Fanny Burney: A biography

Fanny Burney had a much less sheltered upbringing than most middle-class girls of her time, and the constant stream of musicians, writers, singers, actors and travellers that passed through the Burney household provided endless matter for amazement and speculation. It was a peculiarly worldly atmosphere for an unworldly, innocent-minded girl to observe, and she found it attractive without always being able to identify quite why. As a novelist, she developed a taste for drama and high colouring which some critics have seen as almost an obsession with the violence potential in genteel life.8 The heroines of Burney novels are beyond reproach morally, but are constantly exposed to bizarre and outlandish events that the author is not afraid to depict as stimulating. This indicates a relish for experience which the novel form allowed Fanny Burney to emphasise and exaggerate – the freedom that the mask at Mr Lalauze’s had given her not to hide her true colours, but to reveal them.

The habit of writing, whether it was her journal or creative ‘vagaries’, and the secretive solitude it required became such pleasures to Fanny that she resented other calls on her time. The social duties of adult life that obliged women to be forever receiving and returning visits and performing ‘constrained Civilities to Persons quite indifferent to us’9 left her cold. ‘Mama’ was very keen on these civilities (she no doubt saw them as essential in a household full of girls in the marriage market), and one of Fanny’s outbursts in her journal hints at the tensions that were arising from the new regime:

those who shall pretend to defy this irksome confinement of our happiness, must stand accused of incivility, – breach of manners – love of originality, – & God knows what not – nevertheless, they who will nobly dare to be above submitting to Chains their reason disapproves, they shall I always honour – if that will be of any service to them!10

The cryptic references to ‘Chains’ and ‘defiance’ indicate the dramatic terms in which the teenaged Burney girls saw their struggle against ‘Mama’ and her set ideas about a woman’s destiny. At this point in her life, Fanny had no thought of her writings being published or even read by anyone other than ‘Nobody’, or Susan at the very most, but writing already defined her sense of autonomy, in terms both of what she wrote and the liberty she required to write it.

Fanny’s invention of the deliberately trivialising term ‘scribbleration’ for her writing was a sort of disclaimer, disassociating herself from authorship, which was the preserve of the venerated ‘class of authors’. Her father was about to join that class himself, in the same year (1769) that he finally took his doctorate in music at Oxford. When a friend called Steele suggested that Burney wasn’t making enough of his new academic title, and urged him to change his door-plate, the new doctor replied, self-consciously slipping into dialect, ‘I wants dayecity, I’m ashayum’d!’11 Want of ‘dayecity’ – or the affectation of such – ran even stronger in his daughter. When her father was in Oxford for the performance of his examination piece, Fanny sent him some comic verses that she had composed to mark the occasion. He was so amused that he read them aloud to casual acquaintances in Oxford, and teased her when he got home by reciting them in front of the family. Fanny tried to snatch the verses from him, but he carried on, and all she felt she could do was run out of the room. Her delight that he was not angry at her ‘pert verses’12 made her creep back again, though, to hear his praises surreptitiously. It was a premonition of all her later fears and ambivalence about the reception of her work and her father’s approval of it in particular.

Charles Burney’s doctorate (which was, of course, soon brazened – Steele’s pun – on the Poland Street door) conferred an authority which was helpful to his self-esteem and to the new turn he wanted his career to take. In October his first book, a short, businesslike Essay towards a history of the principal comets that have appeared since 1742, was published. The subject was timely and topical; astronomy was fashionable, and 1769 was the year in which Halley had predicted the return of his comet ‘in confirmation of the theory of the illustrious Sir Isaac Newton’. But though Burney’s little book shows his commercial instincts at work (it sold well enough to be reprinted the following year), it had a personal significance as well, being a form of homage to the dead Esther. Years before, she had made a translation of the French scientist Maupertuis’s ‘Letter upon Comets’, purely from ‘love of improvement’, according to Fanny13 (rather like Fanny’s own youthful translation of Fontanelle). Esther’s interest in astronomy had fuelled her husband’s – she might well have been looking forward to the reappearance of the great comet herself. Charles Burney revised the translation and wrote his own essay as a companion piece, a gesture which was not lost on their daughter. In the Memoirs she describes the work as a joint project by her parents, and prefaces her remarks with the apparently irrelevant information that the second Mrs Burney was staying in Norfolk at the time of its production – as if the book constituted some kind of secret assignation between Burney and his dead wife. At the distance of more than fifty years, Fanny wrote portentously about her father’s first step into print, and was in no doubt who should take the credit: her mother’s pure ‘love of improvement’ had ‘unlocked […] the gates through which Doctor Burney first passed to that literary career which, ere long, greeted his more courageous entrance into a publicity that conducted him to celebrity’.14

