ARTICLES
The life and times of Fanny Burney
New Criterion, Nov, 1999 by Jeremy Bernstein
New Criterion, Nov, 1999 by Jeremy Bernstein
My sister then played another duet
with my father; but Dr. Johnson was so deep in the Encyclopedie that,
as he is very deaf, I question if he even knew what was going forward.
When this was over, Mrs. Thrale in a laughing manner said, "Pray, Dr.
Burney can you tell me what that song was and whose, which Savoi sung
last night at Bach's concert, and which you did not hear?" My father
confessed himself by no means so good a diviner, not
having time to consult the stars, though in the house of Sir Isaac
Newton. However, wishing to draw Dr.
Johnson into some conversation, he told him the question. The Doctor,
seeing his drift, good-naturedly put away his book, and said very
drolly, "And pray, Sir, who is Bach? is he a piper?"
--The Early Diaries of Frances Burney
If you look up "Frances Burney" in an encyclopedia you are likely to find two listings. One will be under the name "Fanny Burney" since that was a nickname that many people used--although Dr. Johnson, who was especially fond of her, referred to her as "Fannikins." You will also find her listed as "Madame d'Arblay." That is because in 1793, after a brief courtship, much to the surprise of her family, probably to her own surprise at the age of forty-one, she married Alexandre Gabriel Jean-Baptiste Piochard d'Arblay, adjutant-general to Lafayette. How Fanny Burney, in midlife, met and married a French general is part of the charm of her life story.
That Fanny Burney married late was certainly not because she was unattractive. There is a portrait of her painted by her cousin Edward Francisco Burney hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London. In the words of one of her recent biographers, Kate Chisholm, it
shows a young woman in half-profile, shyly looking away from the artist (and her audience). She has soft blue eyes, full and shapely lips, rosy cheeks and lightly powdered fair hair, gently curling to her shoulders. Her simple gray dress is tightly waisted and has long tapered sleeves; a cream muslin fichu is tucked into the bodice. She wears no jewelry, but a large strawberry-pink bow is pinned to her petite bosom. Black gloves and a black lace shawl would complete the impression that here is a woman of gentle spirit and mod pretensions--except that she is wearing a magnificent hat. This dusky-gold "Lunardi," ruffled, trimmed, and flounced, was the height of fashion in the autumn of 1784, named after the daring exploits of the balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi. It dominates the portrait and quite transforms Fanny from an unexceptional society belle into someone who compels our attention. Before I explain why Burney "compels our attention," I owe the reader an explanation of why she compelled my attention. Not being a student of the literature of eighteenth-century England, I did not come to Burney in any way that you are likely to guess. It began in Kathmandu in the spring of 1987. I was on my way to Tibet, which I was intending to write about, and a friend of long standing invited me to forage in his extensive private library. Many of the books were familiar to me, but one wasn't. It was entitled The Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa (1876), edited by a man named Clements Markham. Bogle, born in Scotland in 1746, had been in India since 1769 when he went out as a "writer"--the lowest order of clerk --with the British East India Company. Unlike most of the young writers, whose only thought was to get rich quick and to return to England before the climate killed them, Bogle became fascinated by India. He learned many of the languages including Persian, the language of diplomacy. In the early 1770s, the British were having trouble with their Bhutanese neighbors to the north and took action against them militarily. This, in turn, alarmed the Tibetans, and the Governor General of India, Warren Hastings, decided in 1774 to send a diplomatic mission north to Bhutan and Tibet to arrive at a modus vivendi. He chose Bogle as its leader and this mission is what is described in these journals.
As I read the journals, and the fascinating and wonderfully written letters which Bogle wrote to his family, I kept coming across the figure of Warren Hastings. He was certainly the most brilliant and erudite Englishman ever to govern India. His curiosity was insatiable and he charged Bogle to bring back anything--animal or vegetable --that could be transported from Tibet and Bhutan. He did not bargain for one of Bogle's imports, which was a Tibetan wife. She is not mentioned in the journals, which have been edited for Victorian consumption, but her children have been traced to Scotland where they were sent after Bogle died in India of disease in 1781. Hastings, by the way, instructed Bogle to plant potatoes as he went along and their descendants now make up a good portion of the staple diet of these countries. What emerges in these journals is both Bogle's unlimited admiration for Hastings and the fact that Hastings was in a good deal of trouble. He and his council in Calcutta were at loggerheads, and upon his return to England in 1785 he found himself the subject of a parliamentary inquiry which led in 1788 to his being tried for "high crimes and misdemeanors." The trial, which was a sensation at the time, lasted seven years; he was acquitted on all charges, but was financially and politically ruined.
What does all of this have to do with Fanny Burney? When I shifted my attention from Bogle to Hastings, I began asking questions about him of people who might be knowledgeable. One of them was a professor of English at Rutgers University named W. C. Dowling, who in fact teaches the literature of this period. When I mentioned my interest in the Hastings impeachment trial, he asked if I had read the diaries of Fanny Burney. To be quite truthful, at the time I had only the foggiest idea of who Burney was, let alone what was contained in her diaries, but having a good deal of faith in Dowling I decided to look into the matter. I haven't stopped yet.
The first thing you will discover if you want to read the diaries is that they are not all that easy to get hold of. Burney began keeping her journals in 1768 and they continue to her death in 1840. You cannot simply go down to your neighborhood bookstore and buy them the way, for example, you can readily buy Boswell's journals. At the present time there is no single edition that begins in 1768 and ends in 1840, and it seems unlikely that there ever will be. There is a project which has been started by Lars E. Troide of the department of English of McGill University to do the years from 1768 to 1791 to complement the twelve-volume Oxford edition edited by Joyce Hemlow which goes from 1791 to 1840. Professor Troide has published three volumes that take us up to 1779. Nine more are due. All of this was much more than I wanted to deal with. Instead, what I chose to do was to use the two-volume edition of the "Early" diaries which stops in 1778 and then to join them to the wonderful six-volume edition of the later diaries edited by Burney's niece Charlotte Barrett. This edition was first published in the years 1842-46. If you scout used book stores you can find it, often in later printings. (There is a one-volume edition that should be avoided since it contains only a fraction of the material.) It is beautifully illustrated and contains adequate references. Barrett, incidentally, did not try to pry under Burney's inked-over passages which the new editions attempt to do. Once you begin reading the journals you will discover that they read like a novel--a great historical novel. For reasons I will shortly explain, this is not too surprising. For me, the surprise was the extent of Burney's connections to Hastings.
