Fanny Burney: A biography. Claire Harman

       Preface

       Dr Johnson: Ay, never mind what she says. Don’t you know she is a writer of romances?

      Sir Joshua Reynolds: She may write romances and speak truth.¹

      By dint of outliving her parents, five siblings, husband and child, the novelist Fanny Burney (then Madame d’Arblay) became the caretaker of a vast quantity of family papers in her later years. Her father’s archive alone seemed at one point to be taking over her life, for, as she discovered when she began to sort through his literary remains in the 1820s, he seemed to have ‘kept, unaccountably, All his Letters, however uninteresting, ceremonious, momentary, or unmeaning’. She destroyed quantities of these papers and edited the remaining ones ruthlessly using scissors and heavy black ink; a process she applied to her own archive in the last decade of her life and which was continued after her death by her niece and literary executrix Charlotte Barrett, who pasted over more than a thousand passages in Madame d’Arblay’s diary, and cut out or deleted many others.

      Millions of words remain, nevertheless, in tens of thousands of family letters, diaries, memoirs, drafts, notebooks, manuscripts and Fanny Burney’s famous journal covering the period from 1768 until shortly before her death in 1840. The historical and literary importance of the Burney papers was recognised early on. Fanny Burney was one of the best-known and most highly respected novelists of her generation, whose ‘uncommonly fine compositions’² had been admired by writers as diverse as Jane Austen and Lord Byron. She had also led a long and eventful life which brought her into contact with some of the most famous men and women of her time; David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, Hester Thrale, Joshua Reynolds, Richard Sheridan, Edmund Burke, Warren Hastings, Madame de Staël, Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, Napoleon. She was a member of the Royal Household during the period of George Ill’s ‘madness’ in 1788 and a refugee in Brussels during the Battle of Waterloo: she had been an intimate of Dr Johnson in the 1780s, yet lived long enough to meet Sir Walter Scott. When the Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay were published in seven volumes between 1842 and 1846, she began a new posthumous career as the leading journalist of the Georgian age.

      The first edition of the Diary and Letters was a re-editing, with some deletions, of Burney’s own selection, bequeathed to Charlotte Barrett in 1839 ‘with full and free permission … to keep or destroy’,³ though Burney must have calculated that the loyal and scholarly ‘Charlottina’ was unlikely to destroy much. The diaries have been in print ever since, in one form or another. Some editions, like Christopher Lloyd’s,⁴ were short and sweet, presenting Fanny Burney as a sentimental Regency ‘miss’; others, like Austen Dobson’s of 1904, attempted to put the work in its historical