The Essay was only a short work but it kept Dr Burney up late at night, and its completion was followed by an acute bout of rheumatic fever. The pattern of overwork, hurry and collapse during the composition of his books may have impressed the Doctor’s daughter with the idea that writing was something urgent, difficult and heroic. Burney had by this time formulated the plan for his General History of Music, the first scholarly attempt in English to cover the development of the subject from ancient times to his own day. To choose a project so massive and challenging suggests that Burney had tired of dabbling and wanted a surefire ticket to fame (and fortune, of course), to be the author of a work which would virtually put itself beyond criticism on account of its novelty, authority and sheer size, and which, like the Dictionary of his admired Johnson, would contribute substantially to knowledge, in an age when all the best minds of Europe seemed engaged on writing works of reference.

Burney felt that his book would only make the proper impact if it derived from original research in the great music libraries of Europe, also that ‘the present state of modern music’ was the most important part of his subject. Armed with letters of recommendation from his influential friends to British officials in France and Italy, he set off on a six-month Continental tour in June 1770. It was an arduous but extremely productive journey, and though Burney was in a state of collapse on his return, he had met many famous and learned people, including Padre G.B. Martini in Bologna, the foremost musicologist of the time, the castrato Farinelli in Venice, the seventy-five-year-old Voltaire at Ferney (by an engineered accident), and in Paris Denis Diderot and the great Rousseau himself. The ‘Man Mountain’ was sitting in a dark corner, wearing a woollen nightcap, greatcoat and slippers, an informal reception which perhaps encouraged Burney to show him his plan for the History, which to the budding author’s delight, and after a little initial resistance on Rousseau’s part, went down encouragingly well.

Burney kept a detailed journal of his tour, and soon after his return to London began to think of publishing it as a money-spinner and as an advertisement for the forthcoming History. With the help of the girls, he had a manuscript ready within four months which was published in May 1771 as The Present State of Music in France and Italy. The market for ‘tour’ books was saturated at the time, but Burney’s had the novelty of its focus on music and performers, as well as gripping passages about the difficulties of travel, such as this description of crossing the Apennines:

At every moment, I could only hear them cry out ‘Alla Montagna!’ which meant to say that the road was so broken and dangerous that it was necessary I should alight, give the Mule to the Pedino, and cling to the rock or precipice. I got three or four terrible blows on the face and head by boughs of trees I could not see. In mounting my Mule, which was vicious, I was kicked by the two hind legs on my left knee and right thigh, which knocked me down, and I thought at first, and the Muleteers thought my thigh was broken, and began to pull at it and add to the pain most violently.15

The reviews of the book would probably have been good anyway, but Burney, in his acute anxiety to succeed, fixed the two most influential ones, in the Monthly Review and the Critical Review.16 He described himself as a ‘diffident and timid author’,17 but he had a ruthless streak, especially when it came to nobbling the opposition (as he did shamelessly when a rival History of Music, by Sir John Hawkins, appeared before his own). His later anxieties about his daughter’s literary career centred on the possible critical reception of her books; he felt it better for her not to publish at all than to risk adverse reviews.

With their father’s absence abroad in 1770, followed by the rush to write his book, and another long trip to Europe in 1772 to gather material for a sequel, the Burney children were left even more than usual in the undiluted company of their stepmother. While the Doctor was in Italy, Mrs Burney found and purchased a new home for the amalgamated Burney-Allen household. It was a large, luxurious house on the south side of Queen Square, an area familiar to the children from their long association with Mrs Sheeles’s school (Burney’s appointment there lasted from 1760 to about 1775). Fanny liked the open view of the villages of Hampstead and Highgate to the north, and rooms that were ‘well fitted up, Convenient, large, & handsome’, but regretted leaving Poland Street, which represented the old days of her parents’ marriage.