At the end of his career in India, Hastings had a personal physician named Clement Francis. He was one of Hastings's coterie that left India with him. For reasons I have not been able to discover, while in India, Francis decided to propose marriage to Fanny Burney. As far as I can make out they had never met. I do not even know what their mutual connection was. In any event, upon visiting the Burney home--which, incidentally, had been the final residence of Isaac Newton in London--he met Burney's younger sister Charlotte. He fell in love with her and they were married in 1786. Francis then worked as a country doctor in Aylsham until his death in 1792. At the time of the marriage, both sisters were living at home (the two other sisters and the two other brothers were already married). With the departure of Charlotte, Burney was left at home with a stepmother she could not stand and a father who loved her but did not understand her very well.
One consequence was that in 1786 Burney accepted the position as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, the German-born wife of George III. I will come back to this later but I want to note here that the Keeper of the Robes was a dreadful German woman named Juliana Elizabeth Schwellenberg who had come over with Charlotte at the time of her marriage in 1761. In her journals, Burney, who had perfect pitch for dialogue and dialect, turns Schwellenberg into one of the great comic villains in literature. However, it was Schwellenberg who some years earlier had introduced her countryman the Baron Carl von Imhoff, and his wife Anna Maria, to Queen Charlotte. This resulted in Imhoff's getting a junior position with the British East India Company. On the boat to India --a voyage which often took six months --Hastings met the Baroness. They fell in love and were later married. I will describe some of the other connections after I have told you some more about Burney's life.
Charles Burney, Fanny's father, was from an aristocratic family which had fallen into decay. Throughout his life he was very conscious of class distinctions and quite insecure about his own. To be close to true aristocrats--to say nothing of the royal family--was for him like being showered with angel dust. As a very young man he displayed considerable talents as a musician. He both sang and played the organ. It was suggested that he go to London to further his musical studies. While there, he found employment in theater orchestras which, considering the low esteem in which theater people were held, must have caused him some concern. It is not surprising that he next took employment as the private music master to an upper-class family. He was meant to go to Europe with them but fell in love with a woman called Esther Sleepe. By the time they married in 1749, they had already had their first child, Esther, who was always known as "Hetty." The fact that Hetty's birth preceded her parent's marriage you will not find mentioned in Burney's journals, unless it is in one of the inked-over parts.
Other children followed almost annually and to support his growing family Charles Burney took on a variety of musical odd jobs including rehearsing the singers for Handel's oratorios. But before Fanny Burney's birth, he had moved the family to the Norfolk port town of Lynn Regis. He had decided that the air in London was endangering their health. Fanny Burney was born in Lynn Regis on June 13, 1752. There they lived until 1760 when they moved back to London.
Musical entertainment was always part of the Burney family life. Either the senior Burney performed alone or with one of Fanny's sisters. I do not know the extent of Fanny Burney's musical talent, but whatever it was, public performance was out of the question for her; she was almost pathologically shy. What she did do was to record. If there is such a thing as having a photographic memory for conversation, Burney had it. But it went beyond this. She reordered her observations so that they made a great narrative. Like so many "naturalistic" plays and films, her written dialogues sound like conversations, but no conversations sound like that. It is important to keep this in mind when one reads the journals.
In the first place, they are not private diaries such as Pepys's or Boswell's London diaries. What is in them was meant to be read by others. Indeed, most of the entries are copies of letters sent or received. Some of these letters are several pages long, so to retranscribe them required some effort. If you read them attentively, you will see that they have an element of fiction. For example, in the spring of 1775 when Burney was twenty-two, as a favor to her sister she went on a visit to a family whom she describes as "very stupid." They had a boarder, a young man named Barlow. Barlow was immediately and hopelessly smitten with Burney. As Burney notes in her journal, "he has a great desire to please but no elegance of manners; neither, though he may be very worthy, is he at all agreeable." Upon leaving, there was kissing among the female members of the party and Barlow, taking advantage of the situation, kissed Burney. "I have seldom been more surprised," she writes, "I had no idea of his taking such a freedom." But then she adds, "He came down stairs with us and waited at the door, I believe, till the coach was out of sight." This last "I believe" is what a novelist would invent to complete a story.
In 1762, when she was ten, Burney's world crashed down upon her; her mother died. She had had nine pregnancies in thirteen years and the last childbirth had taken her life. For any child such a loss would have been devastating, but for Burney it was catastrophic. It became worse five years later when the senior Burney married a widow named Elizabeth Allen who had children of comparable ages to the Burney children. It is unlikely that any stepmother would have been welcomed by Burney, but Mrs. Allen seemed to have little comprehension of her. One wonders whether Burney would have survived these traumas if it had not been for a friend of her father named Samuel Crisp. He had retired to the country where the Burneys often visited him. He did understand her and many of the longer letters in her journals are addressed to "daddy Crisp." It should also be understood that none of the Burney daughters were allowed a formal education. Fanny Burney was self-taught and what reading she was allowed to do was carefully supervised by her father. This continued even into her twenties. Dr. Johnson offered to teach her Latin and Greek, but her father would not give his permission since some literature in those languages might not be suitable. When Burney was fifteen she had some sort of encounter with her stepmother as a result of which she burned everything she had written. This included parts of a novel that she had called The History of Caroline Evelyn. In light of this, what happened in the next few years is almost beyond belief.
Sometime in her late teens, Burney began a new novel, Evelina, in secret. She was then being employed by her father as an amanuensis. She copied out the chapters of the book he was writing on the history of music. While writing Evelina, Burney disguised her handwriting, and wrote mostly at night, by candlelight in her bedroom under the eaves near where Isaac Newton had had his observatory. Nearly everything is remarkable about this enterprise. Burney had essentially no role models. The few women writing fiction in English were older and had had an entirely different set of life experiences. Most remarkable to me is that Burney knew how good it was. No one told her, because no one had seen it. Evelina consists entirely of letters--like her journals--some of which are written to a substitute father like her own "daddy Crisp." What is equally remarkable is the range of characters: from aristocrats to prostitutes. It is true that the Burney household often entertained theater women who, for many, were little better than prostitutes, but somehow she managed to transform these people into the real thing.
Burney was convinced that it should be published. But how? In fact, when she made this decision the novel was not even finished. She was trying to sell an incomplete novel written by an author who would not reveal her identity. In this madcap scheme she enlisted the help of her brother Charles who was disguised as "Mr. King." Remarkably, a publisher was found, Thomas Lowndes, who wrote, "Sir, I've read and like the Manuscript and if you'll send me the rest I'll soon run it over." Two of the eventual three volumes of Evelina were turned over by "Mr. King" to Lowndes. She was now under pressure to deliver the third and so she asked time off from her work with her father to complete the book. Fortunately, she did not show her father the incomplete novel so he never knew until after it was published what it contained or even what its title was. I say "fortunately" because later in her career, when he did get into the process, the effect was not beneficial. The third volume was given to Lowndes by Burney's artist cousin Edward since Charles had been sent down from Cambridge and was in disgrace. Lowndes offered twenty guineas--later raised to thirty--for the rights. In view of the unframed art he was buying, it is difficult to argue that he underpaid. However, the book, which was published in 1778 under the full title of Evelina: or, a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, became an immediate sensation in London. It has been in print from that day to this.
