Fanny Burney: A biography

Her reading, as suggested by entries in her early diaries,31 was heavily weighted towards works of moral instruction, sermons, standard histories, poetry and the ‘female conduct books’ which were deemed an essential part of a young woman’s mental baggage. One of the most popular and influential of the conduct-book writers was James Fordyce, whose Sermons to Young Women Fanny knew well.* Fordyce asserted the authority of his sex with confidence: ‘Men […] are in general better judges than women, of the deportment of women’,32 while its moral inferiority was also acknowledged: ‘The world, I know not how, overlooks in our sex a thousand irregularities, which it never forgives in yours’.33 The disturbing sexual power of women could only, in Fordyce’s view, be put to proper use as an inducement to and reward for good male behaviour. A roomful of riotous men, he asserted, could be ‘checked all at once into decency’ by the accidental entrance of a virtuous woman.34 Restraint was the key to proper female conduct: wit, in women, ‘is commonly looked upon with a suspicious eye’, and ‘war, commerce, politics, exercises of strength & dexterity, abstract philosophy & all the abstruser sciences, are most properly the province of men’.35 This left little for women to do (besides entering rooms virtuously) other than going astray, the irreparable personal disaster which opened the way to widespread social disintegration.

Because Fanny had no one with whom to discuss her reading or to guide it, and because her veneration for the written word was intense, the messages of authors such as Fordyce impressed her very strongly, reinforcing an already anxious and conservative nature. Their severity appealed to the neglected child, whose ‘straightforward morality’, in her father’s opinion, had ‘wanted no teaching’.36 At this impressionable age, and unguided, she assumed a set of standards which proved a constant agitation to her natural morality. She assented to the conventional view, as articulated by Fordyce, of the superior authority of the male sex, although her common sense and sense of justice often told her otherwise. For example, reading the Iliad, aged sixteen, she found herself ‘provoked […] for the honour of the sex’:

Venus tempts Hellen with every delusion in favour of her Darling, – in vain – Riches – power – honour – Love – all in vain – the enraged Deity threatens to deprive her of her own beauty, & render her to the level with the most common of her sex – blushing & trembling – Hellen immediately yields her Hand.

Thus has Homer proved his opinion of our poor sex – that the Love of Beauty is our most prevailing passion. It really grieves me to think that there certainly must be reason for the insignificant opinion the greatest men have of Women – At least I fear there must. – But I don’t in fact believe it – thank God!37

The poet – not just a man, but a truly ‘great man’ – had to be right: but wasn’t. ‘Fear’ and ‘belief’ contradicted one another, and the only way Fanny could resolve the problem was by sticking to the evidence of her own experience. She lost no opportunity in her books to expose the disadvantages under which her own sex laboured, but did so, characteristically, through realistic representation of women rather than by direct criticism of men. Modern readers can’t help interpreting her works as feminist, but Fanny Burney herself would have been shocked and distressed to have been associated with anything so subversive. In the fight between duty and justice, duty was always going to win. A person such as her father, who embodied her primary duty, thus became an idealised figure, incapable of doing wrong – even though she knew he did act wrongly sometimes. It was a paradox that affected her profoundly, creating tensions in her writing which provide much of her works’ interest, but which ultimately may have inhibited her from becoming a great artist.

Fanny Burney’s attitude to novels and novel-writing reflects the same anxieties. She never completely outgrew her poor opinion of the form, derived from the views of old-fashioned moralists such as Fordyce (who thought that novels ‘carry on their very forehead the mark of the beast’). She projected onto her father the same strict tastes. Novels were not banned in the liberal Burney household; as well as Richardson and Fielding, Fanny had read Sterne (although she pityingly called him ‘poor Sterne’) and many other works which Fordyce would have abominated. The house was full of reading-matter quite apart from the mostly musical and classical texts in Charles Burney’s library, and lack of supervision meant that while Fanny read much more demanding books than most ‘educated’ young ladies would have encountered, she also read a great deal more ‘low-grade’ literature, and knew many risqué works, such as Swift’s ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, well enough to parody them.38 The sort of literature she enjoyed and the sort of literature she felt ‘allowed’ to write were not the same thing at all.