One of the reasons for the move was to get away from the family’s former neighbour Mrs Pringle, at whose house the Burney girls had met Alexander Seton, the baronet’s son who had been so impressed with Fanny’s conversational powers. His flirtation with Hetty had been so on-and-off for the past two years that she felt forced to give up seeing him altogether for her own peace of mind, and Mr Crisp’s advice (backed up by ‘Mama’) was that the Burneys should end contact with Mrs Pringle too. Fanny was pained to cut her old friend, but did it all the same, and was ready with some lies when the puzzled matron asked what the matter was. In all ‘difficult’ dealings of this kind, the Burneys displayed unattractive qualities: panic, fudging and petty cruelty, such as in the case of their former friend Miss Lalauze, whom they treated with a species of horror after she was reputed to have ‘fallen’. Their own struggle to sustain their upward mobility seems to have prevented them from behaving more magnanimously to such people ‘however sincerely they may be objects of Pity’.18

Hetty recovered from her disappointment over Seton (and avoided having to join the new step-household) by marrying her cousin and fellow musician Charles Rousseau Burney in the autumn of 1770. Dr Burney was abroad at the time and unable to give his consent. He would not have approved the match; he was very fond of his nephew, a gentle, talented man, but knew as well as anyone how hard it was to make a decent living out of music. The marriage was happy, but never prosperous materially. Before long, Hetty was expecting the first of her eight children (the last of which was born as late as 1792). Her career as a harpsichordist was of course over. Fanny, as the eldest unmarried daughter, now acquired the title ‘Miss Burney’.

At about the same time, Maria Allen was jilted by a young man called Martin Rishton. To cheer her up after this disappointment, Fanny wrote her a poem called ‘Female Caution’, which contains these stanzas:

Ah why in faithless man repose

The peace & safety of your mind?

Why should ye seek a World of Woes,

To Prudence and to Wisdom blind?

Few of mankind confess your worth,

Fewer reward it with their own:

To Doubt and Terror Love gives birth;

To Fear and Anguish makes ye known.

[…] O, Wiser, learn to guard the heart,

Nor let it’s softness be its bane!

Teach it to act a nobler part;

What Love shall lose, let Friendship gain.

Hail, Friendship, hail! To Thee my soul

Shall undivided homage own;

No Time thy influence shall controll;

And Love and I – shall ne’er be known.19

This accomplished poem, which, strangely, has never found its way into any anthology of eighteenth-century verse, displays an advanced state of sexual cynicism in its eighteen-year-old author; men, she claims, do not have it in their nature to be constant, and are interested only in the process of conquest. Friendship (with women) is the only way to guarantee happiness; only among women can ‘sensibility’ and ‘softness’ survive undamaged. The fop and the cad were worrying social phenomena, coarse, worldly and unmarriageable. Fanny targeted such men in her novels and created heroes who presented a new ‘feminine’ ideal of masculinity, heroes who were (sometimes absurdly) super-sensitive, rational and gentle. Fanny admired, even idealised, older men such as Crisp, Garrick and the agriculturalist Arthur Young (who was married to Elizabeth Allen Burney’s sister Martha), appreciated male gallantry and wit, and yearned romantically for an ideal male companion – but she didn’t expect to find one. Her high standards were to cause her some trouble in an age when early marriage was the expected, and only really acceptable, fate of womankind.

Extrovert Maria Allen was the moving force behind several amateur theatrical productions in the Burney household and at Chesington in which Fanny was persuaded to take part, though few actors could ever have performed so consistently badly. Fanny was loath to perform in any way, being subject to terrible stage-fright that almost certainly originated in her stigmatisation as a ‘dunce’ in early childhood. Though at least one of the plays she took part in (Colley Cibber’s The Careless Husband) was meant to be an exercise in overcoming stage-fright for the benefit of Dr Burney’s former singing pupil Jenny Barsanti, who was giving up her career as a singer to become an actress (she went on to be the first Lydia Languish in Sheridan’s The Rivals), nothing could distract Fanny from her own performance and its possible shortcomings. Howevermuch she wanted to join in with the gaiety and diversion of a family play-party, the moment when she had to appear, or speak, was one of disabling terror, as on this occasion at her uncle’s house in Worcester, where her cousins were putting on a production of Arthur Murphy’s The Way to Keep Him:

Next came my scene; I was discovered Drinking Tea; – to tell you how infinitely, how beyond measure I was terrified at my situation, I really cannot […] The few Words I had to speak before Muslin came to me, I know not whether I spoke or not, – niether [sic] does any body else: – so you need not enquire of others, for the matter is, to this moment, unknown.20

Fanny had a ‘marking Face’21 and was a violent blusher. ‘Nobody, I believe, has so very little command of Countenance as myself!’ she complained to Susan on one of the many occasions when her ‘vile Colouring’ gave her acute embarrassment. The causes of her embarrassment varied enormously. It was knowingness, not innocence, that made her self-conscious in front of people such as Richard Twiss, a traveller who on his first visit to the Burney household in 1774 indulged in very ‘free’ conversation with Dr Burney about the prostitutes in Naples. Asked by Twiss whether she knew what he meant by a ragazza, Fanny records, ‘I stammered out something like niether [sic] yes or no, because the Question rather frightened me, lest he should conclude that in understanding that, I knew much more.’22 The inference of course is that she did know ‘much more’. She certainly knew enough about John Cleland’s erotic Dictionary of Love to be embarrassed by Twiss’s reference to it on the same occasion. ‘Questa signora ai troppo modesta’, he said to Charles Burney of the blushing young woman he had been goading all evening, demonstrating the truth of James Fordyce’s observation in his Sermons that many men find ‘shyness’ in women attractive sexually as well as morally. Fordyce implies that ‘the precious colouring of virtue’ on a girl’s cheeks is the equivalent of showing a red rag to a bull: ‘Men are so made,’ he sighs complacently.23 But Fanny was much more likely to have agreed with Jonathan Swift’s acid judgement of female ‘colouring’: ‘They blush because they understand.’24

Nevertheless she was highly resistant to sexual flattery, and too self-conscious to be vain. In her copious diary, she hardly ever mentions dress, although much of the needlework that the Burney girls, like all women of their class, were expected to do daily consisted in making and mending their own clothes. She disliked needlework and was not particularly good at it; if her clothes were ever eye-catching, it may not have been for the right reasons. Her best gown in 1777 was simply referred to as her ‘grey-Green’, presumably a silk or ‘tabby’, chosen to match the colour of her eyes.

Fanny Burney was quick to satirise the absurdities of fashion and personal vanity in her works: in Evelina the London modes provide plenty of humour, especially the mid-1770s fashion among women for high hair. In the novel, Miss Mirvan makes herself a cap, only to find that it won’t fit over her new coiffure, and Evelina herself, the country girl agog at the novelty of going ‘a-shopping, as Mrs Mirvan calls it’25 (it was a very recently coined word), gives an insider’s account of being pomaded, powdered and pinned:

I have just had my hair dressed. You can’t think how oddly my head feels; full of powder and black pins, and a great cushion on the top of it. I believe you would hardly know me, for my face looks quite different to what it did before my hair was dressed. When I shall be able to make use of a comb for myself I cannot tell for my hair is so much entangled, frizzled they call it, that I fear it will be very difficult.26

In Fanny’s play The Witlings, the first scene is set in a milliner’s shop, among the ribbons and gee-gaws that recur in her works as symbols of luxury and waste. The shop girls are slaves to appearances: Miss Jenny has no appetite because ‘she Laces so tight, that she can’t Eat half her natural victuals,’ as one of the older women observes. ‘Ay, ay’, replies another, ‘that’s the way with all the Young Ladies; they pinch for their fine shapes’.27 The unnaturalness of fashion struck Burney forcibly (as well it might in the age of hoops, stays, corsetry, high hair and silk shoes), but she also despised its triviality and the hold it had over so many women’s lives, confirming them in the eyes of unsympathetic men as inferior beings. In her play The Woman-Hater, misogynistic Sir Roderick describes womankind as ‘A poor sickly, mawkish set of Beings! What are they good for? What can they do? Ne’er a thing upon Earth they had not better let alone. […] what ought they to know? except to sew a gown, and make a Pudding?’28

