From the origin of her first literary attempt, [she] might almost be called an accidental author.
Fanny Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney1
Fanny’s diary was not addressed to ‘Nobody’ for long. Craving news from town and the company of his dear Burney girls, Samuel Crisp had developed an apparently insatiable appetite for their letters, and singled out Fanny’s as the best. His attention was extremely gratifying to the ‘little dunce’ and encouraged her to invest time and effort in the correspondence. Her diary gradually modulated into a series of journal-letters to the hermit of Chesington which Crisp felt free to circulate to his sister and her friends.
While it stimulated Fanny to have a discerning and appreciative audience (in a way that addressing passive ‘Nobody’ could never do), there was of course a danger that these semi-public letters might become self-conscious. Fortunately, Crisp was not only a forthright man but astute, and foresaw the kind of inhibitions to which Fanny might be prey. ‘I profess there is not a single word or expression, or thought in your whole letter,’ he wrote in the winter of 1773, when their correspondence was just taking root, ‘that I do not relish’:
– not that in our Correspondence, I shall set up for a Critic, or schoolmaster, or Observer of Composition – Damn it all! – I hate it if once You set about framing studied letters, that are to be correct, nicely grammatical & run in smooth Periods, I shall mind them as no others than newspapers of intelligence; I make this preface because You have needlessly enjoin’d me to deal sincerely, & to tell You of your faults; & so let this declaration serve once for all, that there is no fault in an Epistolary Correspondence, like stiffness, & study – Dash away, whatever comes uppermost – the sudden sallies of imagination, clap’d down on paper, just as they arise, are worth Folios, & have all the warmth & merit of that sort of Nonsense, that is Eloquent in Love – never think of being correct, when You write to me.2
Crisp granted Fanny a licence to be natural, and the benefits were enormous. He encouraged her to entertain him, not with anything fanciful or affected, but with the events of her everyday life, written in her everyday language, really as if she were talking to him. It was in their degree of deviation from ‘nicely grammatical’ writing that he would judge the vitality of her letters. Uneducated Fanny had appealed to the family monitor to correct her faults, and he had replied that she wasn’t to give her style a moment’s notice.
‘Dash away, whatever comes uppermost’: Fanny’s letters to Crisp became studiedly informal, making use of character sketches and long passages of dialogue as a substitute for straightforward chronicling. The success of the formula must have influenced her decision to cast the latest of her ‘writings’ in epistolary form, and the sheer familiarity 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. In his few months at the university, he must have been stealing books almost all the time.
The shock at home was seismic, and none felt it more violently than the Doctor, who refused to see his son. Fanny’s diary from this painful period has not survived, nor has Charles Burney’s correspondence on the subject with his friend Thomas Twining, though Twining’s replies indicate how much comforting and bringing to reason the bitterly disappointed father required.17 At one point Charles seems to have considered disowning his son altogether, and he certainly thought of making him change his surname. Fortunately, when the first shock subsided, he dropped these drastic ideas. The problem of what to do with the reprobate remained, however. Charles junior was sent into exile to the village of Shinfield in Berkshire, presumably to a private tutor, from where he communicated forlornly with his sisters in St Martin’s Street.
But young Charles’s was not a brooding nature, and he recovered far quicker from this shameful episode than did the rest of his family. By the following spring he had been found a place at King’s College, Old Aberdeen – a far cry from Caius, and in a Presbyterian country (which his father thought might be a further hindrance to his taking Holy Orders, as they still hoped he would some day). He was writing verses, such as ‘Farewell to Shinfield’, which indicate that his spirits were pretty well restored:
Let me shake off the rustic – & once more
The gayer joys of college life explore.18
The ‘gayer joys’ in question may well have been what got him into trouble in his short Cambridge career, where any kind of high living would have very rapidly used up young Charles’s small allowance. Ralph S. Walker, in his article on the thefts,19 points out that when Charles junior’s own son, Charles Parr Burney, was going up to Oxford, he warned him feelingly of ‘three stumbling blocks: Gaming, Drinking and the Fair Sex’, the greatest being gaming: ‘Its fascinations are matchless and when they once influence the mind, their power is uncontrollable’.20 This is surely the voice of experience, and perhaps young Charles did steal and sell the books in order to avoid owning up to debt at home.
Fanny puts a different slant on the matter in a letter written many years later to Charles Parr Burney (who had only just found out about the episode), in which she states ‘the origin of that fatal deed to have been a MAD RAGE for possessing a library, and that the subsequent sale only occurred from the fear of discovery’.21 Charles’s bibliomania, which far surpassed his father’s, resulted in him possessing at the time of his death in 1817 one of the most splendid private libraries of the age, which, along with his magpie hoards of old newspaper cuttings (ninety-four volumes) and an extensive archive of material relating to the history of the stage, formed a core collection of the new British Library. Fanny’s suggestion that her brother suffered a pathological ‘rage for possessing a library’ seems psychologically convincing. In the days of his prosperity, he acquired books conventionally; when he was a student from the lower bourgeoisie, let loose in the treasure-house of a university library, he just acquired them anyway.
If Fanny was trying to make enough money from Evelina to bail out her brother, she failed, even though the twenty guineas she received from the publisher for the copyright seemed ‘a sum enormous’ to her at the time. She said later that she had given the proceeds of her first novel to her brother Charles, but his disgrace at university post-dates her rush to finish Evelina. Perhaps even at Charterhouse, where he stayed until the late age of nineteen, Charles had run into the kind of debt that seems to have burdened him as a student. It is even possible that he might have been desperate (from whatever cause) to the point of attempting suicide. There is a cryptic reference in Fanny’s diary to a conversation with the writer Giuseppe Baretti in 1788, when Baretti used the image of ‘running a dagger into your own breast’. This made Fanny shudder, ‘because the dagger was a word of unfortunate recollection’.22* Is it possible, as Mrs Thrale heard on the grapevine the same year,24 that Charles Burney junior was the model for the suicidal Macartney in Evelina, whom the heroine (later revealed to be his half-sister) discovers preparing to use a pistol on himself? The heroines of Cecilia, Camilla and The Wanderer undergo traumatic encounters with potential suicides too, and in each case the desperado is brandishing a weapon. There may have been something more painful behind her ‘decision to print’ than Fanny Burney was prepared to let anyone know.
By the winter of 1776, Fanny had completed the first two volumes of her novel and had copied out at least one volume in the feigned, upright hand she developed to prevent recognition of the author of the manuscript. This was not as neurotic as it might seem. Fanny’s handwriting was well known in the London printing shops from her extensive copying of her father’s works, and as she would have no control over the production of her novel – should a publisher take it up – there was a real risk that her cover would be blown, or worse, that her father might be disgraced by association with the book.
The task of transcribing her text into the unnatural handwriting was irksome, and by Christmas 1776 she was losing patience with it. In conspiracy with Susan, Charlotte and Charles she had already approached the bookseller James Dodsley, but he had refused to consider an anonymous work. The next bookseller she fixed on was Thomas Lowndes, whose premises were in Fleet Street. Fanny felt she couldn’t approach him directly, so using the Orange Coffee House in the Haymarket as a decoy address, she sent Charles as go-between, weirdly dressed up by his sisters to look as adult as possible and melodramatically concealed behind the pseudonym ‘Mr King’. Fanny herself became the work’s anonymous and genderless ‘editor’, writing to Lowndes, ‘I have in my possession a M:S. novel, which has never yet been seen but by myself.’25 She hoped to have the first two volumes ‘printed immediately’, with two more appearing later if they were successful. This might have been desirable to the young author, fed up with the slog of transcribing her half-completed manuscript and keen for cash; but Lowndes, unsurprisingly, wanted the thing complete. He returned volume one via ‘Mr King’, hoping to see the rest by the summer of 1777, but Fanny did not complete the book until November, staying up ‘the greatest part of many Nights, in order to get it ready’,26 and it was not published until January of the following year. For one who claims to have had a ‘vague’ desire ‘to see her works in print’, it was an arduous process, requiring hard work, determination, patience and concentration.
The manuscript that finally found its way to Lowndes’s shop late in 1777 was prefaced with three layers of anxious authorial disclaimer: first there was an ode dedicating the work to the ‘author of my being’ (Dr Burney) and explaining that anonymity was the only course open to one who ‘cannot raise, but would not sink’ the fame of a matchless parent; then there was a petition for clemency ‘to the Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews’, entreating them to remember that ‘you were all young writers once’. Lastly there was a preface from ‘the editor’ of the book, admitting that though novels (with a few notable exceptions) were held in low regard, ‘surely all attempts to contribute to the number of those which may be read, if not with advantage, at least without injury, might rather be encouraged than contemned’. Apparently forgetting the role of ‘editor’, she declared an intention not to copy the style of ‘the great writers’ (Johnson, Rousseau, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Marivaux) or to deal with ‘the same ground which they have tracked’. She is of ‘the vulgar herd’, and they ‘great’. Another reason why Fanny Burney’s novel was unlikely to fit into the existing ‘great’ tradition was that she was female, but since the title page did not even feature the conventional anonymous credit ‘By a Lady’, that fact was hidden.
The novel tells the story of a seventeen-year-old girl, beautiful – of course – virtuous and naive, whose sheltered upbringing in Dorset under the protection of an elderly cleric, Mr Villars, is brought to an abrupt end by her entrance into London society in the company of aristocratic acquaintance. Villars is an anxious guardian: Evelina’s grandfather, his former pupil, met an early death after a disastrous marriage to a ‘lowbred and illiberal’ serving-woman, having bequeathed the care of his baby daughter, Caroline Evelyn, to the old tutor. When the girl grew up, her reprobate mother, remarried and called Madame Duval, reclaimed her, but their subsequent life together in Paris was miserable. Caroline escaped into a hasty marriage to a profligate Englishman, Sir John Belmont, who abandoned his pregnant wife, destroying their marriage certificate and denying any connection with her. She died giving birth to a daughter, Evelina Anville, a surname invented by Mr Villars to cover the baby’s unacknowledged parentage.
The eventual restoration of Evelina to her rightful name and identity, and the parallel story of her troubled courtship by courtly Lord Orville, provide the double framework within which Fanny Burney creates a vivid satire of eighteenth-century manners, told, for the first time, from a feminine viewpoint. The love story of Evelina is entertainingly perverse: as in Pride and Prejudice (which owes a great deal – possibly including its title* – to Burney’s work), the couple start out by meeting at an assembly and getting on very badly. Endless accidents and misconceptions make Orville’s poor opinion of Evelina, ‘a poor weak girl!’,28 fall even further, and only through the passage of time, painfully good behaviour and the couple’s persistent sexual attraction to each other are they eventually united.
Burney packed her ‘little narrative’ with matter, rather in the way that Dickens was to do a century later. There are sentimental scenes, ‘sublime’ scenes (notably the tear-jerking reconciliation between Evelina and her repentant father, Sir John Belmont), high drama, low comedy and a large cast of characters catering for all tastes. A great deal of the book’s novelty and charm, however, comes from the sympathetic way in which Burney depicts the heroine’s youth and inexperience. The scene at Evelina’s first assembly is both funny and painful, for she is concentrating too hard on the formalities to behave any way other than idiotically. Her letters home to Dorset chart this frustrating ‘entrance into the world’ with an endearing candour that also performs an important ironic function: the reader sees (almost) all Evelina’s troubles coming long before she does, from the manoeuvrings of her intemperate grandmother Madame Duval, to the dangerously plausible Sir Clement Willoughby’s persistent attempts at seduction.
Evelina is at the mercy of appearances in every way, judged to be as vulgar as the company she is forced to keep, that of her meddling and exploitative grandmother and her self-seeking cousins, the Branghtons. Burney’s portrayals of mean-spirited, selfish and socially ambitious characters immediately show where her genius lies. Years of studying the manners of the aspirant middle class (most notably, of course, her own father) had given her ample material to work on; her traditionally limited female upbringing added a claustrophobic intensity and weight of disgust to her observations. The Branghtons come in for particularly stinging satire. They are silversmiths (like the Burneys’ own tenant in Long’s Court), with premises on Snow Hill, near Smithfield. Their alertness to class signals is extreme – even the disposition of their accommodation reflects it like a three-dimensional model. The Branghtons themselves live on the second floor, with a poor Scotch poet, Macartney, lodging in the garret and ‘classy’ Mr Smith in the former reception rooms on the first floor. The stratification is relative, of course. Only to a Branghton could Mr Smith be a model of gentility, and the poet, needless to say, turns out to be a man of sensibility and noble blood. Fanny Burney revels in exposing the small-mindedness of her vulgar characters, and Smith is the best of them all. ‘Such a fine varnish of low politeness!’ said Dr Johnson of his favourite, ‘– such a struggle to appear a Gentleman!’29 Smith is constantly on his guard, yet every word and action betrays him. He doesn’t, for instance, like to lend his rooms to the grubby Branghton girls (who guilelessly admit how seldom they put on clean clothes). ‘The truth is,’ he explains, expecting to impress Evelina,
Miss Biddy and Polly take no care of any thing, else, I’m sure, they should always be welcome to my room; for I’m never so happy as in obliging the ladies, – that’s my character, Ma’am; – but, really, the last time they had it, everything was made so greasy and so nasty, that upon my word, to a man who wishes to have things a little genteel, it was quite cruel. Now, as to you, Ma’am, it’s quite another thing; for I should not mind if every thing I had was spoilt, for the sake of having the pleasure to oblige you; and, I assure you, Ma’am, it makes me quite happy, that I have a room good enough to receive you.30
The Branghtons’ ineradicable vulgarity provides much of the humour of the book. Forced to take a party to the opera, Mr Branghton is totally unprepared for the expense of the tickets and makes a scene at the booth, thinking he can haggle over the prices as he might with a fellow tradesman. His purchase of the cheapest possible seats, still in his view extortionately expensive, pleases no one in the party, for they have neither the satisfaction of hearing or seeing the performance properly, nor of being seen by the ‘quality’ in the pit. When the opera begins, their disappointment is intensified: ‘Why there’s nothing but singing!’ Mr Branghton exclaims, and is disgusted by the realisation that it is all in a foreign language too. ‘Pray what’s the reason they can’t as well sing in English?’ he asks; ‘but I suppose the fine folks would not like it, if they could understand it.’31
‘The fine folks’ come off rather worse than the vulgarians, although Burney’s depiction of them is necessarily less convincingly observed. Lord Merton and his friends are all (except for super-virtuous Orville) as stupid as the Holborn crowd, and more culpable. Their affectations and excessive language are evidence of moral malaise; while they should be leading society (Lovel is a Member of Parliament and all the others landowners), their time is wasted in gaming, dangerous sports and dalliance. Evelina’s blue-stocking chaperone, Mrs Selwyn, is the scourge of this set, endlessly showing up their ignorance and folly. When she suggests that they have a competition to see who can quote longest from Horace, none of the fops can join in, despite their expensive ‘classical’ educations: ‘what with riding, – and – and – and so forth’, says one of them, ‘really, one has not much time, even at the university, for mere reading.’32 But while Mrs Selwyn’s ‘masculine’ learning and wit is the vehicle for many of the novel’s home truths, the author makes clear that she finds it ultimately sterile. Mrs Selwyn is too busy ‘reserving herself for the gentlemen’ to function as the sympathetic mother-figure the orphaned heroine needs.
There is no doubt that Evelina’s worth is only recognised at all by Lord Orville because she is also beautiful, but in this profoundly feminist novel Burney gives an original view of the conventional heroine – the view from the pedestal. Evelina’s instant physical impact on other people – of which she is imperfectly aware – is shown as something of a liability (inflaming lustful men and making enemies of jealous women). It is her guarantee of attention, but at the same time an impediment to being truly seen. Evelina exposes – in a way undreamed of by earlier novelists – the double standards applied towards women, in whom everything but beauty and goodness are ‘either impertinent or unnatural’.33 The wit, Mrs Selwyn, is seen as unnaturally intellectual (‘oddish’), and Evelina’s grotesque grandmother, Madame Duval, as impertinently immodest; both commit the cardinal sin of being old. ‘I don’t know what the devil a woman lives for after thirty,’ says dissolute Lord Merton, in one of the novel’s bleakest remarks; ‘she is only in other folks’ way.’34 The lovely young heroine’s hold on her admirers will soon, it is implied, be turned to just such withering scorn, for women past their bloom are not just negligible but irritating – ‘in other folks’ way’ – and a resented financial liability on some man or other.
The scene in Evelina in which the gambling-mad fops organise a race between two very old women is a graphic example of the point. Like the episode in which a dressed-up monkey attacks Lovel, it has been criticised for being excessive and unlikely, but this is not the case: gambling was the mania of the period and the occasions for it bizarre. There was one contemporary case of a gambler hiring a desperado to prove that people could live under water (the desperado drowned, so the gambler tried again with another), and another in which some members of Brooks’s Club laid bets on whether or not a passer-by who had collapsed in the street was dead (no attempts were allowed to help him, which might have affected the outcome).35 By these lights, the race between the two destitute old women in Evelina does not seem fantastical; Evelina’s urge to step forward and help one who falls over is thwarted as ‘foul play’, for no one cares if the contestants die in the ‘sport’. Who could be more disposable than a person who is not just poor, infirm and female, but also old?
Misogyny and sadism are linked throughout the novel, from the behaviour of the ‘beaux’ towards women in Marylebone’s sinister ‘dark walks’ to the extraordinary ill-treatment of Madame Duval by Captain Mirvan and Sir Clement Willoughby. The two men, posing as highwaymen, waylay the coach in which Evelina and her grandmother are travelling merely to have an excuse to assault and humiliate the older woman, who is left bound in a ditch in such a state of dishevelment ‘that she hardly looked human’.36 Such scenes, intended as comic by the author, inevitably strike modern readers as both grotesque and revealing. Captain Mirvan seems in many ways a character from the earlier eighteenth-century school of rough and ready picaresque comedy, though Burney defended her portrait of him on the grounds that it was drawn from life (the ignorance of her brother James and his fellow sailors about ‘modern customs’ on shore37 was presumably a running joke at home). This only renders the overall meaning of the book more ambiguous. If Burney really considered Mirvan – the main perpetrator of aggressive behaviour in the novel – to be an accurate expression of the social attitudes fostered in a male environment (the navy), his ‘comic’ status affords no excuse. Contemporary critics are surely right to view both the knockabout comedy and the romantic plot of Evelina as something of ‘a consoling cover story’, consciously or unconsciously hiding a far less acceptable tale of male violence and coercion.38
Much else in Evelina was ‘drawn from life’, often directly so. The novel contains a sort of guided tour of current fashionable amusements in London and the spa towns (here represented by Bristol, the only spa Burney had then visited), with scenes set in the Haymarket Opera House, Ranelagh, Marylebone Gardens, Drury Lane, Vauxhall, Cox’s Museum and the Hampstead assembly rooms.* This didn’t simply offer ‘a fund inexhaustible for Conversation, observations, and probable Incidents’,40 but made the novel topical and glamorous in a way which Burney was correct to claim ‘has not before been executed’.41 Her expectation of remaining anonymous led her to draw freely on detail from her own experience. Her favourite performers, Garrick and the castrato Millico, appear in the novel in performances she had witnessed, and she includes a scene in a personally significant location, the Pantheon, the new winter assembly rooms in Oxford Road where Dr Burney was on the payroll and in which he had shares. Grandmother Sleepe’s maiden name, Du Bois, is given to the put-upon male companion of Evelina’s grandmother, Madame Duval, and the maiden name of her negligent godmother Frances Greville is given to the poet Macartney (who, as we have seen, may have been based on her brother Charles). In fact, so much in Evelina was recklessly transposed from Burney’s own life that it is hardly surprising she later began to fear detection.
Before Evelina, the comic novel had been raucous and the novel of sentiment cloying; both types of book had tended towards obscenity, either through the sort of explicit sexuality displayed in Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, or Richardson’s more insidious brand of prurience, which D.H. Lawrence memorably described as ‘calico purity and underclothing excitements’.42 There are no ‘underclothing excitements’ in Fanny Burney’s novels, which is one reason why the burgeoning novel-reading class took to them so warmly. The novel, she proved, could be decent and amusing; indeed, Burney’s moral satire derives a great deal of its power from the author’s feelings of propriety, and the constraints this imposes on her. Her field of action is narrow, but within it she investigates carefully and critically.
The sophistications of Evelina were timely. In the 1770s some people thought that the novel had already outlived its usefulness, but Burney made it into a vehicle for refined entertainment. Just as Jane Austen was to outshine her literary heroine Burney, Burney herself had surpassed her hero Richardson with a work that can be seen as something of a rebuke to the male novelists who for decades had gorged on the theme of ‘a young lady’s entrance into the world’ without ever realistically representing a young lady’s sensibilities.
In the middle of January 1778, Fanny received a parcel containing proofs of the three volumes of her novel for correction from Lowndes, this time via Gregg’s Coffee House in York Street, Covent Garden, which was now being run by her two aunts Ann and Rebecca Burney.43 The new venue was necessitated by young Charles’s dramatic fall from grace and removal to Shinfield, which also meant that a new go-between had to be found. Fanny chose obliging cousin Edward, who assumed the name ‘Mr Grafton’ for secrecy. The aunts, who might otherwise have become suspicious of the traffic with Lowndes going on at their address, also had to be let in on the affair. Their delight and pride in what Fanny was now referring to, with unconvincing insouciance, as her ‘frolic’ was gratifying to the anxious author, but the gradual widening of the circle of confidants was beginning to take the secret out of her control.
The actual publication of the book, on 29 January 1778, was a rather abstract affair. Fanny had the unbound and incomplete set of sheets from Lowndes, but didn’t receive any finished copies for another six months. If the story she tells in the Memoirs is to be believed, she only found out that the book was ready for sale when her stepmother read aloud an advertisement of it in the newspaper at breakfast:
This day was published,
EVELINA,
or, a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World.
Printed for T. Lowndes, Fleet-street.*
Charles Burney was not present at this breakfast, or he might have noticed, as Mrs Burney, buried in the paper, evidently did not, ‘the conscious colouring of the scribbler, and the irresistible smiles of the two sisters, Susanna and Charlotte’.46
About six weeks passed without any news of the book’s progress reaching St Martin’s Street, and though the author would have us believe that this was just as she wished, it is clear that curiosity and impatience soon began to get the better of both her and her sisters. As soon as the Doctor and Mrs Burney left on a visit to Streatham Park on 13 March, the young women invited cousin Edward round to tea, and together they devised a plan to go to Bell’s Circulating Library in the Strand to ‘ask some questions about Evelina’.47 When they got to the shop, which was one from which Charles Burney ordered new books, Fanny’s nerve failed and all she could bring herself to ‘ask questions’ about were some magazines, only to find that there was an advertisement for Evelina on the back of one of them. This hard evidence of her book having made its own ‘entrance into the world’ was peculiarly disturbing to the young author, who made this interesting observation in her journal:
I have an exceeding odd sensation, when I consider that it is in the power of any & every body to read what I so carefully hoarded even from my best Friends, till this last month or two, – & that a Work which was so lately Lodged, in all privacy, in my Bureau, may now be seen by every Butcher & Baker, Cobler & Tinker, throughout the 3 kingdoms, for the small tribute of 3 pence.48
The exposure she felt on this occasion was at least threefold: the social exposure of being read by tradesmen, artisans – even tinkers; a kind of sexual exposure suggested by these people (all men) being able to enjoy for a mere three pence what had hitherto been locked up in a young lady’s bedroom; and, thirdly, the exposure of her inner self through the work. The last is the most significant, and this diary entry is a rare early articulation of the kind of questions about the psychology of creativity which preoccupied theorists and practitioners for much of the twentieth century. The idea of an artist ‘carefully hoarding’ what he wants to express in his work, then promiscuously giving it away, is just that so clearly analysed by Marcel Proust in his essays on Sainte-Beuve, where he says of authorship, ‘it is the secretion of one’s innermost life, written in solitude and for oneself alone, that one gives to the public. What one bestows on private life – in conversation, that is, however refined it may be […] is the product of a quite superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world’.49 It is interesting to see Fanny Burney feeling this on the quick as she overheard Edward talking to the bookseller at Bell’s. But as we shall see, her critical and analytical powers (manifesting themselves most often as an acute self-consciousness) were to a great extent to be her undoing. Usually the evidence of a writer’s inhibitions is interesting – as, say, in the case of Coleridge – for the very reason that the inhibitions are, one way or another, eventually overcome. This was not so in Fanny Burney’s case. She understood the conflict between inner and outer life too well for comfort, but was only able to resolve it partially, and her writing suffered in consequence.
While Edward Burney was at Bell’s Library he may well have bought the copy of Evelina which he took off the next day to Brompton, where his brother Richard was convalescing from a fever, attended by the Worcester family nurse, Miss Humphries. Fanny, whose partiality for her cousin Richard is clear from several remarks earlier in the journal, was tempted to excuse herself from joining the party at Brompton when she discovered from Charlotte that the book, hotly recommended by both Edward and the Covent Garden aunts, was now in his hands. ‘This intelligence gave me the utmost uneasiness,’ she wrote in the journal. ‘I foresaw a thousand dangers of Discovery, – I dreaded the indiscreet warmth of all my Confidents; & I would almost as soon have told the Morning Post Editor, as Miss Humphries.’50
But the visit went ahead, and had aspects of sentimental comedy which would have transferred very nicely onto the stage of Drury Lane, where Sheridan’s The Rivals and The School for Scandal had been such recent successes. Even on the way up the stairs of the lodgings, Fanny could overhear Miss Humphries reading the book aloud, presumably to the invalid Richard. She had got as far as Mr Villars’s consolatory letter to Evelina after her father has refused to acknowledge her (which is at the beginning of volume two, so they had read pretty far in one day): ‘Let me entreat you, therefore, my dearest child, to support yourself with that courage which your innocency ought to inspire …’51 ‘How pretty that is!’ Miss Humphries was commenting as the author entered the room.52 ‘I longed for the Diversion of hearing their observations’, Fanny wrote in her journal, relating how she begged Miss Humphries to go on with the reading. It was highly gratifying to witness an audience enjoying her work so much. If this was publication, what had she to fear?
I must own I suffered great difficulty in refraining from Laughing upon several occasions, – & several Times, when they praised what they read, I was upon the point of saying ‘You are very good!’ & so forth, & I could scarce keep myself from making Acknowledgements, & Bowing my Head involuntarily.
However, I got off perfectly safely.53
But, predictably, no sooner had Fanny appeared to ‘get off safely’ than a new anxiety presented itself to her overworking imagination: that Richard and Miss Humphries, who both seemed ‘to have [Evelina] by Heart’,54 might talk about the book so much when visiting St Martin’s Street that Mrs Burney would want to read it. Sooner or later, rumours about the book’s authorship, or the truth itself, would reach her father. Delaying this moment was of prime concern. Fanny had already confessed to her father in the spring of 1777 that she was writing a book (although the Doctor, preoccupied at the time by a dispute with Fulke Greville over the money that had been paid to Arne back in 1748, seemed to have forgotten his daughter’s confidence). The longer she was able to keep him in ignorance that it had been published, the more chance she had of influencing his judgement, and perhaps forestalling any serious criticism through its favourable reception by ‘the world’.
And indeed, the judgement of the reviewers was far more favourable than Fanny had dared hope. The London Review was brief, but laudatory: ‘There is much more merit, as well respecting stile, character and Incident, than is usually to be met with among our modern novels.’55 The influential Monthly Review was more fulsome: ‘we do not hesitate to pronounce [Evelina] one of the most sprightly, entertaining & agreeable productions of this kind which has of late fallen under our Notice. A great variety of natural Incidents, some, of the Comic stamp, render the narrative extremely interesting. The characters, which are agreeably diversified, are conceived & drawn with propriety, & supported with spirit. The Whole is written with great ease & Command of Language.’56 The Critical Review, Westminster Review and Gentleman’s Magazine also gave the book laudatory notices, and Fanny was right to think she had ‘come off with flying Colours’57 from the periodicals.
It is hard to appreciate just how low a profile most authors kept in the eighteenth century. Few authors were more famous or notorious than their works; in Fanny Burney’s case, when even her gender was unknown to the publisher himself, never mind her name, age or station, the disparity between her fame and Evelina’s was even more extreme. While society women such as Mrs Cholmondeley were discovering the book and excitedly recommending it to their friends, while Evelina was the subject of gossip and speculation across London, it had almost ceased to exist for the author, who didn’t even possess a copy, and had very little idea of the impact her work was having outside the small group of family confidants.
Fanny’s ignorance of the book’s progress was exacerbated by a bout of serious illness in the spring of 1778 which put her completely out of action for the better part of two months. She describes it as ‘an Inflammation of the Lungs’, which Dr Burney feared might turn tubercular, and which left her so enfeebled that she was hardly capable of moving. When the initial alarm was over, a long convalescence at Chesington was prescribed. Fanny went there in the first week of May, accompanied by Susan and Edward, who had to prop her up between them in the post chaise, and regularly apply salts to her nose. Samuel Crisp, who was himself infirm, gouty and a chronic pessimist, had probably resigned himself to never seeing his ‘dear Fannikin’ again after the dire reports from St Martin’s Street; certainly, he was just as overcome by their reunion as she, and having kissed her hand, had to hurry away speechless.
Fanny’s recovery was slow, but in June she began to feel well enough to continue her journal. One of the first conversations she chose to record was an example of Mrs Hamilton’s niece Kitty Cooke in full spate against Mrs Burney, whom Kitty obviously felt should have brought Fanny to Chesington herself, rather than leaving the chaperonage to Edward and Susan: ‘but you know, [three words effaced] what a thing it would be for a fine lady to bring a sick person!’ Edward was clearly shocked by Miss Cooke’s speech, as was Fanny, though she says she was too weak and tired to raise an objection. It seems unlikely that she would have objected in any case – Susan was uncomfortable, but only laughed nervously, and if Fanny had not secretly relished hearing criticism of her stepmother by someone they all considered ‘utterly incapable of art’, she need not have recorded quite so much of it. ‘“To be sure she [Mrs Burney] did well to stay away,”’ Kitty rattled on, ‘“for she knows we none of us love her; she could only think of coming to mortify us; for one must be civil to her, for the Doctor’s sake. – but she’s such a queer fish, – to be sure, for a sensible woman, as she is, she has a great many oddities; & as to Mr Crisp, he says he’s quite sick of her, d – her, he says, I wish she was Dead! for, you know, for such a good soul as the Doctor to have such a Wife, – to be sure there’s something very disagreeable in her, – Laughing so loud, & hooting, & clapping her Hands, – I can’t love her, a nasty old Cat, – yet she’s certainly a very sensible Woman.”’58 No wonder Edward ‘couldn’t keep his Countenance’59 at this outburst, so strongly dramatised by the diarist. If Miss Cooke’s claim that ‘none of us loves’ the ‘nasty old Cat’ is shocking, even more so is her blurting out of Crisp’s malicious private opinion of Mrs Burney, his view of her unworthiness as wife to the Doctor, and his wish that she were dead. And the more Fanny Burney tried to mitigate the effect in her diary by saying that Kitty was an ‘unguarded Creature […] without the slightest notion of the impropriety of which she was guilty’, the more likely one is to believe that what Kitty says is also true.
Mrs Burney did not come off much better at Streatham, where her husband was enjoying a blossoming friendship with Mrs Thrale and her circle. In the classification tables of her acquaintances’ qualities that Mrs Thrale was amusing herself with that summer, Elizabeth Burney scored an average ‘10’ (out of twenty) for ‘Worth of Heart’, but a miserable ‘o’ under the heading ‘Person, Mien & Manner’.60 Perhaps the very insensitivity that Miss Cooke found ‘disagreeable’ provided Mrs Burney with some protection against the dislike of almost all her husband’s family and friends – certainly she was given the cold shoulder as often as possible, which the Doctor could scarcely have failed to notice.
A letter from Mrs Burney to Fanny written around this time (and presumably kept as an exemplum, since Fanny wrote ‘in the style of a certain Lady –’ at the top of it) gives some idea of the odd manner that so riled Crisp and failed to impress Mrs Thrale. The whole letter is written in a jerky, inconsequential style, with many impenetrable coinages and cryptic references. At some points, Mrs Burney’s sentences seem to run parallel to their meaning; she gives the bizarre impression of having made up both the vocabulary and the syntax as she went along. One example is a passage which presumably refers to Mrs Burney’s youngest child, Sarah, who was then six years old: ‘That nibbetting yepping thing snitch* stands gloring over my papers, & says she wonders what I am writing; but I tell her wondring is n’t good for her – & to stop her yep have sent her for a wafer’. Or this, about the maid Betty, ‘that Stothering Creter’, whom Hetty Burney had recently dismissed: ‘she’l never be good for anything while her eyes are open – the creter is to me aversion upon aversions – she was so rude the last time I drank tea with her mistress when I only wanted her to bring me up a glass of water – that tho’ I went to the top of the Kitchen stairs & cried “is this body here”? half a hundred times she never made me any answer!’61 Perhaps Betty was taking her cue from what she had overheard Hetty and her sisters say in private about ‘the Lady’s’ embarrassing behaviour. Hetty herself clearly didn’t feel inclined to reprimand her servant on this occasion.
The longueurs of convalescence at Chesington made Fanny restless. She had promised that Hetty would be allowed to read Evelina to Crisp – without disclosing her secret, of course – but began to want to witness his response to the book herself. Pretending that Hetty had introduced Evelina at Brompton, she tried to get Crisp interested in it, and eventually he agreed to have it read aloud. ‘I found it a much more awkward thing than I had expected,’ Fanny wrote in her journal; ‘my voice quite faltered when I began it, which, however, I passed off for the effect of remaining weakness of Lungs; &, in short, from an invincible embarrassment, which I could not for a page together repress, the Book, by my reading, lost all manner of spirit.’62 To avoid having to finish the book, she told him that the third volume was missing: ‘To be sure, the concealment of this affair has cost me no few Inventions’, Fanny reflected later. ‘I have no alternative, but avowing myself for an authoress, which I cannot bear to think of.’
Fanny may not have understood at the time of writing Evelina, but soon learned, that guessing the authorship of an anonymous work was a common pastime among the London reading class: in her play The Witlings, written in the year following the publication of Evelina, but never produced, Burney’s Lady Smatter, a rather crudely caricatured blue-stocking, causes mischief by frivolously indulging in this game: ‘I am never at rest’, she says, ‘till I have discovered the authors of every thing that comes out; and, indeed, I commonly hit upon them in a moment.’63 By not including the words ‘By a Lady’ on the title page, Fanny Burney had presumably wanted her novel to be read without any gender prejudice; but it must also have been clear to her that any sensitive reader would guess the author’s sex from the work. Apart from the obvious woman-centredness of the plot and viewpoint of Evelina and the physicality of much of the description, there is the whole force of the novelty of her portrayal of female sensibility. All Fanny could hope to conceal in the long term was her personal connection.
People in the Burneys’ circle were starting to read the book, and Fanny listened avidly to reports of their opinions. Lady Hales and Miss Coussmaker were besotted with Evelina, apparently, and could hardly talk of anything else. But when Lady Hales declared that the author must be ‘a man of great abilities’, Miss Coussmaker replied firmly that ‘the Writer was a Woman, for […] there was such a remarkable delicacy in the conversations & descriptions, notwithstanding the grossness & vulgarity of some of the Characters, […] that she could not but suspect the Writer was a Female, but, she added, notwithstanding the preface declared the Writer never would be known, she hoped, if the Book circulated as she expected it would, he or she, would be tempted to discovery’. Fanny Burney’s private response was exultant: ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! – that’s my answer. They little think how well they are already acquainted with the Writer they so much honour.’64 The trick seemed to be working.
Fanny was still very anxious about her father’s possible disapproval, either of the work in particular or of the secrecy with which she had published it. There is no doubting the veneration she felt for her father – ‘the author of my being’, to use her suggestive phrase from the dedicatory verses to Evelina – but it had a neurotic edge which was absent from all the Doctor’s feelings towards her. If she had conceived an illegitimate child she couldn’t have tried harder to cover it up, and yet at the same time there is a perverse sense in which she was longing to ‘come clean’ with him about her authorship, and justify her efforts by openly winning his approval.
There was already speculation in Mrs Thrale’s circle that the Doctor himself might be the author of Evelina, and Susan Burney must have realised that if the book came into his hands, he would immediately recognise the autobiographical incidents and allusions which Fanny had used. In what was a very well-judged and considerate piece of meddling – only revealed in a fragmentary memoir written by Dr Burney between 1792 and 1806 – Susan decided that the time had come to tell their father the secret while her sister was out of the way in Chesington.
The Doctor’s benign reaction to the revelation (and his refusal to say how he was told) suggests that Susan and Charlotte presented the news as another family conspiracy, this time to alleviate Fanny’s massive anxieties. In the wake of her illness, which they had all sincerely considered life-threatening, both the sisters and Dr Burney must have feared a relapse. The odd thing is that Fanny did not guess what had happened. When she received Charlotte’s letter – ‘the most interesting that could be written to me’ – with the news that their father was reading Evelina, she paraphrased its contents thus:
How this has come to pass, I am yet in the dark: but, it seems, the very moment, almost, that my mother & Susan & Sally left the House [to go to Chesington], he desired Charlotte to bring him the Monthly Review; […] He read it with great earnestness, – then put it down; & presently after, snatched it up, & read it again. Doubtless his paternal Heart felt some agitation for his Girl, in reading a review of her Publication! – how he got at the name, I cannot imagine!65
According to his own account, Charles Burney took up the first volume ‘with fear & trembling’,66 but soon saw that the work was nothing to shame the family name further – quite the contrary. Susan passed on all his reactions to her sister, sitting agog over these letters in Chesington: he had begun reading it with Lady Hales and Miss Coussmaker; he admired Villars’s pathetic style; he thought the preface ‘vastly strong’, and opined – clearly regretting his daughter’s unworldliness on this count – that Lowndes had had a ‘devilish good bargain’ for his twenty guineas.
The further the Doctor went in the book, the more lavish his praise. By 16 June, Susan was reporting that he thought it ‘the best Novel I know excepting Fielding’s [Amelia], – &, in some respects, it is better than his!’ How much of a reader of novels Burney was is hard to ascertain: Amelia was the only novel he saw fit to keep in his library, and for all his genuine paternal pride over Evelina, he had no qualms about selling his set on to Lady Hales as soon as he had finished reading it.
Fanny heard with mixed gratification and amusement how Evelina was ‘travelling in the Great World’: it seemed that half of Lady Hales’s acquaintance were blubbering over it at once. When she wrote to Lowndes at the end of June, asking to be allowed to make corrections to any further edition, his reply that he expected the first impression (of five hundred) to sell out by Christmas alerted her to the scale of its success: ‘The Great World send here to Buy Evelina’, the publisher replied excitedly to ‘Mr Grafton’; ‘A polite Lady said Do, Mr Lowndes, give me Evelina, Im [sic] treated as unfashionable for not having read it.’67
Meanwhile, the author herself sensed that although she had cleared the hurdle of her father’s discovery remarkably easily, infinite further challenges opened up ahead:
Indeed, in the midst of the greatest satisfaction that I feel, an inward something which I cannot account for, prepares me to expect a reverse! for the more the Book is drawn into notice, the more exposed it becomes to criticism & annotations.
[…] Lord! what will all this come to? – Where will it End?68
* Mrs Burney did not go straight to St Martin’s Street, but to a friend’s house, via Mrs Thrale’s. Her reluctance to meet her stepdaughters casts an interesting light on relations between them. Johnson’s interpretation suggests that Fanny and her sisters’ hostility to ‘Mama’ was obvious: ‘The consolations of [Burney’s] girls must indeed be painful. She had intended to enjoy the triumph of her daughter’s superiority. They were prepared to wish them both ill, and their wishes are gratified.’15
* Fanny mentions daggers again in an emotional letter to her brother of 4 October 1814, a reply to his refusal to assume guardianship of Fanny’s son Alex, who was facing rustication from college. At this significant juncture, she may have been trying to remind him of an old debt: ‘O Charles – you have written me a dagger!’23
* The last chapter of Cecilia contains the words: ‘if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination.’27
* When Burney first tried to interest Lowndes in her novel, she pointed out that the first volume included ‘a round of the most fashionable Spring Diversions of London’, and that the second volume would cover ‘Summer Diversions’.39 Since at this stage she was planning a four-volume novel, it seems reasonable to assume that she was intending to cover the whole social year season by season.
* This anecdote appears nowhere but in Memoirs of Doctor Burney.44 In the Early Journals and Letters she simply says: ‘A thousand little incidents happened about this Time [March 1778], but I am not in a humour to recollect them: however, they were none of them productive of a discovery either to my Father or Mother.’45
* The printed version has ‘wretch’, but my reading of the manuscript is different.