When she tried to amalgamate entertainment with moral instruction in her own work, the results were patchy. In Evelina, which was published anonymously, the attempt was successful because Burney felt free to make her heroine mildly fallible, and open to moral improvement; in the later books, when she had to own authorship, her heroines represented pure virtue under attack – a very much less dramatic or entertaining formula. Clearly, the only way Fanny Burney could justify to herself her own persistent interest in writing fiction (and her last novel, The Wanderer, though her least satisfactory, is probably the most ambitious) was by stressing its moral purpose. ‘If many turn aside from all but mere entertainment presented under this form’, she wrote in the dedication to The Wanderer, ‘many, also, may, unconsciously, be allured by it into reading the severest truths, who would not even open any work of a graver denomination’.39

Fanny’s juvenilia seems to have been mostly of a ‘grave denomination’: ‘Elegies, Odes, Plays, Songs, Stories, Farces, – nay, Tragedies and Epic Poems, every scrap of white paper that could be seized upon without question or notice’.40 It was an obsessive, absorbing pleasure which she kept secret, convinced ‘that what she scribbled, if seen, would but expose her to ridicule’.41 Her ‘writing passion’42 was partly a response to loneliness, partly, as is evident from the astonishing diversity of the forms she tried, a form of interaction with the authors she read and admired. The extent of that interaction was very unusual. As an old woman, Fanny described to her younger sister Charlotte how she got by heart one of William Mason’s poems by ‘repeating it, in the dead of sleepless Nights, so often, so collectedly, so all to myself, that I believe I must have caught every possible meaning of the Poet, not only in every sentiment, but in the appropriation of every word, so as to be able to pronounce as I conceive him to have thought, […] entering into the Poem as if it had been the production of my own brain’.43 This describes something more akin to a form of ecstatic spiritual communion than to what we normally understand by reading. Her use of the word ‘appropriation’ seems particularly apt.

In her early teenage years, Fanny had plenty of time in which to indulge her ‘writing passion’, and a safe place, her ‘bureau’, in which to lock her works away. This was not a piece of furniture, but a closet in the Poland Street bedroom, the only part of the house which was inviolably hers. Even as a forty-year-old, Fanny was expected to share a bedroom with her half-sister, and it is unlikely that she ever had a room of her own before her marriage, except at Mrs Thrale’s in the late 1770s and at court in the late 1780s. It is clear from the early diaries that as an adolescent Fanny stayed up at night writing or reading until the candle ran out, with her sisters asleep nearby.44 There was nothing casual about these secretive literary pursuits ‘in the dead of sleepless Nights’. By Fanny’s mid-teens, the stack of compositions in the ‘bureau’ included at least one full-length novel.

On her return from Paris,* eleven-year-old Susan was struck by the differences between her two elder sisters, one of whom had enjoyed the same opportunities for travel and education as herself, the other of whom had stayed at home:

The characteristics of Hetty seem to be wit, generosity, and openness of heart; – Fanny’s, – sense, sensibility, and bashfulness, and even a degree of prudery. Her understanding is superior, but her diffidence gives her a bashfulness before company with whom she is not intimate, which is a disadvantage to her. My eldest sister shines in conversation, because, though very modest, she is totally free from any mauvaise honte: were Fanny equally so, I am persuaded she would shine no less.46

Observers who were less well-disposed than Susan might easily have dismissed Fanny as affected or dull. The superior intellect was not on public display (now or ever), while the bashfulness and ‘degree of prudery’ were marked. By the age of fourteen Fanny had adopted patterns of behaviour – all stemming from vigilant self-appraisal – that she would never be able to break completely.

But there was another side to Fanny’s character, of ‘wildness’ ‘friskyness’ and invention, which Susan’s company brought out. Only Susan was shown the precious writings, and ‘the stolen moments of their secret readings’ together were, in retrospect, ‘the happiest of their adolescent lives’.47 Among the pieces Susan read was Fanny’s manuscript novel, ‘Caroline Evelyn’, a sad tale of abandonment and ill-usage, which ended with the young heroine dying in childbirth. Like the ‘Elegies, Odes, […] Tragedies and Epic Poems’ Fanny had been writing, it reflected the melancholy that had settled on her after her mother’s death. But with Susan re-established at home, such mournful ruminations had become obsolete. In that year,* Mr Crisp had been amused and surprised to see Fanny dancing a wild jig on the lawn at Chesington Hall, ‘with Your Cap on the Ground, & your long hair streaming down your Back, one shoe off, & throwing about your head like a mad thing’.50 This was a far cry from the bashful, mumbling behaviour Fanny usually displayed in public. ‘[T]here is a nameless Grace & Charm in giving a loose to that Wildness & friskyness sometimes’, Crisp told her years later, acknowledging how much of this element there was in his young friend’s character, however seldom anyone outside the family circle got to see it.

Change was in the air in the Burney household. Unknown to his children, Charles Burney was once again courting Mrs Allen. The opportunity to renew acquaintance with the beautiful widow had come in 1765 when she placed her elder daughter, lively fourteen-year-old Maria, at school in London and rented a house in Great Russell Street as a winter base. Charles Burney was appointed to teach Maria music, and arranged for the lessons to take place at teatime, in order that ‘when he was liberated from the daughter, he might be engaged with the mother’.51 Chastened by his earlier failure, Burney adopted a gentler line of courtship over the next eighteen months or so, accompanying Mrs Allen to the opera and to concerts, both of which she loved, and sending her his prose version of Dante’s Inferno instead of poems like ‘The Witch’. In truth, there was nothing for Mrs Allen to gain materially from a remarriage: she would lose the £100 annual income under her first husband’s will and gain a low-earning husband with six children and a chaotic workload. Nevertheless, Burney kept up the campaign, contriving meetings when the widow’s ‘imperious’ mother was absent. He was clearly in love, as well as very keen to find a second mother for his family and a supporter (financially and morally) for his work. By the spring of 1767, his patience was in sight of paying off: ‘my beloved Mrs Allen […] began to be weaned from her fears’, he wrote, ‘by affection and consta[nt] importunity; and I flattered myself I was gaining ground’.52

When Elizabeth Allen returned to Lynn for the summer in April 1767, Burney bombarded her with letters, sent under cover to Dolly Young or in a feigned hand to avoid the vigilant mother’s eye. Like his daughter Fanny, he seemed to relish a conspiracy: ‘our correspondence had all the Air of mystery and intrigue; in that we seemed 2 young lovers under age trying to out-wit our parents and guardians’.53 Unfortunately, Elizabeth’s mother could not be outwitted forever, and her objections to the match were strong. Charles decided to try another approach through her son Edmund, and to this end arranged a trip to Bristol Hotwells, taking ‘my 2d daughter Fanny’ along with him.

This was Fanny’s first, and possibly only, visit to Bristol, and lasted only three days, but the impression made on the fifteen-year-old must have been extremely vivid, for she set a large part of her first published novel there. She had no idea of the real purpose of her father’s visit – to her it was a delightful privilege to be his sole companion, a pleasure possibly enhanced by the melancholy association of the Hotwells with her mother’s last illness. Any special marks of attention from her father must have been flattering, and one can imagine that Burney was in a particularly animated mood at the thought of gaining consent to his nuptials. He was also, presumably, keen to give Fanny a treat of some kind, knowing that if his plans went ahead, there would no longer be any question of her going abroad to school.

Burney took Fanny with him again, with one of her sisters (probably Susan), when he went to Lynn in June 1767 for a wild courtship holiday. It was the first time Fanny had been back to her native town since the family moved to London in 1760, and it was of course another place deeply associated with her mother. They stayed at Mrs Allen’s dower-house opposite St Margaret’s for a month, during which time Burney and Mrs Allen visited ‘almost every place and thing that is curious in Norfolk, making love chemin faisant’54 (the way Burney did everything). Dolly Young acted as chaperone on this tour, but was possibly not very strict, nor always in attendance. Who else, after all, was there to attend to the girls while Burney was ‘making love’, if not Dolly?

By the end of their romantic holiday, the couple had come to an agreement. They were to marry, but secretly; only their closest friends, Dolly Young and Samuel Crisp, were to know about it. The ceremony took place on 2 October at St James’s Church, Westminster. Charles must have found some excuse of work to account for his three-day absence on honeymoon at a farmhouse near Chesington Hall – arranged by Crisp – after which he and his new wife returned to their separate houses in town as if nothing had happened. Several reasons for this strange deception suggest themselves. Old Mrs Allen, Elizabeth’s mother,* viewed Burney as a fortune-hunter, and continued to disapprove of the match. Perhaps Elizabeth’s brother Edmund also disapproved, since he took no part in the wedding. As it was, the bride was given away by her banker, Richard Fuller. Since the couple did not wait to gain the Allen family’s consent, either they had given up trying to win it as hopeless, or they had become lovers and wanted the cover of legitimacy (albeit secret) in case Elizabeth became pregnant. Charles Burney had, after all, got Esther pregnant before they were married, a fact that Elizabeth, as an intimate of both parties, would very probably have known.

The banker was a symbolic presence at the ceremony that October morning, since the disparity of wealth between the couple had threatened the match, and was still being argued over by the bride’s son and the groom’s daughter sixty-six years later. Mrs Allen had, at what date is unclear, invested a large part of her £5000 in the English Factory in Russia, which subsequently failed. In an overtly self-justifying letter to Dolly Young,55 Charles Burney claimed that his second wife’s money was ‘almost all gone’ before the Russian bankruptcy, which itself was ‘many months before our marriage’. If this had been the case, his wife must have frittered away a fortune in the four years of her widowhood and come to the new marriage dependent on him. But by remarking ‘I never touched a penny from the wreck in Russia’, Burney acknowledges that something was salvaged from it; Stephen Allen, Elizabeth’s son, claimed this sum was as much as £1000 (again, the date at which it was recovered is unknown). Allen also reckoned that his mother was in possession of at least £600 at the time of her marriage, and was owed £900 by a family friend, James Simpson.* With her properties and the rent from them added, the whole amount his mother brought to her second marriage was ‘not actuated at less than £4000’.56

Fanny’s rather jaundiced impression, expressed in her correspondence following the publication of her Memoirs of Doctor Burney, was that if the second Mrs Burney was wealthy at the time of her marriage, she did not spend the money on anyone but herself. Her father had, understandably, seen it more as a matter of pride to himself than blame to his wife that he continued to support his family by force of sheer hard work ‘without encroaching on the income of my wife’.57 The notion that Elizabeth’s money made no difference to the household is disingenuous, however. The Burneys’ standard of living rose considerably (including the grand acquisition of their own coach), and Charles Burney, whether because of his reduced workload or increased well-being (or both), suddenly saw his career taking off in previously unthought-of ways. Within two years of his remarriage he had taken his doctorate at Oxford, written his first book, and was preparing for an extensive research tour on the Continent. Elizabeth was the enabling factor in all this.

The dispute in the 1830s between Stephen Allen and Fanny Burney confined itself to the matter of Elizabeth Allen Burney’s money, but there was a great deal more for a son to object to in Fanny’s Memoirs than the insinuation that his mother was ‘destitute of any provision when she consented to a second marriage’.58 Fanny’s version of the growth of affection between Mrs Allen and her father clearly reflected her own difficulties in coming to terms with it, but it is almost breathtakingly unfair and inaccurate if we are to believe Dr Burney’s own account (and there is no reason why we should not) in the fragmentary memoirs on which Fanny herself purported to be basing her book.

In Fanny’s account, the affair was initiated by Mrs Allen (‘very handsome, but no longer in her bloom’59) on her arrival in London with Maria. She was widowed, but not, Fanny suggests, very severely, unlike Charles Burney, whose ‘superior grief’ was ‘as deep as it was acute’.60 Her father’s degree of grieving was a problem for Fanny, who was disturbed by the thought that he might have ‘got over’ Esther’s death. She makes his profound bereavement not only the cause of ‘feeling admiration’ in Mrs Allen, who ‘saw him with daily increasing interest’,61 but a way of clearing her father of any complicity in the affair: ‘insensibly he became solaced, while involuntarily she grew grateful, upon observing her rising influence over his spirits’. Pages of Fanny’s chapter on ‘Mrs Stephen Allen’ are taken up with eulogies of her own dead mother, put into the mind, if not the mouth, of Charles Burney:

If, by any exertion of which mortal man is capable, or any suffering which mortal man can sustain, Mr. Burney could have called back his vanished Esther to his ecstatic consciousness, labour, even to decrepitude, endurance even to torture, he would have borne, would have sought, would have blessed, for the most transient sight of her adored form.62

In an attempt to rebut the idea that her father’s willingness to remarry might undermine the ‘pristine connubial tenderness’ of his first vows, Fanny came up with an ingenious interpretation of his behaviour, extremely unflattering to her stepmother:

The secret breast, alive to memory though deprived of sympathy, may still internally adhere to its own choice and fondness; notwithstanding the various and imperious calls of current existence may urge a second alliance: and urge it, from feelings and from affections as clear of inconstancy as of hypocrisy; urge it, from the best of motives, that of accommodating ourselves to our lot, with all its piercing privations; since our lot is dependent upon causes we have no means to either evade or fathom; and as remote from our direction as our wishes.63

In other words, Charles Burney remarried, but stayed secretly, ‘internally’ faithful to ‘the angel whom [he] had lost’. He ‘recoiled from such an anodyne as demanded new vows to a new object’, but couldn’t help inflaming Mrs Allen all the more with the pathos of his vulnerability and ‘noble disinterestedness’ in her fortune when it was ‘completely lost’ in the Russian bankruptcy.64 So much for the ‘not less than £4000’ Stephen Allen spoke of. So much, also, for any hint of Charles Burney’s ‘very impassioned’ feelings for Mrs Allen, his ‘constant importunity’ and pursuit of her to a hasty, secret marriage against her family’s wishes and her own best interests materially. If Fanny had got one thing right, it was that Elizabeth Allen must have felt unusually ‘impassioned’ about her new husband in return.

Fanny was writing her account, it must be remembered, more than sixty years later, and the intensity she ascribes to Charles Burney’s bereavement reflects her own intense losses by that date. But if the gulf of years makes it hard for her to untangle her own motives and feelings, it adds interest to the details which she considers significant with hindsight. There is no record of when the news of their father’s marriage was broken to the Burney children. Charles Burney simply relates that he and his new wife ‘kept our union as secret as possible for a time, inhabiting different houses’.65 Fanny goes further, relating that though the secret was ‘faithfully preserved, for a certain time, by scrupulous discretion in the parties, and watchful circumspection in the witnesses’ (Crisp and Miss Young), something happened to force the hand of the clandestine couple:

as usual also, error and accident were soon at work to develop the transaction; and the loss of a letter, through some carelessness of conveyance, revealed suddenly but irrevocably the state of the connection.

This circumstance, however, though, at the time, cruelly distressing, served ultimately but to hasten their own views; as the discovery was necessarily followed by the personal union for which their hands had been joined.66

What the miscarried letter contained is of less importance than at which address it was ‘lost’, Burney’s or his wife’s, and by whom ‘found’. ‘Some carelessness of conveyance’ – such a throwaway phrase – would have had to involve, in this case, either somebody wrongly opening a letter addressed to someone else, or reading a letter already opened by the addressee. The children had probably guessed that something was afoot between their father and Mrs Allen. Perhaps the discovery of the letter was an accident, perhaps not. If it was a deliberate act of snooping, it backfired nastily. We may wonder, but not wonder too long, given the authorship of that feeling phrase, who it was that found the incident so ‘cruelly distressing’.

Perhaps in order to give the children time to accustom themselves to the situation, Charles Burney and his new wife continued to live mostly apart. By July 1768 it was no longer possible to hide the fact that Elizabeth was pregnant, but she still retained her spacious dower-house in Lynn and spent most of her time there. Fortunately, the Burney girls loved their new stepsister Maria Allen, and took their cue from her generous and optimistic view of the prospects of the new arrangements. Their devotion to their father was such, too, that they would not openly have said anything to hurt him. Fanny’s wording is interesting when she describes how the sisters ‘were all earnest to contribute their small mites to the happiness of one of the most beloved of parents, by receiving, with the most respectful alacrity, the lady on whom he had cast his future hopes of regaining domestic comfort’.67 One gets the impression that even if Elizabeth Allen had been an ogress, the children would have made an effort for their father’s sake. It does not mean that the shock of the news or their embarrassment was any the less.