Each of Burney’s novels contains some insight into the extent to which women are unfairly judged by their appearance. She was never very pleased with hers. Like all the Burneys she was very short – Samuel Johnson described her affectionately as ‘Lilliputian’29 – and slightly built, with very thick brown hair, lively, intelligent eyes and her father’s large nose. She had an inward-sloping upper lip inherited from her mother (Hetty and Susan had the same), small hands and narrow shoulders. The portrait painted by her cousin Edward Francesco Burney in 1782 shows a gentle, intelligent and attractive face. She thought he had flattered her horribly, but how many portrait painters do not idealise their sitters, especially when, like Edward, the artist is also an admirer? His second portrait of her, painted only two years later (it now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery), has her face partly shadowed by an enormous hat. Her look is more thoughtful, slightly uncomfortable, but the benignly intelligent expression is the same.

Fanny Burney’s short sight caused her trouble all her life and undoubtedly affected her behaviour. She became mildly paranoid about being scrutinised by other people because she couldn’t see their expressions clearly and only felt really comfortable with things which fell within the circle of her vision, such as books, writing and intimate friends. Short sight affected her writing too; the novels are remarkable for the avoidance of physical description and heavy reliance on dialogue to delineate character. Fanny owned an eye-glass, but was often inhibited from using it; at Lady Spencer’s in 1791 she ‘did not choose to Glass’ the company ‘& without, could not distinguish them’.30 At court in the 1780s, the use of the eye-glass was, presumably, limited by protocol and many embarrassing incidents ensued when Fanny did not identify the King or Queen in time to respond correctly. She doesn’t seem to have owned a glass in 1773 when she went to a performance at Drury Lane by the singer Elizabeth Linley one month before that siren’s marriage to Richard Brinsley Sheridan; she could only make out Miss Linley’s figure […] & the form of her Face’.31 By 1780, however, she could be pointed out at the theatre as ‘the lady that used the glass’.32 Understandably, she hated to have attention drawn to her disability, and scorned one of Mrs Thrale’s acquaintance for suggesting that she could not see as far as the fire two yards away by answering his question ‘How far can you see?’ with a comical put-down; ‘O – I don’t know – as far as other people, but not distinctly’.33

Fanny’s constitution was basically strong, but easily affected by nervous ailments and stress. ‘[H]er Frame is certainly delicate & feeble’, Susan noted in her journal. ‘She is quickly sensible of fatigue & cannot long resist it & still more quickly touched by any anxiety or distress of mind’.34 Fanny endured remarkable pain, both physical and mental, in the course of her long life, and survived the appalling mutilation of the mastectomy she underwent for cancer in 1811 with astonishing tenacity and powers of recuperation, yet she appears to have been something of a hypochondriac in her youth, impressed with a belief in her own fragility and half-expecting to die young, like her mother. When Mrs Thrale once exclaimed against the idea of Fanny marrying a man old enough to be her father, Fanny replied, ‘I dare say he will Live full as long as I shall, however much older he may be’.35 The character of being frail, insubstantial, almost No-body, was oddly compelling, and she recorded with evident satisfaction the playwright Dr John Delap’s remark in 1779 that she was ‘the charmingest Girl in the World for a Girl who was so near being nothing, & they all agreed nobody ever had so little a shape before, & that a Gust of Wind would blow you quite away’.36 The ‘Girl’ was, at this date, twenty-seven years old, unmarried, unhappy at being exposed to the public as a writer and not eating well.

Fanny’s attitude to food and eating immediately suggests some sort of disorder. References to food in her journals and works are infrequent, and never enthusiastic or appreciative. She knew, as we have seen from The Witlings, about young women starving themselves to get into smallsized clothes; she also knew about bingeing. In The Woman-Hater, Miss Wilmot’s unabashed relish for food is seen as a mark of her lack of feminine delicacy, and she characterises her old life of restraint and decorum as ‘sitting with my hands before me; and making courtsies; and never eating half as much as I like, – except in the Pantry!’37 Whether the Burney girls, singly or in gangs, raided the pantry in Poland Street or Queen Square is a matter for speculation, but in public Fanny was a very small eater. ‘I seldom Eat much supper’, she said to Twiss when he remarked on her pickiness.38 The diaries show her at various times satisfied with one potato,39 overpowered by the thought of a rasher40 and alert to the grotesque aspects of ingestion, as a letter to Susan in March 1777 reveals: