Fanny Burney

Frances (or Fanny) Burney was born on 13th June 1752 at King’s Lynn in Norfolk, the third child of Charles Burney, a well-known musician who wrote a celebrated “History of Music”. Although she was a slow starter, she became a voracious reader and an early writer of stories, plays and much else. However, on her 15th birthday she burnt everything she had written up to that date.

When Fanny was eight the family moved to London, where her father taught music to many distinguished pupils and became acquainted with a number of the celebrities of the day, to whom Fanny would have been introduced.

Her mother died when she was 12, in 1762, and her father re-married in 1767. Fanny’s relationship with her step-mother became increasingly strained, although she got on well with the children of her step-mother’s previous marriage. We know these facts from Fanny’s earliest diaries, which she started to keep from 1768.

Fanny helped her father with his literary work, which brought her into contact with London society, as did the fact that the Burneys lived in a house previously owned by Sir Isaac Newton, and many distinguished people came to visit. Acquaintances included Sir Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson.

Fanny Burney is best known for “Evelina”, a novel which was probably begun around 1772, with most of the writing dating from 1776 after the first volume of her father’s “History of Music” had been published. The writing of “Evelina”, and its publication, were done under a cloak of secrecy, as writing was not regarded at the time as a suitable occupation for a woman. Only the closest members of her family, not including her father, were even aware that Fanny was writing anything other than her work on the “History of Music”. All sorts of subterfuges were used to preserve the secret, including writing in a disguised hand and night-time visits to publishers by Fanny’s brother.

“Evelina, or, A Young Lady's Entrance into the World” was published on 29 January 1778 and was an almost immediate success. It was read with enthusiasm by such notables as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, who praised it highly. The secret of its authorship eventually leaked out, but this also brought Fanny to the notice of the writer and socialite Hester Thrale, who was a friend of both her father and Samuel Johnson. Fanny and Hester became firm friends and Fanny gained access to the most distinguished intellectual circles of the day. Her diaries record many incidents from the lives of these people, and have proved to be valuable source material for the social history of the time.

Fanny was urged, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and others, to write a play, which she did. This was “The Witlings”, a satirical comedy that poked fun at some of the lesser literary lights of the day, much as Alexander Pope had done a generation earlier. However, although the play was completed, and would no doubt have been highly successful, her father took fright at the consequences of its being staged, and so this never happened.

Her second novel was “Cecilia, the Memoirs of an Heiress”, begun in 1780 and published in 1782. Like “Evelina”, this was very well received, with her readers accepting that a well-connected woman could also be a respected writer of fiction.

Even though her novels brought her wealth and success, Fanny Burney’s personal life then underwent a number of upheavals, including a break with her friend Hester Thrale and the death of Samuel Johnson, who had been one of her greatest supporters. Together with changes on the domestic front with a sister marrying and her father accepting a post at Chelsea Hospital, plus the fact that she was still unmarried in her mid-thirties, she felt obliged to accept an offer she had received of a post at court, as “second keeper of the robes” to Queen Charlotte.

She took up her responsibilities in July 1786 and stayed in royal service for five years. Despite moving in the highest circles, the work was nothing short of menial drudgery and extremely boring to a woman with such a lively mind and outgoing personality. She would much have preferred to mix in the literary and intellectual circles that she had known previously, but the royal family and court consisted of people with virtually no interest in that world, and she simply did not fit in.

To later generations, the main interest of Fanny’s Burney time at court comes from her journals, which covered the time of King George’s first period of madness, in 1788. Eventually, Fanny’s health began to suffer, and it was on health grounds that she was finally released from her duties, in July 1791.

With her health on the mend, Fanny rejoined the society she had missed so much and soon made the acquaintance of a group of French émigrés who had escaped from the Terror being perpetuated by the Jacobins. These were not reactionary aristocrats but constitutional reformers, whose efforts at moderation had been repulsed just as strongly as had the representatives of the “ancien regime”. Among this group was Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Piochard d'Arblay, a soldier and former adjutant to the Marquis de Lafayette. Fanny became attracted to him and accepted his offer of marriage, much to her father’s dismay.

On 28th July 1793, at the age of 41, Fanny Burney became Madame d’Arblay, the wife of a penniless Frenchman, a Catholic with, for the time, very liberal political views. None of these facts was likely to please her father.

However, the marriage turned out to be a very happy one, lasting until her husband’s death in 1818. A son, Alexander, was born in 1794.

Fanny began writing again, firstly working on a verse tragedy that she had virtually completed during her time at court as a way of staving off the boredom. This was “Edwy and Elgiva”, based on the life of a 10th century Saxon king, and it was the only play by Fanny Burney to be staged in her lifetime. However, it was not well-received and was withdrawn after only one performance, despite its all-star cast.

Fanny’s third novel was “Camilla, a Picture of Youth” which was written in little more than a year and published in June 1796. As was common at the time, people were invited to subscribe in advance and would expect to receive their copy on publication. One notable name (among many such) on the list of subscribers was that of Jane Austen, aged 20 at the time. Although “Camilla” is not regarded today as the best of her work, being too moralistic for modern tastes, it was hugely successful at the time and the proceeds allowed the d’Arblays to build their own house, called “Camilla Cottage”.

Fanny soon became painfully embroiled in serious family problems affecting her sisters and brother. These included the death of her sister Susan in 1800, after she had suffered at the hands of her unworthy husband, and a family scandal, the details of which were kept entirely out of public knowledge, that involved her brother James living with his half-sister.

D’Arblay was anxious to recover his property in France, and the couple lived apart for a time until Fanny and Alex were able to join him there. However, when hostilities broke out the family became trapped in France and did not return to England for another ten years. While there, Fanny underwent a mastectomy, which was performed without anaesthetic.

In 1812 Fanny and Alex were able to return to England, and in 1814 she published her last novel, “The Wanderer”, which was based on her own experiences. However, this did not prove to be a success. Her father died during the same year and Fanny started work on compiling his memoirs.

Back in France, Fanny witnessed the events leading up to the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, after which the d’Arblays returned to England for good, settling in Bath where her husband died in May 1818.

Fanny Burney devoted much of the rest of her life to assembling her father’s “Memoirs”, which were published in 1832. Her final years were marked by a series of family deaths, including that of her son Alex in 1837. By the time of her own death in 1840, at the age of 87, only one family member of her generation, a half-sister, was left to survive her.

Fanny Burney has been hailed as the first woman writer of note in English literature (not counting the far less talented Aphra Behn). Her early reputation depended a lot on her journals, some of which were published from 1842 and were soon recognised as valuable insights into late Georgian England. As a novelist, her influence on later writers such as Jane Austen cannot be doubted, particularly her ability to place female characters in realistic social settings. In more recent years, Fanny Burney has been re-assessed as a feminist icon, with her troubled life-history being analysed alongside her literary works.