Fanny Burney: A biography. Claire Harman
of writing to Crisp suggested the story’s central correspondence between a young lady in the city (Evelina) and an old mentor in the sticks. Writing a novel as a series of letters suited the author’s circumstances, too. In a household where there was little privacy, the excuse of ‘writing a letter’ would have helped keep her compositions secret.
The epistolary novel was the most popular form of the day, and the trademark of Fanny’s literary hero, Richardson, though in Evelina she uses it more cleverly than he. Having, like Richardson, presented herself as the editor of the letters (thereby setting up the mild pretence of them being real), she ‘edits out’ parts of the correspondence, plants references in the text to ‘missing’ letters, has letters cross in the post, get diverted, forged, delayed (notably in the case of the one from the heroine’s dead mother, pivotal to the resolution of the plot). The model of Fanny’s real correspondence with Crisp was most valuable, though, in discouraging her from attempting too ‘literary’ a style. Evelina’s breathless note to her guardian on her arrival in London, for instance, has an irresistible realism:
This moment arrived. Just going to Drury-Lane Theatre. The celebrated Mr. Garrick performs Ranger. I am quite in extacy. So is Miss Mirvan. How fortunate, that he should happen to play! We would not let Mrs. Mirvan rest till she had consented to go; her chief objection was to our dress, for we have had no time to Londonize ourselves; but we teazed her into compliance, and so we are to sit in some obscure place, that she may not be seen.3
Evelina bears none of the marks of having been worked on for up to ten years, though in the Memoirs the author asserts that much of the story had been ‘pent up’ in her head since the time of the composition of ‘Caroline Evelyn’, the manuscript novel destroyed in Poland Street in 1766 or 1767.4 A document in Charlotte Barrett’s hand5 (but presumably written under the supervision of her aunt) adds that the earlier story had featured several characters who reappear in the ‘daughter’ novel: Lady Howard, Mr Villars, Miss Mirvan, Sir John Belmont and Madame Duval. These characters were so real to Fanny that she couldn’t help revolving their circumstances and personalities long after the manuscript containing their history had ceased to exist. ‘My bureau was cleared,’ she wrote, many years later, ‘but my head was not emptied.’6
It is likely that Evelina was one of the ‘writings’ Fanny Burney mentions in her diaries of 1770, 1771 and 1772. The two following years were burdened with copying as Dr Burney hurried to finish the first volume of his History, and it was probably only after the publication of that book in 1775 that Fanny had much time for her own work. In the early stages, there was little motivation to write the story down, except perhaps a desire to circulate a readable manuscript among her siblings and the Chesington Hall set. ‘Writing, indeed,’ as Madame d’Arblay confessed later, ‘was far more difficult to her than composing.’7 Writing down also meant pinning down, and an end to the pleasurable composing process.
Nevertheless, in the summer of 1776, when Dr and Mrs Burney had gone to Bristol and Fanny was left to her own devices with only the toddler Sally and the servants for company, she settled down with a hitherto unknown single-mindedness and wrote most of what is now Evelina’s second volume. By the end of the year she was beginning to negotiate with publishers.
The step from indulging in private ‘vagaries’ to producing two volumes of a full-length novel and soliciting its publication is so momentous that we may well wonder what prompted Fanny Burney to take it, or even think of it. The reason given in the Memoirs does not sound like the whole truth:
When the little narrative, however slowly, from the impediments that always annoy what requires secrecy, began to assume a ‘questionable shape;’ a wish – as vague, at first, as it was fantastic – crossed the brain of the writer, to ‘see her work in print.’8
This makes it sound as if Burney was simply indulging ‘a taste for quaint sports’9 in a frivolous and ladylike fashion. She certainly could not have thought of openly adopting a career as a novelist in 1776 – for a middle-class woman it was simply not respectable – but anonymous publication was a possibility. Her knowledge of the printing trade made the business of soliciting publication less intimidating than it might otherwise have been, but when Joyce Hemlow says that ‘the practice (almost the habit) of book-making that she had known for the last five years in her father’s study must have been sufficient by the momentum of its progress to carry her on to the press’,10 she makes the publication of Evelina sound rather too much like a demonstration of Newton’s second law. Fanny’s sudden decision to finish and publish her novel seems to have been triggered by something more urgent and personal.
It is possible that something happened in the Burney family in 1776 that made it desirable or even necessary for Fanny to make some money quickly by hurrying into print. We are unlikely to find out what this might have been; Fanny burned her whole diary and most of her correspondence for that year and the next, noting in her papers that the material was ‘upon Family matters or anecdotes’ – as if that was sufficient to justify it being ‘destroyed […] in totality’.11 But two years later, when she was accused by Mrs Thrale of having courted the attention she seemed to despise by soliciting publication, she said, ‘My printing it, indeed […] tells terribly against me, to all who are unacquainted with the circumstances that belonged to it.’12 This reveals that there were ‘circumstances’ that forced Fanny to act against her inclination and publish.
Neither of the two family scandals that took place in the autumn of 1777 can completely account for the move. The first was the elopement of Mrs Burney’s third child, Bessy Allen, who had been sent to Paris in 1775 for the improvement of her manners. Charlotte Burney, who was the same age as Bessy, was not sent with her as a companion; presumably they did not get on well. Mrs Burney was proud of her daughter and had intended, in Samuel Johnson’s opinion, ‘to enjoy the triumph of her superiority’ over the Burney girls.13 In August 1777 she had gone to Paris to bring Bessy home when the girl, sensing an end to her freedom, eloped with an adventurer called Samuel Meeke, a man reputed to be ‘Bankrupt in fame as well as Fortune’.14 The couple were married two months later in exactly the same place, Ypres, where Maria had married Martin Rishton. Mrs Burney had to return home on her own, shocked, anxious, ashamed and chagrined to the quick.*
The family had hardly recovered from this first shock when another disgrace hit the Burney household. Charles Burney junior had gone up to Caius College, Cambridge, in January 1777. Though he was fond of pranks, and lighthearted to the point of being feckless, Charles had a zeal for scholarship and an intellectual ability that outshone that of anyone else in the family. At Cambridge he was admitted to the University Library as a special privilege (it was not normally used by undergraduates at this date), but when a surprising number of classical texts began to go missing soon after his arrival, suspicion fell on him. The Under-Librarian decided to search his rooms secretly, an operation which had to be attempted during dinner since, as the College Bedmaker said, that was the only time Burney could be relied on not to be studying.16 ‘In a dark Corner’ they found about thirty-five of the missing volumes, mostly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions of the standard classical authors, which had had the university arms removed from them and the Burney bookplate substituted. Other volumes, as it turned out, had been sold on, and when young Burney fled Cambridge after the discovery of his crime, a further box of stolen books was sent back to the library from London.