The great question became who wrote it. Nearly everyone assumed that it must have been a man. One exception was Joshua Reynolds who decided that it must be a woman and offered fifty pounds to meet her. Burney's father, who had still not read the novel, came across a favorable review of it. When he discussed this with Burney's sister Susan, she told him that it was her sister who had written it. The senior Burney was flabbergasted, but once having read the book he began spreading the news. One of the first places was at the home of Hester Thrale--Streatham--at which Dr. Johnson was almost a perpetual guest. In March of 1777, at Streatham, Burney had her first encounter with Dr. Johnson. Her description of the great man is one of the high points of the early journals. She writes, He is, indeed, very ill-favoured; is tall and stout; but stoops terribly;he is almost bent double. His mouth is almost constantly opening and shutting, as if he was chewing. He has a strange method of frequently twirling his fingers, and twisting his hands. His body is in continual agitation, see-sawing up and down; his feet are never a moment quiet; and,in short, his whole person is in perpetual motion. His dress too,considering the times, and that he meant to put on his best becomes, being engaged to dine in a large company, was much out of the common road as his figure; he had a large wig, snuff-colour coat, and gold buttons, but no ruffles to his shirt.
Dr. Johnson truly loved Burney and he loved her novel which he thought was one of the best ever written in English. Their friendship lasted until his dying day in 1784. When, after Dr. Johnson's death, Boswell tried to get information for his biography from her she refused to cooperate, feeling that this was an invasion of his privacy. As her later journals show, she did not much care for the book. She and Boswell had a wary relationship. Boswell was always trying, literally and figuratively, to get the seat closest to Dr. Johnson which was often occupied by Burney. Dr. Johnson and others, including Richard Brinsley Sheridan who was then running the Drury Lane Theater, wanted Burney to turn her talents to writing a comic play. She did. It was called The Whirlings. A play was different from a novel in that the author was meant to be present while it was being rehearsed, which would mean a close association with actors and actresses in the theater itself. On this, both her father and "daddy Crisp" were very cautionary given the social status of theater people. They were even more cautionary when they were given the play to read. It was a satire involving recognizable socialites--the kind who were her father's patrons. When her father and "daddy Crisp" objected violently to the play, Burney simply withdrew it.
She then wrote a novel, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, which was published in 1782. The Penguin edition of Evelina, including the introductory notes and the footnotes, runs to five-hundred-and-five pages. The World's Classics edition of Cecilia, including the same, runs to one-thousand-and-four pages! Evelina had put on weight. In my view, none of Burney's later fiction compares to Evelina, although Cecilia contains the memorable line "The whole of this unfortunate business . . . has been the result of pride and prejudice," a line which we know Jane Austen read.
Whatever Burney's life--with its parties and musical evenings at home--may have appeared to others, it must have been clear to her that she had reached something of a dead end. There were episodes of illness which we would certainly diagnose as being psychosomatic. Furthermore, in 1783, at the age of seventy-eight, "daddy Crisp" died leaving an emotional void for Burney. But that same year she made the acquaintance of an eighty-three-year old woman named Mary Delany. For Burney, Mrs. Delany was the reincarnation of her maternal grandmother. She visited her often in a house that had been provided by the royal family who also loved her. Indeed it was at Mrs. Delany's house in December of 1785 that she had her first encounter with the king and queen. In her journal entry, she manages in a few short paragraphs of dialogue to give an indelible image of the king's rather lovable eccentricity. Like a character out of P. G. Wodehouse, he introduced the conversation as follows:
"But what?--what?--how was it?"
"Sir?," cried I, not well understanding him.
"How came you--how happened it--what? --what?"
Divining that he was talking about Evelina, she replied,
"I--I only wrote, sir for my own amusement--only in some idle hours"
"But your publishing--your printing--how was that?"
"That was only sir--only because . . . I thought--sir--it would look
very well in print."
As it happened, about this time the post of the Second Keeper of the Robes to the Queen became vacant and the queen offered it to Burney. It should be understood that the Second Keeper of the Robes was a glorified lady's maid. She was on call from early morning to late at night to help the queen dress and undress and, in the case of Queen Charlotte, mix her snuff. It paid two hundred pounds a year and, in addition to a small apartment, there was an assigned maid and footman. But there were no vacations and, like all palace personnel, her personal life would be dictated by the queen who would approve of any visitors and even of the books that came to the palace.
Burney understood this and had serious doubts about accepting. But pressure was put on her. Her father was in heaven at the notion of his daughter's being in such proximity to the royals. It is probable that he saw the connection as leading to various royal favors for himself, something that was enhanced when a palace representative implied to Burney that this was likely to be the case. As it happened, the senior Burney never got any royal preferments. Burney certainly would have resisted if she had known about the dreadful toad-eating Madame Schwellenberg whose assistant she was about to become. Schwellenberg was erratic, mean-spirited, and childishly demanding. The few quiet hours Burney might have had to herself were lost since Schwellenberg insisted that she play cards with her.
The only writing Burney could do in the five years she served the queen was what she called her "Court" journals. These journals provide a fascinating account of the world of the court with occasional glimpses of the world outside. Everyone will take away different impressions from them, but, for me, the two highlights are the illness of King George and the trial of Warren Hastings.
The illness of the king first enters Burney's journals in October of 1788. From then, until February of 1789, when Burney seems to have been the first person to witness the beginnings of the king's slow return to normalcy, the journals are a litany of his afflictions. She was not allowed to see him in person during much of this period, but then neither was the queen. However, the queen had instructed Burney to be at the king's bedroom door at dawn to receive the latest news from the doctors and then to give her a full and honest report. When I read them in the journals, I kept thinking of Lewis Thomas's remark about early medicine; it was by trial and error, usually in that order. On February 2, 1789, Burney took her morning walk in Kew Gardens, having been assured that the king was elsewhere. She was astonished--indeed horrified--to see him appear in the gardens accompanied by his doctors. When she tried to run away, he ran after her calling her name. He caught up to her and they had a heart-to-heart talk. It was clear that he knew about Madame Schwellenberg. The last thing he said to Burney was, "Never mind her! . . . depend upon me! I will be your friend as long as I live!" And he was.
Divining that he was talking about Evelina, she replied,
"I--I only wrote, sir for my own amusement--only in some idle hours"
"But your publishing--your printing--how was that?"
"That was only sir--only because . . . I thought--sir--it would look
very well in print."
As it happened, about this time the post of the Second Keeper of the Robes to the Queen became vacant and the queen offered it to Burney. It should be understood that the Second Keeper of the Robes was a glorified lady's maid. She was on call from early morning to late at night to help the queen dress and undress and, in the case of Queen Charlotte, mix her snuff. It paid two hundred pounds a year and, in addition to a small apartment, there was an assigned maid and footman. But there were no vacations and, like all palace personnel, her personal life would be dictated by the queen who would approve of any visitors and even of the books that came to the palace.
Burney understood this and had serious doubts about accepting. But pressure was put on her. Her father was in heaven at the notion of his daughter's being in such proximity to the royals. It is probable that he saw the connection as leading to various royal favors for himself, something that was enhanced when a palace representative implied to Burney that this was likely to be the case. As it happened, the senior Burney never got any royal preferments. Burney certainly would have resisted if she had known about the dreadful toad-eating Madame Schwellenberg whose assistant she was about to become. Schwellenberg was erratic, mean-spirited, and childishly demanding. The few quiet hours Burney might have had to herself were lost since Schwellenberg insisted that she play cards with her.
The only writing Burney could do in the five years she served the queen was what she called her "Court" journals. These journals provide a fascinating account of the world of the court with occasional glimpses of the world outside. Everyone will take away different impressions from them, but, for me, the two highlights are the illness of King George and the trial of Warren Hastings.
The illness of the king first enters Burney's journals in October of 1788. From then, until February of 1789, when Burney seems to have been the first person to witness the beginnings of the king's slow return to normalcy, the journals are a litany of his afflictions. She was not allowed to see him in person during much of this period, but then neither was the queen. However, the queen had instructed Burney to be at the king's bedroom door at dawn to receive the latest news from the doctors and then to give her a full and honest report. When I read them in the journals, I kept thinking of Lewis Thomas's remark about early medicine; it was by trial and error, usually in that order. On February 2, 1789, Burney took her morning walk in Kew Gardens, having been assured that the king was elsewhere. She was astonished--indeed horrified--to see him appear in the gardens accompanied by his doctors. When she tried to run away, he ran after her calling her name. He caught up to her and they had a heart-to-heart talk. It was clear that he knew about Madame Schwellenberg. The last thing he said to Burney was, "Never mind her! . . . depend upon me! I will be your friend as long as I live!" And he was.
Burney got to see a few of the high points of the Hastings trial, which began on February 13, 1788, before the full parliament in Westminster Hall. Tickets were almost impossible to get, but the queen gave Burney hers, expecting that Burney would give her a complete report. Her description of the scene in Parliament is now part of the literature of that period. By this time Burney had met Hastings socially and liked him very much. It also must be remembered that her sister was married to one of his closest associates. It is unlikely that Burney had much of a grasp of the very complex issues on which the impeachment rested. But she was absolutely certain that the man she knew could not be the villain he was being described as. The experience was wrenching for her because she was also a close friend of Edmund Burke who was Hastings's principal antagonist. She did something at the trial that could have put her at great risk. One must remember that she had come to the trial with the tickets of the queen so that what she said, and did, could be interpreted as representing the views of the palace. What she tried to do, when she saw people like Burke, was to persuade them that they were wrong. She reconstructs these dialogues in her journals and one is struck by her tenacity. If word of this had gotten back to the palace, where the view of Hastings was by no means so favorable, Burney would have found herself in very grave trouble indeed. When Hastings was finally acquitted on April 23, 1795, one of the first letters of congratulation came from Burney who was, by this time, Madame d'Arblay and the mother of a son, Alexander Charles Louis d'Arblay.
By the time of Burney's later appearances at Hastings's trial, it was clear to everyone who knew her that she was seriously ill. The routine at the palace had undermined her health. Even Boswell, who was not one of her admirers, wanted to organize a petition to her father to insist that Burney be allowed to resign. In October of 1790, Burney asked permission of the queen to be allowed to leave. It took until July of the following year before it was granted. Schwellenberg was, needless to say, beside herself. The queen was correct but not overly generous; she granted Burney a pension of a hundred pounds a year--half her salary, but not really enough to live on. The senior Burney had moved house and in the new quarters there was not adequate space for Burney.
But she was now taken under the wing of an older widowed friend: a Mrs. Anna Ord. Mrs. Ord took Burney on a tour of the spas. They first stopped at Westminster. As it happened, a small group of French aristocrats had settled there after having fled the excesses of the French Revolution, people like the Comte de Mirabeau and Talleyrand. It was Burney's first encounter with this French colony, but a few months later her sister Susan reported the arrival of General d'Arblay. He had made a great impression on her, and when finally Burney met him in January of 1793 she soon decided that this was the man that she had waited for all her life. D'Arblay felt similarly about her, and he invented a device for them to get to know each other better. Burney spoke little French and d'Arblay not much English, so he proposed that they write "essays" to each other to learn the languages. The essays turned into love letters and by the spring of 1793 they had decided to get married.
Burney senior behaved exceedingly badly. He refused to meet General d'Arblay or to sanction the marriage. Not only was d'Arblay a foreigner, he was also a Catholic. But by this time Burney had been through too much to let this deter her. On Sunday July 28, 1793, they were married in a Protestant church with Burney's brother James giving away the bride. Two days later they had a Catholic ceremony so that Burney might be able to inherit any of d'Arblay's property in France should he ever be able to reclaim it. Burney's only expressed regret was that she was not younger. It is true that d'Arblay was two years younger than she was but this was surely not what she meant. I am sure she meant that she wished she could have known such happiness earlier in her life.
The d'Arblays had little money. The queen's one hundred pounds did not go very far and the general had no profession he could practice in England. Burney set about trying to earn some money by writing. Her third novel, Camilla, which appeared in 1796 helped. In 1802, she went to France to join her husband who had returned to fight in Napoleon's army. Her French journals, much of which are written in French, describe this period. At first she admired Napoleon but came to find him loathsome. Somehow d'Arblay managed to survive the Napoleonic wars and she a bout with breast cancer that required a masectomy--an ordeal she famously underwent without anesthesia. In 1812, she and her son returned to England (he was to die six years later). In 1814, Burney returned to France and in 1815 witnessed the Battle of Waterloo. This ended d'Arblay's military career and the two of them returned to England later that year. Burney never again left England. D'Arblay made a brief return to France, but he came back to England to die in 1818 leaving Burney to live out the next twenty-two years of her life alone. She outlived every member of her immediate family. When she died on January 6, 1840, she was barely remembered as the author of Evelina, one of the great novels of the eighteenth century.
Jeremy Bernstein's biography of Warren Hastings will be published in the spring by Ivan R. Dee.
COPYRIGHT 1999 Foundation for Cultural Review
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Jeremy Bernstein "The life and times of Fanny Burney". New Criterion. . FindArticles.com. 02 Nov. 2008.
--The Early Diaries of Frances Burney
If you look up "Frances Burney" in an encyclopedia you are likely to find two listings. One will be under the name "Fanny Burney" since that was a nickname that many people used--although Dr. Johnson, who was especially fond of her, referred to her as "Fannikins." You will also find her listed as "Madame d'Arblay." That is because in 1793, after a brief courtship, much to the surprise of her family, probably to her own surprise at the age of forty-one, she married Alexandre Gabriel Jean-Baptiste Piochard d'Arblay, adjutant-general to Lafayette. How Fanny Burney, in midlife, met and married a French general is part of the charm of her life story.
That Fanny Burney married late was certainly not because she was unattractive. There is a portrait of her painted by her cousin Edward Francisco Burney hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London. In the words of one of her recent biographers, Kate Chisholm, it
shows a young woman in half-profile, shyly looking away from the artist (and her audience). She has soft blue eyes, full and shapely lips, rosy cheeks and lightly powdered fair hair, gently curling to her shoulders. Her simple gray dress is tightly waisted and has long tapered sleeves; a cream muslin fichu is tucked into the bodice. She wears no jewelry, but a large strawberry-pink bow is pinned to her petite bosom. Black gloves and a black lace shawl would complete the impression that here is a woman of gentle spirit and mod pretensions--except that she is wearing a magnificent hat. This dusky-gold "Lunardi," ruffled, trimmed, and flounced, was the height of fashion in the autumn of 1784, named after the daring exploits of the balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi. It dominates the portrait and quite transforms Fanny from an unexceptional society belle into someone who compels our attention. Before I explain why Burney "compels our attention," I owe the reader an explanation of why she compelled my attention. Not being a student of the literature of eighteenth-century England, I did not come to Burney in any way that you are likely to guess. It began in Kathmandu in the spring of 1987. I was on my way to Tibet, which I was intending to write about, and a friend of long standing invited me to forage in his extensive private library. Many of the books were familiar to me, but one wasn't. It was entitled The Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa (1876), edited by a man named Clements Markham. Bogle, born in Scotland in 1746, had been in India since 1769 when he went out as a "writer"--the lowest order of clerk --with the British East India Company. Unlike most of the young writers, whose only thought was to get rich quick and to return to England before the climate killed them, Bogle became fascinated by India. He learned many of the languages including Persian, the language of diplomacy. In the early 1770s, the British were having trouble with their Bhutanese neighbors to the north and took action against them militarily. This, in turn, alarmed the Tibetans, and the Governor General of India, Warren Hastings, decided in 1774 to send a diplomatic mission north to Bhutan and Tibet to arrive at a modus vivendi. He chose Bogle as its leader and this mission is what is described in these journals.
As I read the journals, and the fascinating and wonderfully written letters which Bogle wrote to his family, I kept coming across the figure of Warren Hastings. He was certainly the most brilliant and erudite Englishman ever to govern India. His curiosity was insatiable and he charged Bogle to bring back anything--animal or vegetable --that could be transported from Tibet and Bhutan. He did not bargain for one of Bogle's imports, which was a Tibetan wife. She is not mentioned in the journals, which have been edited for Victorian consumption, but her children have been traced to Scotland where they were sent after Bogle died in India of disease in 1781. Hastings, by the way, instructed Bogle to plant potatoes as he went along and their descendants now make up a good portion of the staple diet of these countries. What emerges in these journals is both Bogle's unlimited admiration for Hastings and the fact that Hastings was in a good deal of trouble. He and his council in Calcutta were at loggerheads, and upon his return to England in 1785 he found himself the subject of a parliamentary inquiry which led in 1788 to his being tried for "high crimes and misdemeanors." The trial, which was a sensation at the time, lasted seven years; he was acquitted on all charges, but was financially and politically ruined.
What does all of this have to do with Fanny Burney? When I shifted my attention from Bogle to Hastings, I began asking questions about him of people who might be knowledgeable. One of them was a professor of English at Rutgers University named W. C. Dowling, who in fact teaches the literature of this period. When I mentioned my interest in the Hastings impeachment trial, he asked if I had read the diaries of Fanny Burney. To be quite truthful, at the time I had only the foggiest idea of who Burney was, let alone what was contained in her diaries, but having a good deal of faith in Dowling I decided to look into the matter. I haven't stopped yet.
The first thing you will discover if you want to read the diaries is that they are not all that easy to get hold of. Burney began keeping her journals in 1768 and they continue to her death in 1840. You cannot simply go down to your neighborhood bookstore and buy them the way, for example, you can readily buy Boswell's journals. At the present time there is no single edition that begins in 1768 and ends in 1840, and it seems unlikely that there ever will be. There is a project which has been started by Lars E. Troide of the department of English of McGill University to do the years from 1768 to 1791 to complement the twelve-volume Oxford edition edited by Joyce Hemlow which goes from 1791 to 1840. Professor Troide has published three volumes that take us up to 1779. Nine more are due. All of this was much more than I wanted to deal with. Instead, what I chose to do was to use the two-volume edition of the "Early" diaries which stops in 1778 and then to join them to the wonderful six-volume edition of the later diaries edited by Burney's niece Charlotte Barrett. This edition was first published in the years 1842-46. If you scout used book stores you can find it, often in later printings. (There is a one-volume edition that should be avoided since it contains only a fraction of the material.) It is beautifully illustrated and contains adequate references. Barrett, incidentally, did not try to pry under Burney's inked-over passages which the new editions attempt to do. Once you begin reading the journals you will discover that they read like a novel--a great historical novel. For reasons I will shortly explain, this is not too surprising. For me, the surprise was the extent of Burney's connections to Hastings.
At the end of his career in India, Hastings had a personal physician named Clement Francis. He was one of Hastings's coterie that left India with him. For reasons I have not been able to discover, while in India, Francis decided to propose marriage to Fanny Burney. As far as I can make out they had never met. I do not even know what their mutual connection was. In any event, upon visiting the Burney home--which, incidentally, had been the final residence of Isaac Newton in London--he met Burney's younger sister Charlotte. He fell in love with her and they were married in 1786. Francis then worked as a country doctor in Aylsham until his death in 1792. At the time of the marriage, both sisters were living at home (the two other sisters and the two other brothers were already married). With the departure of Charlotte, Burney was left at home with a stepmother she could not stand and a father who loved her but did not understand her very well.
One consequence was that in 1786 Burney accepted the position as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, the German-born wife of George III. I will come back to this later but I want to note here that the Keeper of the Robes was a dreadful German woman named Juliana Elizabeth Schwellenberg who had come over with Charlotte at the time of her marriage in 1761. In her journals, Burney, who had perfect pitch for dialogue and dialect, turns Schwellenberg into one of the great comic villains in literature. However, it was Schwellenberg who some years earlier had introduced her countryman the Baron Carl von Imhoff, and his wife Anna Maria, to Queen Charlotte. This resulted in Imhoff's getting a junior position with the British East India Company. On the boat to India --a voyage which often took six months --Hastings met the Baroness. They fell in love and were later married. I will describe some of the other connections after I have told you some more about Burney's life.
Charles Burney, Fanny's father, was from an aristocratic family which had fallen into decay. Throughout his life he was very conscious of class distinctions and quite insecure about his own. To be close to true aristocrats--to say nothing of the royal family--was for him like being showered with angel dust. As a very young man he displayed considerable talents as a musician. He both sang and played the organ. It was suggested that he go to London to further his musical studies. While there, he found employment in theater orchestras which, considering the low esteem in which theater people were held, must have caused him some concern. It is not surprising that he next took employment as the private music master to an upper-class family. He was meant to go to Europe with them but fell in love with a woman called Esther Sleepe. By the time they married in 1749, they had already had their first child, Esther, who was always known as "Hetty." The fact that Hetty's birth preceded her parent's marriage you will not find mentioned in Burney's journals, unless it is in one of the inked-over parts.
Other children followed almost annually and to support his growing family Charles Burney took on a variety of musical odd jobs including rehearsing the singers for Handel's oratorios. But before Fanny Burney's birth, he had moved the family to the Norfolk port town of Lynn Regis. He had decided that the air in London was endangering their health. Fanny Burney was born in Lynn Regis on June 13, 1752. There they lived until 1760 when they moved back to London.
Musical entertainment was always part of the Burney family life. Either the senior Burney performed alone or with one of Fanny's sisters. I do not know the extent of Fanny Burney's musical talent, but whatever it was, public performance was out of the question for her; she was almost pathologically shy. What she did do was to record. If there is such a thing as having a photographic memory for conversation, Burney had it. But it went beyond this. She reordered her observations so that they made a great narrative. Like so many "naturalistic" plays and films, her written dialogues sound like conversations, but no conversations sound like that. It is important to keep this in mind when one reads the journals.
In the first place, they are not private diaries such as Pepys's or Boswell's London diaries. What is in them was meant to be read by others. Indeed, most of the entries are copies of letters sent or received. Some of these letters are several pages long, so to retranscribe them required some effort. If you read them attentively, you will see that they have an element of fiction. For example, in the spring of 1775 when Burney was twenty-two, as a favor to her sister she went on a visit to a family whom she describes as "very stupid." They had a boarder, a young man named Barlow. Barlow was immediately and hopelessly smitten with Burney. As Burney notes in her journal, "he has a great desire to please but no elegance of manners; neither, though he may be very worthy, is he at all agreeable." Upon leaving, there was kissing among the female members of the party and Barlow, taking advantage of the situation, kissed Burney. "I have seldom been more surprised," she writes, "I had no idea of his taking such a freedom." But then she adds, "He came down stairs with us and waited at the door, I believe, till the coach was out of sight." This last "I believe" is what a novelist would invent to complete a story.
In 1762, when she was ten, Burney's world crashed down upon her; her mother died. She had had nine pregnancies in thirteen years and the last childbirth had taken her life. For any child such a loss would have been devastating, but for Burney it was catastrophic. It became worse five years later when the senior Burney married a widow named Elizabeth Allen who had children of comparable ages to the Burney children. It is unlikely that any stepmother would have been welcomed by Burney, but Mrs. Allen seemed to have little comprehension of her. One wonders whether Burney would have survived these traumas if it had not been for a friend of her father named Samuel Crisp. He had retired to the country where the Burneys often visited him. He did understand her and many of the longer letters in her journals are addressed to "daddy Crisp." It should also be understood that none of the Burney daughters were allowed a formal education. Fanny Burney was self-taught and what reading she was allowed to do was carefully supervised by her father. This continued even into her twenties. Dr. Johnson offered to teach her Latin and Greek, but her father would not give his permission since some literature in those languages might not be suitable. When Burney was fifteen she had some sort of encounter with her stepmother as a result of which she burned everything she had written. This included parts of a novel that she had called The History of Caroline Evelyn. In light of this, what happened in the next few years is almost beyond belief.
Sometime in her late teens, Burney began a new novel, Evelina, in secret. She was then being employed by her father as an amanuensis. She copied out the chapters of the book he was writing on the history of music. While writing Evelina, Burney disguised her handwriting, and wrote mostly at night, by candlelight in her bedroom under the eaves near where Isaac Newton had had his observatory. Nearly everything is remarkable about this enterprise. Burney had essentially no role models. The few women writing fiction in English were older and had had an entirely different set of life experiences. Most remarkable to me is that Burney knew how good it was. No one told her, because no one had seen it. Evelina consists entirely of letters--like her journals--some of which are written to a substitute father like her own "daddy Crisp." What is equally remarkable is the range of characters: from aristocrats to prostitutes. It is true that the Burney household often entertained theater women who, for many, were little better than prostitutes, but somehow she managed to transform these people into the real thing.
Burney was convinced that it should be published. But how? In fact, when she made this decision the novel was not even finished. She was trying to sell an incomplete novel written by an author who would not reveal her identity. In this madcap scheme she enlisted the help of her brother Charles who was disguised as "Mr. King." Remarkably, a publisher was found, Thomas Lowndes, who wrote, "Sir, I've read and like the Manuscript and if you'll send me the rest I'll soon run it over." Two of the eventual three volumes of Evelina were turned over by "Mr. King" to Lowndes. She was now under pressure to deliver the third and so she asked time off from her work with her father to complete the book. Fortunately, she did not show her father the incomplete novel so he never knew until after it was published what it contained or even what its title was. I say "fortunately" because later in her career, when he did get into the process, the effect was not beneficial. The third volume was given to Lowndes by Burney's artist cousin Edward since Charles had been sent down from Cambridge and was in disgrace. Lowndes offered twenty guineas--later raised to thirty--for the rights. In view of the unframed art he was buying, it is difficult to argue that he underpaid. However, the book, which was published in 1778 under the full title of Evelina: or, a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, became an immediate sensation in London. It has been in print from that day to this.
The great question became who wrote it. Nearly everyone assumed that it must have been a man. One exception was Joshua Reynolds who decided that it must be a woman and offered fifty pounds to meet her. Burney's father, who had still not read the novel, came across a favorable review of it. When he discussed this with Burney's sister Susan, she told him that it was her sister who had written it. The senior Burney was flabbergasted, but once having read the book he began spreading the news. One of the first places was at the home of Hester Thrale--Streatham--at which Dr. Johnson was almost a perpetual guest. In March of 1777, at Streatham, Burney had her first encounter with Dr. Johnson. Her description of the great man is one of the high points of the early journals. She writes, He is, indeed, very ill-favoured; is tall and stout; but stoops terribly;he is almost bent double. His mouth is almost constantly opening and shutting, as if he was chewing. He has a strange method of frequently twirling his fingers, and twisting his hands. His body is in continual agitation, see-sawing up and down; his feet are never a moment quiet; and,in short, his whole person is in perpetual motion. His dress too,considering the times, and that he meant to put on his best becomes, being engaged to dine in a large company, was much out of the common road as his figure; he had a large wig, snuff-colour coat, and gold buttons, but no ruffles to his shirt.
Dr. Johnson truly loved Burney and he loved her novel which he thought was one of the best ever written in English. Their friendship lasted until his dying day in 1784. When, after Dr. Johnson's death, Boswell tried to get information for his biography from her she refused to cooperate, feeling that this was an invasion of his privacy. As her later journals show, she did not much care for the book. She and Boswell had a wary relationship. Boswell was always trying, literally and figuratively, to get the seat closest to Dr. Johnson which was often occupied by Burney. Dr. Johnson and others, including Richard Brinsley Sheridan who was then running the Drury Lane Theater, wanted Burney to turn her talents to writing a comic play. She did. It was called The Whirlings. A play was different from a novel in that the author was meant to be present while it was being rehearsed, which would mean a close association with actors and actresses in the theater itself. On this, both her father and "daddy Crisp" were very cautionary given the social status of theater people. They were even more cautionary when they were given the play to read. It was a satire involving recognizable socialites--the kind who were her father's patrons. When her father and "daddy Crisp" objected violently to the play, Burney simply withdrew it.
She then wrote a novel, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, which was published in 1782. The Penguin edition of Evelina, including the introductory notes and the footnotes, runs to five-hundred-and-five pages. The World's Classics edition of Cecilia, including the same, runs to one-thousand-and-four pages! Evelina had put on weight. In my view, none of Burney's later fiction compares to Evelina, although Cecilia contains the memorable line "The whole of this unfortunate business . . . has been the result of pride and prejudice," a line which we know Jane Austen read.
Whatever Burney's life--with its parties and musical evenings at home--may have appeared to others, it must have been clear to her that she had reached something of a dead end. There were episodes of illness which we would certainly diagnose as being psychosomatic. Furthermore, in 1783, at the age of seventy-eight, "daddy Crisp" died leaving an emotional void for Burney. But that same year she made the acquaintance of an eighty-three-year old woman named Mary Delany. For Burney, Mrs. Delany was the reincarnation of her maternal grandmother. She visited her often in a house that had been provided by the royal family who also loved her. Indeed it was at Mrs. Delany's house in December of 1785 that she had her first encounter with the king and queen. In her journal entry, she manages in a few short paragraphs of dialogue to give an indelible image of the king's rather lovable eccentricity. Like a character out of P. G. Wodehouse, he introduced the conversation as follows:
"But what?--what?--how was it?"
"Sir?," cried I, not well understanding him.
"How came you--how happened it--what? --what?"
Divining that he was talking about Evelina, she replied,
"I--I only wrote, sir for my own amusement--only in some idle hours"
"But your publishing--your printing--how was that?"
"That was only sir--only because . . . I thought--sir--it would look
very well in print."
As it happened, about this time the post of the Second Keeper of the Robes to the Queen became vacant and the queen offered it to Burney. It should be understood that the Second Keeper of the Robes was a glorified lady's maid. She was on call from early morning to late at night to help the queen dress and undress and, in the case of Queen Charlotte, mix her snuff. It paid two hundred pounds a year and, in addition to a small apartment, there was an assigned maid and footman. But there were no vacations and, like all palace personnel, her personal life would be dictated by the queen who would approve of any visitors and even of the books that came to the palace.
Burney understood this and had serious doubts about accepting. But pressure was put on her. Her father was in heaven at the notion of his daughter's being in such proximity to the royals. It is probable that he saw the connection as leading to various royal favors for himself, something that was enhanced when a palace representative implied to Burney that this was likely to be the case. As it happened, the senior Burney never got any royal preferments. Burney certainly would have resisted if she had known about the dreadful toad-eating Madame Schwellenberg whose assistant she was about to become. Schwellenberg was erratic, mean-spirited, and childishly demanding. The few quiet hours Burney might have had to herself were lost since Schwellenberg insisted that she play cards with her.
The only writing Burney could do in the five years she served the queen was what she called her "Court" journals. These journals provide a fascinating account of the world of the court with occasional glimpses of the world outside. Everyone will take away different impressions from them, but, for me, the two highlights are the illness of King George and the trial of Warren Hastings.
The illness of the king first enters Burney's journals in October of 1788. From then, until February of 1789, when Burney seems to have been the first person to witness the beginnings of the king's slow return to normalcy, the journals are a litany of his afflictions. She was not allowed to see him in person during much of this period, but then neither was the queen. However, the queen had instructed Burney to be at the king's bedroom door at dawn to receive the latest news from the doctors and then to give her a full and honest report. When I read them in the journals, I kept thinking of Lewis Thomas's remark about early medicine; it was by trial and error, usually in that order. On February 2, 1789, Burney took her morning walk in Kew Gardens, having been assured that the king was elsewhere. She was astonished--indeed horrified--to see him appear in the gardens accompanied by his doctors. When she tried to run away, he ran after her calling her name. He caught up to her and they had a heart-to-heart talk. It was clear that he knew about Madame Schwellenberg. The last thing he said to Burney was, "Never mind her! . . . depend upon me! I will be your friend as long as I live!" And he was.
Divining that he was talking about Evelina, she replied,
"I--I only wrote, sir for my own amusement--only in some idle hours"
"But your publishing--your printing--how was that?"
"That was only sir--only because . . . I thought--sir--it would look
very well in print."
As it happened, about this time the post of the Second Keeper of the Robes to the Queen became vacant and the queen offered it to Burney. It should be understood that the Second Keeper of the Robes was a glorified lady's maid. She was on call from early morning to late at night to help the queen dress and undress and, in the case of Queen Charlotte, mix her snuff. It paid two hundred pounds a year and, in addition to a small apartment, there was an assigned maid and footman. But there were no vacations and, like all palace personnel, her personal life would be dictated by the queen who would approve of any visitors and even of the books that came to the palace.
Burney understood this and had serious doubts about accepting. But pressure was put on her. Her father was in heaven at the notion of his daughter's being in such proximity to the royals. It is probable that he saw the connection as leading to various royal favors for himself, something that was enhanced when a palace representative implied to Burney that this was likely to be the case. As it happened, the senior Burney never got any royal preferments. Burney certainly would have resisted if she had known about the dreadful toad-eating Madame Schwellenberg whose assistant she was about to become. Schwellenberg was erratic, mean-spirited, and childishly demanding. The few quiet hours Burney might have had to herself were lost since Schwellenberg insisted that she play cards with her.
The only writing Burney could do in the five years she served the queen was what she called her "Court" journals. These journals provide a fascinating account of the world of the court with occasional glimpses of the world outside. Everyone will take away different impressions from them, but, for me, the two highlights are the illness of King George and the trial of Warren Hastings.
The illness of the king first enters Burney's journals in October of 1788. From then, until February of 1789, when Burney seems to have been the first person to witness the beginnings of the king's slow return to normalcy, the journals are a litany of his afflictions. She was not allowed to see him in person during much of this period, but then neither was the queen. However, the queen had instructed Burney to be at the king's bedroom door at dawn to receive the latest news from the doctors and then to give her a full and honest report. When I read them in the journals, I kept thinking of Lewis Thomas's remark about early medicine; it was by trial and error, usually in that order. On February 2, 1789, Burney took her morning walk in Kew Gardens, having been assured that the king was elsewhere. She was astonished--indeed horrified--to see him appear in the gardens accompanied by his doctors. When she tried to run away, he ran after her calling her name. He caught up to her and they had a heart-to-heart talk. It was clear that he knew about Madame Schwellenberg. The last thing he said to Burney was, "Never mind her! . . . depend upon me! I will be your friend as long as I live!" And he was.
Burney got to see a few of the high points of the Hastings trial, which began on February 13, 1788, before the full parliament in Westminster Hall. Tickets were almost impossible to get, but the queen gave Burney hers, expecting that Burney would give her a complete report. Her description of the scene in Parliament is now part of the literature of that period. By this time Burney had met Hastings socially and liked him very much. It also must be remembered that her sister was married to one of his closest associates. It is unlikely that Burney had much of a grasp of the very complex issues on which the impeachment rested. But she was absolutely certain that the man she knew could not be the villain he was being described as. The experience was wrenching for her because she was also a close friend of Edmund Burke who was Hastings's principal antagonist. She did something at the trial that could have put her at great risk. One must remember that she had come to the trial with the tickets of the queen so that what she said, and did, could be interpreted as representing the views of the palace. What she tried to do, when she saw people like Burke, was to persuade them that they were wrong. She reconstructs these dialogues in her journals and one is struck by her tenacity. If word of this had gotten back to the palace, where the view of Hastings was by no means so favorable, Burney would have found herself in very grave trouble indeed. When Hastings was finally acquitted on April 23, 1795, one of the first letters of congratulation came from Burney who was, by this time, Madame d'Arblay and the mother of a son, Alexander Charles Louis d'Arblay.
By the time of Burney's later appearances at Hastings's trial, it was clear to everyone who knew her that she was seriously ill. The routine at the palace had undermined her health. Even Boswell, who was not one of her admirers, wanted to organize a petition to her father to insist that Burney be allowed to resign. In October of 1790, Burney asked permission of the queen to be allowed to leave. It took until July of the following year before it was granted. Schwellenberg was, needless to say, beside herself. The queen was correct but not overly generous; she granted Burney a pension of a hundred pounds a year--half her salary, but not really enough to live on. The senior Burney had moved house and in the new quarters there was not adequate space for Burney.
But she was now taken under the wing of an older widowed friend: a Mrs. Anna Ord. Mrs. Ord took Burney on a tour of the spas. They first stopped at Westminster. As it happened, a small group of French aristocrats had settled there after having fled the excesses of the French Revolution, people like the Comte de Mirabeau and Talleyrand. It was Burney's first encounter with this French colony, but a few months later her sister Susan reported the arrival of General d'Arblay. He had made a great impression on her, and when finally Burney met him in January of 1793 she soon decided that this was the man that she had waited for all her life. D'Arblay felt similarly about her, and he invented a device for them to get to know each other better. Burney spoke little French and d'Arblay not much English, so he proposed that they write "essays" to each other to learn the languages. The essays turned into love letters and by the spring of 1793 they had decided to get married.
Burney senior behaved exceedingly badly. He refused to meet General d'Arblay or to sanction the marriage. Not only was d'Arblay a foreigner, he was also a Catholic. But by this time Burney had been through too much to let this deter her. On Sunday July 28, 1793, they were married in a Protestant church with Burney's brother James giving away the bride. Two days later they had a Catholic ceremony so that Burney might be able to inherit any of d'Arblay's property in France should he ever be able to reclaim it. Burney's only expressed regret was that she was not younger. It is true that d'Arblay was two years younger than she was but this was surely not what she meant. I am sure she meant that she wished she could have known such happiness earlier in her life.
The d'Arblays had little money. The queen's one hundred pounds did not go very far and the general had no profession he could practice in England. Burney set about trying to earn some money by writing. Her third novel, Camilla, which appeared in 1796 helped. In 1802, she went to France to join her husband who had returned to fight in Napoleon's army. Her French journals, much of which are written in French, describe this period. At first she admired Napoleon but came to find him loathsome. Somehow d'Arblay managed to survive the Napoleonic wars and she a bout with breast cancer that required a masectomy--an ordeal she famously underwent without anesthesia. In 1812, she and her son returned to England (he was to die six years later). In 1814, Burney returned to France and in 1815 witnessed the Battle of Waterloo. This ended d'Arblay's military career and the two of them returned to England later that year. Burney never again left England. D'Arblay made a brief return to France, but he came back to England to die in 1818 leaving Burney to live out the next twenty-two years of her life alone. She outlived every member of her immediate family. When she died on January 6, 1840, she was barely remembered as the author of Evelina, one of the great novels of the eighteenth century.
Jeremy Bernstein's biography of Warren Hastings will be published in the spring by Ivan R. Dee.
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