The reaction to Fanny’s marriage was almost universally one of surprise. Mrs Burney alone said she had seen it coming; other members of the family who had been kept out of the secret, such as Maria Rishton, isolated in Norfolk by her misanthropic husband, were amazed and amused at the prospect of ‘our vestal sister’ taking such a plunge in middle age.1 Some friends of the family, such as Mrs Ord and James Hutton, were appalled, but Fanny no longer worried about their disapproval. ‘I fear my good old friend Mr Hutton imagines me a mere poor miserable Dupe, taken in by an artful French avanturier,’ she wrote with spirit to her stepmother. ‘If he thinks so, it is he, – Heaven be praised! – is the Dupe! – which I bear with great philosophy, if one of us must be Dupe’.2
The d’Arblays’ wedding present from William and Fredy Locke was the lease of a five-acre plot of land on the Norbury Park estate, on which the newlyweds intended to build themselves a house. D’Arblay drew up some elaborate plans in his exceedingly neat hand, but the project didn’t begin for years due to lack of cash. ‘How the matter will terminate I know not’, Fanny wrote to her father in the summer of 1793 as she listened to the builder pouring cold water on d’Arblay’s amateur architecture; ‘at present the contest is lively, & M. d’Arblay’s want of language, & the man’s want of ideas, render it, to me, extremely diverting’.3 Everything was ‘extremely diverting’ to the enraptured bride, even not having a home of her own. The couple were conspicuously and besottedly in love.
After four months at Phenice Farm on Blagden Hill, the d’Arblays found much more private lodgings in a cottage on the main street in Great Bookham called ‘Fair Field’ (which they renamed ‘The Hermitage’). They lived in this cramped but cosy house for the next four years, with their few prized possessions, such as the copy of Van Dyke’s Sacharissa in oils by Mrs Delany and Edward Burney’s portrait of Samuel Crisp, some cheap cane furniture and spare household goods lent by the Lockes and Phillipses. ‘Can Life, [Monsieur d’Arblay] often says, be more innocent than ours? or happiness more inoffensive?’
– he works in his Garden, or studies English or Mathematicks, while I write, – when I work at my needle he reads to me, & we enjoy the beautiful Country around us, in long & romantic strolls, during which he carries under his arm a portable walking Chair, lent us by Mr Lock, that I may rest as I proceed.4
Even in the early days, there were threats to this life of quiet retirement, for d’Arblay’s honour and inclination made him want to respond to developments such as the gathering of monarchists in Toulon in 1793, routed in December by the forces of the Convention under the command of the young Napoleon Bonaparte. Some of d’Arblay’s friends had decided to risk the return to France to retrieve property or rejoin family; he himself had hardly any family left except a surviving younger brother, François, and a beloved uncle in Joigny.* The desire to make contact with his remaining kin must have been strong, as was the desire not to lose touch with his friends and the Constitutionalist cause for which they had risked so much. Fanny did not interfere in these matters of conscience and duty, but dreaded a rekindling of her husband’s ‘military ardour’.6 Everything they heard about life under the Terror in France and everything they read in the papers (received second-hand from the Lockes and the parson) was alarming, and lent weight to Fanny’s belief that a return to France would mean certain death for d’Arblay. French visitors passing through Bookham had dramatic and pathetic tales to relate. The Chevalier de Beaumetz, an associate of Talleyrand, told the d’Arblays of his flight from murderous agents of the Convention and his narrow escape by hiding himself under a pile of rubbish in an attic. Fanny retold his story in gripping ‘thriller’ style in a letter to her father,7 revelling in its intrinsic drama: ‘as the Gang approached, higher & higher, nearer & nearer, he heard a woman exclaiming “O, you’ll find him – I’m sure he’s in the House.”’
Fanny made a surprising return to print in the first winter of her married life, her first publication for eleven years, with a pamphlet called Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy. This cause had been taken up by a committee of charitable ladies (with Dr Burney acting as secretary) and had already been the subject of pamphlets by Burke and Hannah More and a poem, ‘The Emigrants’, by Charlotte Smith. Fanny’s appeal to ‘the Ladies of Great Britain’ to send money to support the refugee priests was a mixture of conventional morality and sensationalism. She described (on what authority we may wonder) the 1792 massacre of priests in the Église des Carmes thus:
the murderers dart after them: the pious suppliants kneel – but they rise no more! they pray – and their prayers ascend to heaven, unheard on earth! Groans resound through the vaulted roof – Mangled carcases strew the consecrated ground – derided, while wounded; insulted, while slaughtered – they are cleft in twain – their savage destroyers joy in their cries – Blood, agony, and death close the fatal scene!8
Charles Burney, significantly, loved this rhetoric: ‘I never liked anything of your precious writing more’, he wrote to the author in congratulation. His praise was enough to encourage Fanny to develop the style for other grand subjects – sometimes more appropriately than others.
Brief Reflections is interesting for its clear statement, in the ‘Apology’, of Fanny’s views on the role of women. If she had read Mary Wollstonecraft’s extraordinary feminist polemic of the previous year, Vindication of the Rights of Women, she does not mention the fact in her extant letters or journals. It is highly likely that she avoided the book, or read only enough to condemn it, as she had done other ‘dangerous’ literature in the past, such as Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. Wollstonecraft’s acute analysis of female conditioning and subjugation was indeed so radical that it was relatively easy, at this date, to dismiss it as Jacobin ranting; but even women writers, like Fanny Burney, who did not want to dignify Wollstonecraft’s work by engaging with it directly, can be seen to be reacting to it, reaffirming their own ideas or formulating them perhaps for the first time. Fanny’s position, as set out in the ‘Apology’, seems at first sight to be a restatement of received wisdom about ‘the distinct ties of [women’s] prescriptive duties’ to the home and their unsuitability for ‘forming public characters’ (rather rich coming from ‘the author of Evelina and Cecilia’, as she identified herself on the title page), but she was assertive about the superior role that women had to play within their restricted field. They should not be ‘mere passive spectatresses’ of life, but active in the refinement and practice of morality,
since the retirement, which divests them of practical skill for public purposes, guards them, at the same time, from the heart-hardening effects of general worldly commerce. It gives them leisure to reflect and to refine, not merely upon the virtues, but the pleasures of benevolence; not only and abstractedly upon that sense of good and evil which is implanted in all, but feelingly, nay awefully, upon the woes they see, yet are spared!9
This was as unlike Wollstonecraft as it was unlike Wollstonecraft’s opponent Hannah More (who famously said of the idea of ‘Rights’, ‘there is perhaps no animal so much indebted to subordination for its good behaviour as woman’10). Fanny’s was an egalitarian view of sorts, if prescriptive: women were the conscience of society, men its functionaries. She was basically claiming all the moral high ground for her sex in return for any ‘heart-hardening’ participation in ‘worldly commerce’, which would contaminate women, on whom private virtue and social progress depended. Fanny Burney was making over ‘conduct-book’-style ideas from the old century for use by a new generation to whom James Fordyce and his kind looked impossibly old-fashioned. It was reactionary but assertive, and actually had a greater immediate impact on the coming age than did Wollstonecraft, whose time was yet to come. In Burney’s post-1790s novels, her tragedies and her one political tract, all of which promote the idea of moral responsibility as a more powerful weapon for women than political rights, we can see the emergence of the ‘Victorian’ ideal of womanhood that in fact took hold well in advance of Victoria’s reign, and which found its most famous expression in the idea of ‘the Angel in the House’.
Married life at Bookham was blissfully happy and amusing. Monsieur d’Arblay made strenuous efforts to cultiver son jardin, hoping that enthusiasm would make up for ignorance. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell weeds from vegetables, and dug up a whole asparagus bed; he also planted strawberries thinking they would crop the first year: ‘our Garden, therefore, is not yet quite the most profitable thing in the World’, Fanny wrote to her father, ‘but M.[onsieur] assures me it is to be the staff of our Table & existence’.11 D’Arblay’s passion for redesigning and transplanting threatened at one point to wipe out all signs of life in The Hermitage’s little plot and orchard, neither of which ever seemed to impress visitors quite as much as he felt they deserved. Fanny was appreciative, though, and patient with his mistakes. She enjoyed watching him trying to cut the hedges with martial swipes from his sabre and giving wheelbarrow rides to Susan’s two-year-old son William. Her own attempts at cooking had been disasters, and they soon got a maid to do it. Some ‘asparagrass, most fortunately overlooked by my Weeder’ was sent to Chelsea as humorous acknowledgement of their incompetence, but one crop did survive to grace the d’Arblays’ own table: cabbages, of which they had a glut in the spring of 1794 because they didn’t identify them early enough. They ate cabbage for a week with more voluptuous pleasure than is easily imaginable, exulting in self-sufficient pride and joy: ‘O, you have no idea how sweet they tasted! we agreed they had a freshness & a goût we had never met with before.’12
During the summer of 1794, Fanny suffered ‘bilious attacks’ and fatigue which neither she nor her doctor recognised as symptoms related to early pregnancy. The medical man ‘gave no opinion’ even when he examined his patient in the middle of June, when Fanny could have been as much as thirteen weeks pregnant; for her part, she was either ignorant of the symptoms (which is unlikely, given her closeness to her sisters) or used to such irregular periods that missing three of them did not surprise her. This dysmenorrhea (a condition associated with anorexics and of course, more generally, with the menopause) might help explain some of her mysterious chronic ailments, fevers and prostrations during the preceding years.
Monsieur d’Arblay was delighted at the news when it was finally confirmed, though, like Fanny, fearful for her well-being. Dr Burney was delighted too; he had more than made up the breach that had caused them all such unhappiness around the time of the d’Arblays’ marriage and had quite warmed to his son-in-law subsequently, no doubt influenced by the charming descriptions of their married life in Fanny’s letters home. Dr Burney had begun to lend d’Arblay books from the ‘Chelsea circulating library’,13 and now looked forward with glee to the prospect of romping with the ‘Bookham Brattikin’. The full return of affection from her beloved father made this period truly happy for Fanny, and was further confirmation, if she needed it, that her own judgement about what was best for herself had been superior to his.
Naturally enough, as the birth approached Fanny became extremely anxious about her chances of survival, and began a farewell letter to her husband which is a touching memorial of their mutual love, praising ‘the chaste, the innocent, the exemplary tenour of your conduct, & the integrity, the disinterestedness, the unaffected nobleness of your principles & sentiments. – Heaven bless you, my d’Arblay! here & hereafter!’14 Such parting words were not, however, necessary; the baby, a son, was born without complications on 18 December 1794, and three weeks later his mother described herself as ‘wonderfully well’.15 Even in this first letter about him, Fanny remarked on ‘a thousand little promises of original intelligence’ in the little bundle at her side. He was christened Alexander Charles Louis Piochard d’Arblay, but was soon known to his parents as ‘the Idol of the World’.16
It is hardly surprising that during the autumn and winter when the baby was born, Fanny had barely time or inclination to attend to an important episode in her professional life, the first and only production of one of her plays. It is ironic that though The Witlings had been shelved and none of her later comedies ever reached the stage, one of the strange, half-finished tragedies that she composed at Court was chosen for production. The Court dramas had been circulating among the family and had struck young Charles Burney as saleable (unlike Brief Reflections, all of the profits of which had gone to the priests’ charity). He had contacted the actor John Philip Kemble on his sister’s behalf, knowing how strapped for cash the d’Arblays were, and met with immediate success; Kemble liked Hubert de Vere, but Fanny preferred Edwy and Elgiva, and it was this play which was rushed into production in January 1795 with a cast that included Kemble himself and his sister Mrs Sarah Siddons in the leading roles. Rehearsals were late and patchy and at no point was the author, who had given up her only copy, required or allowed to alter the play. It went on, for its first and only performance on 21 March 1795, in an essentially unactable form.
Fanny came up to town to see the play having been ill for weeks with a painful abscess on the breast which had forced her to wean the baby. Drury Lane Theatre had been magnificently redesigned, and the pantomime playing with Edwy and Elgiva, Alexander the Great (featuring a cast of hundreds and two live elephants), had been composed specially to show off the dimensions of the new stage. No such care had been taken over the main piece, however. At the back of Sheridan’s box, ‘wrapt up in a Bonnet & immense Pelice’,17 Fanny settled down with Susan, d’Arblay and her brother Charles to witness a farcical representation of her already flawed work.
Despite the efforts of Kemble, Siddons and Robert Bensley, who played Dunstan, the rest of the cast seemed hardly to know their lines at all, and the prompter’s voice was ‘heard unremittingly all over the House’, as the reviewer for the Morning Advertiser noticed.18 The actor playing Aldhelm seemed to be making up his speeches as he went along, and the whole cast ‘made blunders I blush to have pass for mine’, as Fanny wrote of the distressing evening to her old friend Mary Ann Port (now Mrs Waddington). Mrs Siddons lost no time in describing the performance to Mrs Piozzi: ‘In truth it needed no discernment to see how it would go, and I was grievd that a woman of so much merit must be so much mortified. The Audience were quite angelic and only laughed where it was impossible to avoid it.’19 Bursts of laughter went up when Edwy cried out ‘Bring in the Bishop!’, which the audience chose to interpret as punch rather than a prelate; they hooted when the King asked what brought Sigibert rushing onto the stage and he answered, ‘Nothing’; and they fell about at the tragic conclusion when a countryman suggested putting the dying heroine behind a hedge. This proved ‘a very accommodating retreat’, as the reviewer of the Morning Herald related:
for, in a few minutes after, the wounded lady is brought from behind it on an elegant couch, and, after dying in the presence of her husband, is carried off and placed once more ‘on the other side of the hedge’. The laughter which this scene occasioned […] was inconceivable.20
This sort of reception would have half-killed Fanny in former years, but it is interesting to see how much more resilient to criticism she had become. Her response was more irritated than ashamed: ‘a more wretched performance […] could not be exhibited in a Barn,’ she told Mary Waddington, echoing the reviewers’ amazement at the sloppiness of the production. She took immediate action to withdraw the piece ‘for alterations’.
The reviews of Edwy and Elgiva, which Fanny read with close attention, also denounced the style of the play as ‘nauseous bombast’, revealing ‘nothing of Poetry, and […] often inelegantly familiar, or ridiculously absurd’.21 Oddly enough, neither this criticism nor the humiliating night at Drury Lane deterred Fanny from hoping that not just Edwy and Elgiva but Hubert de Vere and the fragmentary Elberta might at least be published, if not produced.22 Like Crisp with Virginia, she continued to think them viable works of art.
The summer before the Edwy and Elgiva fiasco, at just about the time when Fanny would have discovered she was pregnant, she had begun to write her new book in earnest, spurred on by the absolute necessity of making money. It was not to be a ‘novel’, a denomination which she felt ‘gives so simply the notion of a mere love story, that I recoil a little from it’, and which, significantly, ‘was long in the way of Cecilia, as I was told, at the Queen’s House’.23 It was to be ‘sketches of Characters & morals, put in action, not a Romance’, and was to contain several ‘sermons’ pointing up the moral in no uncertain terms. Fanny Burney knew her market, and had noted the current popularity of tract-writing – especially the kind so successfully earning a small fortune for Hannah More. But if Fanny thought she could prevent Camilla from turning into a romance simply by inserting a few sermons, she was wrong. Despite her stated intentions, the love-tangles of the central group of young people dominate the book. She was struggling against her instinct to entertain, and the results were predictable: ‘It’s a delightful thing to think of perfection,’ as one of the characters in the novel itself remarks, ‘but it’s vastly more amusing to talk of errors and absurdities.’24
The speed at which the book was written certainly prevented the author from organising her material more coherently, but perhaps the most interesting touches in Camilla might have been lost too had the author, determined on a ‘work’ of moral value, had time to correct it. Fanny finished the book – which is about 350,000 words long – in a period of less than two years that also included the birth of her child and her subsequent illness. She was aware that it sprawled too much and said she was ‘almost ashamed to look at its size’,25 but had really enjoyed its composition (unlike the struggle with Cecilia), reporting to d’Arblay, ‘it is so delicious to stride on, when en verf!’26 This stream of ideas carried along with it matter that had been on her mind for many years, from travel notes dating as far back as her jaunts with the Thrales, to observations on female education, the distresses of unrequited love, the new Young Man, the evils of gambling among women (thinking of the Duchess of Devonshire and her set) and the state of marriage.
Camilla Tyrold is the second daughter of a Hampshire rectory, beautiful, charming, warm-hearted and selfless, whose only faults reside in her youthfulness and inexperience. The favourite of her amiable buffoon uncle, Sir Hugh Tyrold, Camilla is replaced as heiress to his estate by her younger sister Eugenia, towards whom Sir Hugh feels profound remorse, having not only caused her to fall off a seesaw and deform her back and legs (a scene lampooned in Northanger Abbey), but also having exposed her to the smallpox, by which her looks are ruined. Camilla, whose sisterly feelings are as strong as any Burney’s, is not in the least concerned for her own loss of fortune, unlike her beautiful cousin Indiana, Sir Hugh’s ward, who is also disinherited to compensate Eugenia. Money and beauty, and the sudden loss of both, are the powerful forces that work on the group of young people at the heart of the book: the Tyrold sisters, Lavinia, Camilla and Eugenia, their feckless brother Lionel, their handsome, heartless cousins Indiana and Clermont Lynmere, and the old family friend Edgar Mandelbert.
Edgar, described by Joyce Hemlow as ‘the greatest prig in English literature’,27 makes a very unsatisfactory hero. Aged only twenty when most of the novel’s action takes place, his behaviour is of such stuffy rectitude that even the author begins to lose patience with him, allowing the most lively woman character, Mrs Arlbery, to call him ‘a pile of accumulated punctilios’ and ‘that frozen composition of premature wisdom’.28 Edgar is heir to a Norbury-esque estate called Beech Park; he loves Camilla (at a respectful distance) and elects very early on to marry her. However his cynical and misogynistic mentor, Dr Marchmont, persuades the young man to submit Camilla to a ‘probationary interval’ during which, he is convinced, any young woman will prove herself unworthy of his charge. Edgar’s quick submission to this advice is the frail thread on which the subsequent plot depends. Like much in Camilla, it is unlikely, and certainly earned the scorn of whoever wrote in Jane Austen’s copy of the novel, ‘Since this work went to the Press a circumstance of some Importance to the happiness of Camilla has taken place, namely that Dr Marchmont has at last died.’
Most of the action of the novel depicts Camilla’s adventures in society ‘on probation’ and how open to interpretation her actions are to Edgar’s anxious eyes. Just over halfway through the book, the couple reach an ‘understanding’ and become engaged, only to break it off very soon afterwards when Edgar suspects that his fiancée is soliciting the attentions of the fop Sir Sedley Clarendel. The painful restitution of mutual esteem would be moving if Edgar were allowed some normal twenty-year-old characteristics. As it is, he behaves more like a plain-clothes policeman than a lover, following Camilla from resort to resort, ready to have his worst fears about her character proved right.
Though there are plenty of parent and pseudo-parent figures in this book, Burney’s obsession with unguided or badly-guided youth remains as strong as in Evelina and Cecilia. Here the Tyrold parents, like Burney’s own, are seen as perfect – yet oddly disabled. Their marriage is described thus in the opening pages (in language typical of Fanny’s newly-reformed style):
distinctness of disposition stifled not reciprocity of affection – that magnetic concentration of all marriage felicity; – Mr Tyrold revered while he softened the rigid virtues of his wife, who adored while she fortified the melting humanity of her husband.29
But even this exemplary couple (whose ‘distinctness of disposition’ is of exactly the kind Burney recommended in Brief Reflections) expose their family to danger for no good reason, and are so intimidatingly virtuous that their children feel incapable of turning to them for help when it is needed. Mrs Tyrold is an especially interesting authority-figure, ‘unaffectedly beloved’ yet ‘deeply feared by all her children’,30 in the same way that Dr Burney was. Her moral superiority to every other character is of so harsh a nature, the precepts by which she lives so chillingly severe, that she seems inhuman and unsympathetic, almost as if she were, like Burney’s own mother, dead. It is a parallel emphasised by the fact that Mrs Tyrold is absent for a large part of the story, ‘taken from them’ to nurse her brother abroad, and that Camilla’s first contact with her on her return is as a disembodied voice in an inn and later as a ghostly ‘vision’ hovering by her daughter’s sick-bed. Natural mothers are conspicuously absent from all Fanny Burney’s works, and here, on the only occasion she attempts to depict one, impossibly other-worldly.
Mrs Tyrold’s submission to her husband’s will, and through him to the irresponsible whims of Sir Hugh, seems perverse and irrational, but her moral perfection includes the virtue of knowing her place:
she never resisted a remonstrance of her husband; and as her sense of duty impelled her also never to murmur, she retired to her own room, to conceal with how ill a will she complied.
Had this lady been united to a man whom she despised, she would yet have obeyed him, and as scrupulously, though not as happily, as she obeyed her honoured partner. She considered the vow taken at the altar to her husband, as a voluntary vestal would have held one taken to her Maker; and no dissent in opinion exculpated, in her mind, the least deviation from his will.31
If this obeisance were not a major cause of the Tyrold family’s misfortunes, one might be able to admire its rigour; as it is, Mrs Tyrold’s submission weakens the moral force of the work beyond repair in the eyes of modern readers at least (and of some contemporaries – Horace Walpole hated this novel), for what use is superior judgement if it is wilfully not exercised?
Though Camilla is nominally heroine of the story, the most truly heroic character is her deformed sister, Eugenia. Here at last we see Burney tackling the idea she had first broached to Crisp in the early 1780s of a ‘clever unbeautiful heroine, beset all around for her great fortune’, though she still didn’t quite dare place this excellent subject centre-stage. Through Eugenia’s ‘extraordinary personal defects’32* and their violent contrast with her cousin Indiana’s perfect beauty, Burney explores the demoralising effects on women generally of society’s obsession with good looks and their irrational, irresistible ‘magnetic effect’. Both girls are ‘stunning’, for different reasons; the scene in which Clermont Lynmere comes home from abroad to meet his intended bride, not knowing of her deformities but only of her accomplishments, is brilliantly handled. He is stunned into an unbelieving silence, which silences Eugenia’s loving family, too, who realise for the first time the power of outward appearances. Inwardly, Indiana is shallow and selfish while Eugenia is not just refined and pure-minded but highly educated too; part of her special treatment has been a ‘masculine’ education at the hands of Dr Orkbourne, the absent-minded and obsessive scholar employed by her uncle (purportedly a joke portrait of Dr Burney). She has all the ‘feeling’ feminine qualities and yet is a trained philosopher, the perfect mate for a truly sensitive and worthy man. It is another of the book’s moral anomalies that Edgar, who is set up as a masculine ideal of virtue, recognises Eugenia’s superior worth but chooses to marry bubbly, pretty Camilla instead. Melmond, the emotional young romantic who is at first bewitched by Indiana but finds true happiness with Eugenia, therefore rather confuses the ending by beating the hero at his own game.
The most imaginative part of the story is the depiction of Eugenia’s pained recognition that, contrary to the moral thrust of the book, which lauds patience and fortitude, she would do anything to change her looks. No amount of philosophy can compensate the fifteen-year-old girl for the disgust and abuse she excites everywhere she goes. The depression she falls into because of this doesn’t last long because she is ‘brought to her senses’ by her father lecturing her on the subject (the chapter is called, uninvitingly, ‘Strictures on Deformity’), but though Mr Tyrold ostensibly wins the argument, the reader’s sympathy remains entirely with the girl.
When Fanny referred to her manuscript as ‘4 Udolphoish volumes’,33 she didn’t simply mean to compare its size with that of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic bestseller, published in 1794, which she had admired greatly. Fanny’s previous novels had revealed a taste for violence and grotesquerie, but Camilla was the first to contain deliberate elements of horror. As Margaret Anne Doody points out, the Gothic climax of the novel shares the intensity of Burney’s tragic dramas and also something of their emotional excesses; Camilla is isolated from her family by her shame at running into debt and, in a sequence of nightmarish episodes that emphasise her ostracism (including an eerie return to her uncle’s empty, abandoned mansion), she finally collapses at a significantly named ‘half-way house’. Here she teeters on the brink of death, unrecognised and unclaimed until an accident alerts Edgar to her identity. Fanny had already toyed with a sort of false Gothic earlier in the novel (notably in the moonlight scene where Mrs Berlinton appears like a ghost, and Camilla’s visit to the absurd Gothic garden created by Mr Dubster for his roadside villa), but in the final chapters she decided to pull out all the stops. Camilla not only witnesses a hushed procession bringing a murdered man into the inn (he turns out to be her wicked brother-in-law, Bellamy), but in this house of the dead enters a state of morbid delirium, in which, having prayed for death, she has a vision of impending judgement:
another voice assailed her, so near, so loud, so terrible … she shrieked at its horrible sound. ‘Prematurely’, it cried, ‘thou art come, uncalled, unbidden; thy task unfulfilled, thy peace unearned. Follow, follow me! the Records of Eternity are opened. Come! write with thy own hand thy claims, thy merits to mercy!
Camilla is required to write down her ‘deserts’ and her ‘claims’, after which her eternal doom will be rapidly revealed.
A force unseen, yet irresistible, impelled her forward. She saw the immense volumes of Eternity, and her own hand involuntarily grasped a pen of iron, and with a velocity uncontroulable wrote these words: ‘Without resignation, I have prayed for death: from impatience of displeasure, I have desired annihilation: to dry my own eyes, I have left … pitiless, selfish, unnatural! … a father the most indulgent, a Mother almost idolizing, to weep out their’s!’34
Wherever she looks, these words are before her eyes, but when she comes to write down her claims to mercy, the pen makes no impression – in other words, there are no mitigations to her ‘crimes’.* She is urged on by the voices to turn over the page and read her doom, but wakes up from this nightmare, ‘labouring under the adamantine pressure of the inflexibly cold grasp of death’, just in time not to read the inevitable judgement – eternal damnation. The fantastic elements of the vision should not blind us to the fact that Fanny was trying to convey what to her was a plain and incontrovertible truth (in a form she knew would be more powerful than another ‘sermon’): that despair is a mortal sin which will wipe out any claims to divine mercy. In this climax to her ‘Picture of Youth’, as the novel is subtitled, she was earnestly attempting to warn the younger generation, so bombarded with impious and revolutionary ideologies, that the consequences of their actions were of the utmost seriousness.
In order to raise as much money as possible from Camilla, Fanny agreed to publish it by subscription, which necessitated publicity and a businesslike attitude towards the book’s commercial value. Her friends Mrs Boscawen, Mrs Locke and Mrs Crewe managed the list for her (and gathered three hundred names before publication, including those of Hannah More, Mrs Montagu, Burke, Hastings, Mrs Piozzi and a whole regiment of dukes and duchesses); the Burney men busied themselves with the business side, negotiating with printers and publishers. Fanny needed these agents, but showed more true nous than all of them put together; her remark to her brother, that she considered her ‘Brain work as much fair & individual property, as any other possession in either art or nature’36 shows an appreciation of the value of ‘intellectual property’ long before copyright law had even been thought of. Almost twenty years after the appearance of Evelina and fourteen years after Cecilia, the family were all too aware of the huge profits that were still being made for other people by those books, and were determined to maximise the benefits for the d’Arblays this time. As her brother Charles said to Fanny, ‘What Evelina […] does now for the Son of Lowndes, & what Cecilia does for the Son of payne, let your third work do for the Son of its Authour.’37
Fanny heard via Mrs Schwellenberg (who had become very friendly since Fanny’s retirement from Court) that the Queen had enjoyed the book, but in the outside world responses were mixed. Dr Burney had indulged his usual practice of trying to fix at least one good review, writing anxiously to his son Charles, ‘The work […] must do credit, not only to Fanny, but to us all’.38 As it turned out, the worst review was the one he had tried to influence in the Monthly, co-written by his close friend Ralph Griffiths, which freely criticised the book’s length, structure, faulty grammar, Gallicisms and crank vocabulary (such as ‘stroamed’, ‘flagitious’ and ‘fogramity’). ‘M’ (Mary Wollstonecraft) in the Analytical Review thought the book contained ‘parts superior to any thing [the author] has yet produced’,39 but that overall it was not a success; elsewhere critics praised the usefulness of such a work to young people but withheld any very loud or strenuous praise. ‘This novel is not such as we expected,’ the Critical said reservedly. Privately, Dr Burney had heard much harsher judgements, to his fury. The printer Robinson had told him ‘there was but one opinion about [Camilla] – Mme d’Arblay was determined to fill 5 Volumes – & had done it in such a manner as wd do her no credit’.40
Though Fanny admitted she was ‘a good deal chagrined’ by the reception of her book (and took the criticisms to heart, continuing to revise Camilla well into the 1830s), she comforted herself with the knowledge that ‘Camilla will live and die by more general means’.41 She had raised about a thousand pounds through subscription and sold the copyright to Payne, Cadell and Davies for another thousand soon after publication (the book went on to sell four thousand copies by November). The thousand pounds for the copyright was a record sum at the time (though it must be pointed out that the author did not receive all the money at once), and the profits from Camilla kept the d’Arblays afloat for some years. To her father, who was much more piqued by the reviews than she, Fanny sent on Charles junior’s consolatory couplet,
Now heed no more what Critics thought ’em
Since this you know – All people bought ’em.42
Among the list of subscribers were Fanny Burney’s fellow-novelists Ann Radcliffe and Maria Edgeworth and a ‘Miss J. Austen’ of Steventon in Hampshire. Austen was only twenty when Camilla was published, and four months later she began writing her own first adult work, a novel called ‘First Impressions’ (later Pride and Prejudice), the manuscript of which was circulating among the Austen family by August 1797. In her famous defence of the novel in Northanger Abbey (which, as we shall see later, was almost certainly addressed specifically to Madame d’Arblay), Austen singled out Camilla, along with Cecilia and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, as examples of works in which ‘the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language’.43 Austen was a devoted fan of Burney, and seems to have particularly admired Camilla (along with Sir Charles Grandison, it is the novel most frequently mentioned in her letters), reusing several situations and jokes from it in her own much more famous work. Any close reader of Camilla who is familiar with Pride and Prejudice will get a feeling of déjà lu from the similarity of Sir Sedley Clarendel’s haughty behaviour at the provincial ball to that of Darcy at Meryton; Camilla’s detention at Mrs Arlbery’s house because of the rain to that of Elizabeth Bennet and her sister at Netherfield; and the musical ineptitude of Indiana, who ‘with the utmost difficulty, played some very easy lessons’ on the piano-forte,44 to that of Mary Bennet, who so famously ‘delighted us long enough’. The fate of Mr Bennet is foreshadowed in Mrs Arlbery’s warning to Macdersey that the man who chooses a pretty, silly wife to gratify his own sense of superiority will end up ‘looking like a fool himself, when youth and beauty take flight, and when his ugly old wife exposes her ignorance or folly at every word’.45 Even the famous first sentence of Austen’s book finds an echo in Burney’s: ‘[It is] received wisdom among match-makers, that a young lady without fortune has a less and less chance of getting off upon every public appearance’,46 and the main narrative of both books – couple get engaged but then break off and struggle back together – is of course identical.
There are connections from Camilla to other Austen novels too: to Emma, which like Camilla features a charming, imperfect heroine and a disapproving monitor/lover, and to Persuasion, in which the famous Lyme Cobb accident recalls Indiana Lynmere coquettishly insisting on jumping into the yacht without assistance. The very title of Pride and Prejudice is thought to derive from Burney’s repeated use of the phrase in the closing pages of Cecilia.47 These evidences of influence are easily traced through Austen’s reading, but there are other, more enigmatic echoes in Austen of Burney which are more difficult to account for, notably the strange similarity of Fanny Price’s experience in the famous ‘Lovers’ Vows’ episode in Mansfield Park with the account in Burney’s early diary of her own terrifying amateur debut in The Way to Keep Him in Worcester back in the 1770s. There is, more particularly, what looks like a pastiche of Madame d’Arblay’s frequent use of the terms ‘caro sposo’ and ‘cara sposa’ in Mrs Elton’s affected talk in Emma. In a fascinating article tracing the ‘in-group language’ common to the Burney and Austen families, ‘Sposi in Surrey’,48 the critic Pat Rogers elucidates the connection between the two writers through the d’Arblays’ friends and neighbours at Bookham, the Reverend and Mrs Samuel Cooke. Mrs Cooke was a first cousin of Mrs Austen, Jane’s mother, and the reverend gentleman was Jane’s godfather. Jane Austen knew Bookham and its environs well (Emma is set in this part of Surrey), and kept in touch with the Cookes all her life. Rogers’s conclusion that she might have got to hear ‘more about the Burney household than we have recognized’49 through her friendly relations with the Cookes’ daughter Mary, a teenager in the 1790s, is certainly suggestive. Fanny d’Arblay was a frequent visitor to the Cookes’ rectory (The Hermitage is just across the road from Bookham Church), and while she was particularly fond of Mrs Cooke, she found Mary ‘stiff and cold’. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Mary was passing on her impressions of their famous literary neighbour to her Hampshire relations, all of whom, it might be remembered were ‘great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so’,50 and that her reports might have concentrated on the more embarrassing or ridiculous titbits that she heard drop from the novelist’s mouth.
The happy community of Lockes, Phillipses and d’Arblays in Mickleham and Bookham was short-lived. Though Susan loyally kept from her family her husband’s worst ‘eccentricities’ of temper, debt and fidelity, it was clear as early as 1794 that there were serious problems in the marriage. Ever since inheriting the Belcotton farm, Major Phillips had harboured plans to move back to Ireland, and got near to doing it several times. Susan was, of course, averse to the scheme, and though Fanny hoped the matter would blow over, she had seen enough of the Major at close quarters by this time to begin to be wary of him. His behaviour was dangerously unpredictable, she wrote to her father, ‘hovering, though in forms so frequently contradictory that it is impossible to fully fix any stable judgement, either upon the real intent, or the internal causes. Sometimes the aspect is that of a terrible break up, at others the wilfulness of a restless mind that loves to spread confusion, cause wonder, & displace tranquility.’51
In the autumn of 1794 Phillips removed his elder son, nine-year-old Norbury, from Charles Burney junior’s school in Greenwich and later in the year took him to Dublin and placed him with a private tutor. It was the first stage in a staggered removal of the whole family. In June 1795, amid tearful scenes, Susan and her other two children, Frances and William, left their cottage in Mickleham for good and moved to London, where they lodged with James and Charles in turn. The makeshift arrangements suggest that they were expecting to have to leave for Ireland any minute; the fact that the arrangements lasted over a year suggests that Susan was doing everything possible to postpone that evil hour.
In October 1795, Phillips took the rash step of resigning his commission as a Major of Marines, ostensibly because of ‘insuperable avocations in Ireland’, though Fanny was convinced that was a pretence.52 His friend James Burney tried to talk him out of it (having lived for twelve years on half-pay himself he knew the difficulties), but Phillips had made up his mind, and what’s more, seemed unconcerned about the consequences. He spent much of the winter and spring of 1795–6 in County Louth, supposedly preparing Belcotton for his family’s reception, and came back to collect them in August, having promised Susan that he would bring Norbury with him. Had he done so, it seems very likely that Susan would have tried to effect a separation from her husband at this point, but Phillips knew that the boy was his only real bargaining counter, and so left him behind in Ireland.
Susan’s distress was extreme when she realised the choice facing her: to stay in England against her husband’s wishes and possibly never see her son again, or to remove to unknown, distant Belcotton with the ‘half-mad & unfeeling M[ajor]’, as Dr Burney was now calling his son-in-law,53 who, incidentally, had extracted a massive £2000 loan from the Doctor the previous year and showed no signs of paying it back.
Fanny and Charlotte met their sister in secret at Charlotte’s lodgings in Downing Street on 11 September, after which Susan wrote:
the terrible struggle is over – I think I shall be capable of submitting as you would have me – not from mere despondence – but from something better – that despondence may not at times seize me I do presume to hope … but I intend to subdue it when I can, & to make such efforts as I am able to support myself.54
It seems, amazingly, that Fanny and Charlotte had advised their sister to obey her husband’s wishes, even though she was clearly frightened of him and wanted a separation. Nothing could override a wife’s and mother’s duty in Fanny’s eyes, even the happiness of her beloved Susan. She gave similarly ‘rigidly Virtuous advice’ to Maria Rishton the following year, saying that ‘the only Indispensible Cause of Marriage Seperation’ was death.55 However ‘Justifiable’ the complaint, a wife ‘forfeited, by her marriage vow, the right of positively quitting [her husband], if she could not obtain his consent’. These harsh pronouncements, worthy of Mrs Tyrold, were all very well coming from one who had married so happily and knew nothing of domestic tyranny or abuse. One might have thought that her own experience of duty-bound incarceration at Court would have made Fanny more sympathetic to her sisters’ distresses, except that she had (sensibly) not felt obliged to test her own principles quite so far in her own case. The sermonising of Brief Reflections and Camilla (which, ironically, she was only able to indulge because of her own separation from a tyrannical ‘spouse’, the Queen) seems to have made Fanny think of herself as a moral oracle who could not be heard condoning anything other than the most rigidly correct behaviour. The only comfort she could offer Susan were images of the sentimental reunion awaiting in Ireland with her adored son Norbury, and the prospect of a speedy return.
None of Susan’s family was prepared to stand up to Phillips, especially not Dr Burney, who though enraged at the treatment of his favourite daughter, let the ‘half-mad’ Irishman bear her away to a country on the verge of a violent rebellion. ‘I had no hope of working upon his wrong-headed & tyrannical spirit by anything I cd say or do,’ he said limply, ‘& there was great reason to fear the making bad worse, by putting him out of humour, since we must, circumstanced as we are, submit.’56 Susan and the children left London with Phillips on 14 October 1796, having said goodbye to the Lockes and Fanny at Norbury Park a week earlier. Fanny had run up to the gallery alone to watch from the window until the chaise was out of sight.
Susan had not yet reached Dublin before the Burneys had to face another family crisis at home. Elizabeth Allen Burney, who had been ailing for some time, suffered a lung haemorrhage in the summer of 1796 and by September was bedridden and dosing heavily on laudanum. She died, aged seventy-one, on 20 October, and was buried in the grounds of Chelsea College six days later. Charles Burney was devastated by his loss and entered a state of stupefaction very similar to that he had suffered in 1762 after the death of Esther: ‘I sit whole hours with my hands before me, without the least inclination or power to have recourse either to such business, or amusemts as I used to fly to with the greatest eagerness’, he wrote to his friend Christian Latrobe, and to Thomas Twining, ‘who can calculate my loss?’57
Fanny, who went up to Chelsea as soon as she heard the news and spent a fortnight with her grieving father, was anxious about his weak, miserable condition and protracted mourning. Her long jealousy of Elizabeth Burney, kept sharp by loyalty to her own mother’s memory, had always prevented her from acknowledging her father’s true admiration and love of his second wife; now it prevented her from sympathising with the Doctor’s profound bereavement. In her view, his misery was due to the superior ‘tenderness of his pitying nature’, not ‘penetrated affections’. Deep sorrow, she stated categorically, was ‘impossible’ in the case.58 Indeed, she was insensitive enough to suggest that ‘La Dama’ had been such a malign influence on the household at Chelsea College that her death was more a matter for rejoicing than tears; Sarah, she thought, was showing marked signs of improvement already, and her father’s better nature, suppressed since the days of his first marriage, would soon reassert itself. The prospect was elating, and she wrote to d’Arblay, who had been left holding the baby in Bookham, that he would soon ‘know that Father’ for the first time:
He evidently wishes to call all his Children about him, to receive & bestow the affections long pent or restrained, rather than manifested & indulged. His Heart has never been shut, but his ARMS now are opened again[.]59
Fanny harped on these views at length to various members of the family, and developed other theories, including the shamefully self-aggrandising notion that her own departure from Chelsea in 1793 had left Charles Burney unprotected from his wife’s temper, and that ‘from that period, our so long-enduring Father became more clear sighted to her frailties, &, indulgently as he continued to bear them, ceased to persuade himself that he had nothing to bear.’60 There is a note of sour triumph in this that is particularly distasteful. It is unlikely that Fanny ever read such testimonies as Dr Burney sent to Twining and his other friends during these months, describing Elizabeth as ‘bosom friend & rational companion of 30 years, who had virtues, cultivation, & intellectual powers, sufficient to make home not only desirable, but also preferable to places where amusement is sought & promised’61 (if she had read them in her father’s posthumous papers, they probably wouldn’t still exist). That she and her father held radically different views of Elizabeth Burney was something Fanny would rather deny than confront. She simply could not believe that he had ever been in love with this woman, just as he couldn’t see (or chose to ignore) the very strong antipathy his second wife aroused in his first wife’s children. Fanny’s readiness to shape the past to obliterate these uncomfortable differences and re-imagine her father’s feelings for him is ample warning of how she was to behave as his biographer.
Fanny suggested various projects to distract her father from his grief, one of which was to collect and revise his poems. This kept ‘the monster’ of depression at bay for a while, though Dr Burney later destroyed the ambitious long poem he began at this time, a versified history of astronomy. Fanny also attempted to cheer him with letters about her happy family life at Bookham, where everything to do with the ‘Bambino’ seemed newsworthy: his teeth, his toddling, his ‘gibberish lingo’.62 She was the archetypally doting mother, and described the antics of Alex with minute attention. She wrote at length and with pride of the three-year-old boy’s presentation at Court in the spring of 1798, unwittingly revealing how unused the child was to discipline (the Queen, on that occasion, seemed far from amused with ‘My little Rebel’ and his restlessness.) However, Fanny could also laugh at her own maternal fondness and send up ‘the wonderful wonders with which [the baby] makes even his own parents astonished by his wit & vivacity’.63
The d’Arblays were finding The Hermitage unsuitable as a permanent home and decided to go back to their plan to build a house on the land offered by the Lockes. It was not the most auspicious time to do so; with the war going so badly for Britain in 1797, goods and services were extremely expensive and there were serious fears of invasion as troops massed on the northern French coast. The establishment of the Directory had turned the tide of the Revolution, and Bonaparte’s spectacular military success in Italy, along with his conquest of Belgium and Holland, made France the most powerful country in the world. It must have been strange for d’Arblay to witness this from the position of an exile. It was clear that his cause – constitutional monarchy – was becoming obsolete, and that he was in danger of having nowhere to return in his changed country. In August 1796 he received news of his younger brother’s death in action in Spain two years before, fighting for the Republic of which he had been an ardent opponent. D’Arblay ruminated on the irony of this, and the hard choices which those left behind in France during the Revolution had had to face. Uncle Bazille in Joigny was now his last surviving relation in his native land, and little Alex in Bookham the last of the d’Arblay line.
D’Arblay threw himself with ardour into overseeing the construction of their new house in West Humble, which was only about a mile and a half’s walk from Norbury Park. ‘My Chevalier almost lives in his Field’, Fanny reported to her father. ‘[H]e dreams now of Cabbage Walks – potatoe Beds – Bean perfumes & peas’ blossoms.’64 D’Arblay took responsibility for the grounds (the builders don’t seem to have encouraged him to help them), digging a ha-ha to keep the cow off the cabbages and a well that had to be taken to a depth of a hundred feet before they struck water.
‘Camilla Cottage’, the name Dr Burney gave the new house, had a kitchen and three small, high-ceilinged reception rooms on the ground floor, a cellar beneath and four bedrooms and a ‘chambre des livres’ on the first floor (though they still didn’t own many books). D’Arblay had included in his plans a bedroom to be used ‘dans la cas où l’un ou l’autre seraiant indisposés’,65 which as at The Hermitage allowed Fanny a room of her own if required: ‘such a dear refuge – so uncommon & so consolatory’.66 He also gave the little house (which was tall and thin, like himself) ‘Rumford-style’ improved-efficiency fireplaces, a skylight in the roof and plenty of ‘large fenêtres’, though they had barely moved in before Pitt’s window-tax forced them to block up four. Nevertheless, the d’Arblays were extremely proud of their first home, paid for entirely from Fanny’s ‘Brain work’.
On moving day in October 1797, d’Arblay went ahead on foot and had a fire burning in the grate to welcome his wife and child, who arrived by chaise. Alex was delighted to play in the empty rooms, still damp from being freshly plastered, and his parents were equally happy with their first meal of bread, cut with a garden knife, and eggs boiled in the only saucepan. They ate this sitting on the only piece of furniture in the house, a bench left by the carpenters. ‘We dined, therefore, exquisitely’, Fanny wrote in triumph, ‘& drank to our new possession from a Glass of clear water out of our new Well.’67
Camilla Cottage might have been ‘lilliputian’, in Fanny’s description,68 but it had not been cheap to build. D’Arblay estimated the cost at £1,300 – for which sum they could have bought a much larger property freehold. D’Arblay had overspent, thinking that he was likely to get some money from France soon, either from the change in government (subsequently overturned by coup d’état in September 1798) or his brother’s estate (which ended up being confiscated by the state). Fanny was always anxious about her husband’s poor money-sense and tendency to be led astray by ‘bargains & temptations’.69 Despite the Camilla savings, she was dreading the builders’ final accounts, and in January 1798 had begun on another ‘scribbling business’ to meet their rising debts. She had decided to try writing for the stage again (much quicker than another five-volume novel), and the result was a comedy called Love and Fashion.
The plot of Love and Fashion centres around the choice facing the heroine, Hilaria Dalton, of marriage to wealthy old Lord Ardville or young, not-so-wealthy Valentine, the son of Ardville’s elder brother, Lord Exbury (who has been forced to retrench to pay the debts of his other son, Mordaunt). The outcome is obvious from the start, so it is hardly a dramatic play, but Burney enjoyed returning to the Camilla themes of materialism and marriage in what is essentially a comic sermon about the importance of conjugal compatibility. The temptations of mercenary marriage for young girls are strong: ‘to be made mistress in a moment of mansions, carriages, domestics – To have Time, Power and Pleasure cast at once at their disposal’, but as Valentine points out baldly, such ties are ‘radically dishonest’.70 Hilaria, who begins as a frivolous, greedy girl whose idea of poverty is a ‘pitiful’ eleven thousand a year, has a comic solution to the choice between Love and Fashion (i.e. Money): ‘If the regard of Lord Ardville be sincere – why can he not settle half his wealth upon me at once, without making me a prisoner for life in return?’ She loses this flippancy through forced exposure to country life and Valentine’s virtues, which make her ‘attend to Nature’ for the first time, and is rewarded by getting not just the young, good husband, but a fortune too, since Ardville repents his sins and makes Valentine his heir.
Love and Fashion is a much less inventive and amusing comedy than its predecessor, The Witlings. The secondary characters, which include a trio of domestics who open the play, each have traits which are established quickly and stuck to doggedly – a crude form of comic writing. There is a send-up of Gothic in the ‘ghost’ scene and the appearances of the ‘Strange Man’, who turns out to be a bailiff, but this sort of joke is too subtle for the rest of the play, which includes John-Bullish speeches from Lord Exbury directed straight at the gallery: ‘Is This a Land where spirit and Virtue shall want Protection?’ with the heartfelt coda, which could be called The Burney Principle, ‘What is there of Fortune or distinction unattainable in Britain by Talents, probity, and Courage?’71 Overall, Love and Fashion would have needed quite a bit of rewriting before being staged, as Thomas Harris, manager of Covent Garden, suggested in his generally enthusiastic correspondence with Burney about the play in 1798 and 1799. The weakest scene, which may well be among the ones Harris wanted to revise, is a sentimental episode between two rustics, a Hay-Maker and a Wood-Cutter, who are looking forward to married life together in virtuous poverty. ‘How will I rub, and clean, and brighten my platters, and my pans, and my nice red bricks, to make them all shine, and look sightly, to welcome thee!’ the young girl says to her manly but lust-free boyfriend. Hannah More herself couldn’t have written with more patronising sentimentality of the rural poor.
While Fanny Burney was composing this hymn to companionate marriage, more marital disruptions were taking place within her family. Charlotte displeased their father profoundly by marrying again without his approval. Her first husband, Clement Francis, had left her independent and well-provided-for – so much so that Ralph Broome, her new suitor, seemed suspiciously like a fortune-hunter to Dr Burney and James. They were still trying to find out about his finances when Charlotte went ahead with a secret marriage in March 1798. Broome, an ex-Captain in the Bengal Army, was a left-wing political pamphleteer, author of a successful satire on the Hastings Trial known as Simpkin’s Letters (properly Letters of Simpkin the Second, Poetic Recorder, of all the Proceedings upon the Trial of Warren Hastings, 1789). He had been married before and was the father of an illegitimate daughter by an Indian woman, a fact which both Hetty Burney and Maria Rishton thought ‘disgusting’. Fanny was torn between doubts about her younger sister’s judgement, which she thought at best rather romantic, and a pragmatic hope that all would turn out well now that the unbreakable knot had been tied.
Elsewhere in the family there were worse disruptions to come. In the spring of 1798 Maria Rishton finally got her husband’s agreement to an amicable separation, under the terms of which she received enough money to set up her own house eventually at Bury St Edmunds. The example of this (relatively) easy solution to an unhappy marriage (the Rishtons had no children to complicate the matter), and Charles Burney’s readiness to give Maria temporary refuge in his apartments at the College, must have helped precipitate James Burney’s decision in the autumn of 1798 to leave his wife and family for good. He had been spending more and more time away from home in the preceding years, often going about with his half-sister, Sarah Harriet, now twenty-six. While Elizabeth Burney had been alive, James had not been welcome at the College. Mrs Burney harboured dark suspicions of the special friendship that was emerging between the superannuated tar and her wilful, independent-minded daughter, ideas that lodged in Dr Burney’s mind, but which he could not credit at the time. After ‘La Dama’s death, James appeared at his father’s home frequently and seemed happily re-established as ‘the best good fellow & kindest Brother imaginable’, to use Fanny’s phrase.72 But it is clear that as the months went by, the Doctor began to wonder if his late wife had not perhaps been right to suspect that something highly inappropriate was going on.
James’s suggestion, in September 1798, that he might leave his own home and come and board with his father, met with an immediate and disgusted response from the Doctor, who flatly refused to agree, not so much because of James’s intended abandonment of his wife and children (the younger of whom was not yet two), but because the move would indicate ‘an improper Attachment’ to Sarah Harriet.73 James’s response to this was to go home and pack. The following day, 2 September, he and Sarah Harriet ran away together.
Controversy surrounds the nature of this elopement, which sent shock-waves through the Burney family – all of whom, interestingly, initially assumed that the couple were committing incest, and all of whom eventually came round to thinking they hadn’t. The secretive quality of James and Sarah’s departure, Sarah’s ‘happy & flighty’ state on the day and her sinisterly satisfied smiles when quizzed by her half-sisters in the following months all helped convince the family of the worst. Biographers and editors of the Burneys have followed suit ever since with the assumption of incest, except for the editor of Sarah Harriet’s letters, Lorna J. Clark, who has put the case for a less sensational alternative: that Sarah and James, who were both independent-minded and rebellious people, simply found they had common cause in wanting to run away (James from his family responsibilities, which had oppressed him for years, Sarah from her dead-end life at Chelsea), and chose to do so together. Clark’s argument includes the facts that James and Sarah both denied any love-involvement; the family began to dismiss their own worst fears as soon as they had contact again with the runaways; the suspicion of incest had originated with ‘La Dama’; and – the strongest point in Clark’s view – James’s wife Sally welcomed her husband back in 1804 and got on very well with Sarah Harriet afterwards.
There is much to be said for all this, though it might deprive the Burney family history of another animating sex-scandal. The Burneys were worldly people and reliable detectors of sexual guilt. One feels that the rehabilitation of Sarah and James at the end of their five-year experiment in cohabitation could only have taken place because the odd couple were understood to be just that: odd, but not wicked. Sarah Harriet had many reasons for wanting to leave home. She had seen little of her father’s legendary charm and much of his curmudgeonliness, especially in the years since 1790 when old age, the war, family disappointments, the conclusion of his life’s work and the death of his wife had changed the Doctor almost beyond recognition. He did not find his youngest child very congenial, and let her know it, treating her on occasion with ‘bitter raillery or Harshness’.74 It is little wonder that this spirited, eccentric woman, who thought of herself as ugly, ‘queer’ and unlikely to marry, responded with a form of passive rebellion, taking care not to be any good at things that might tie her to Chelsea as dogsbody spinster daughter. She couldn’t copy, sew or keep house, and would much rather read to herself than aloud to anyone else. In 1796, very soon after the appearance of Camilla, Sarah Harriet’s first novel, Clarentine, was published. It was reasonably successful (though not taken very seriously within the family), and served to show Sarah Harriet that she didn’t necessarily have to stay under her father’s protection for life. She went on to write four more novels over the next three decades, eking out a life of genteel poverty and proud independence on the proceeds.
From her letters, one can deduce that Sarah Harriet did not have the necessary guile or patience to keep up a false front on the subject of her relations with James. Her intolerance and free criticism of other people’s sexual misdemeanours also suggests she wasn’t sensitive to it. She was easily dissatisfied, tactless, restless and could be difficult company. None of her later jobs as a governess and lady’s companion lasted very long, and she made a poor co-boarder in her one experiment of that kind. The five-year residence with James, in a series of fairly disreputable lodgings and with little money, probably came to an end because she had had enough of it; unlike when impassioned couples split up, Sarah and James seem to have had no hard feelings about the change, and remained very fond of each other. Her search in life, as she articulated later, was not so much for love, from which she seemed to think her looks debarred her, as for ‘a gentle, rational, & friendly associate’,75 and her letters, especially the later ones, show her sighingly resigned to ‘Old Maidism’.
But in the autumn and winter of 1798 this was cold comfort to the Burney family, especially to Dr Burney, who fumed at the ingratitude and defiance of the unfilial pair threatening to bring disgrace on them all. Any mention of James or Sarah changed his mood abruptly; he wished not to speak of them again. His daughters kept secret from him their efforts to keep in touch with the runaways (unrewarding though these were, since James himself felt aggrieved about his father’s treatment of him), and the Burney sisters’ correspondence in this period is full of concern for their father, who had been left, after Maria Rishton’s departure from Chelsea College in 1799, with no one to look after him.
The necessity of finding ‘some female society & care’76 for old Dr Burney suggested a hopeful scheme to Fanny. If Major Phillips could be persuaded to release Susan, she would make the perfect companion for her father at Chelsea. Fanny probably intended this to be presented to Phillips as a temporary expedient; little else seemed likely to make him agree to a separation. Dr Burney, not surprisingly, was delighted with the idea. He had not previously been able to admit that Susan’s marriage was beyond repair, but if her ‘sweet temper, tender heart, sound judgement, exquisite taste, integrity & acquirements’ might be put to good use sweetening his dotage, he was very keen to get her back. If he had acknowledged the misery of Susan’s situation earlier, such an action might have been of some use, but by the spring of 1799 it was already too late.
Susan had been careful to play down the difficulty of her life at Belcotton, to avoid both alarming her family and risking her husband’s anger. Belcotton was cold, damp and isolated, and Susan and her two children (Norbury was in Dublin with his tutor) were often left there alone while Phillips was out with his friends or pursuing his handsome second cousin and neighbour Jane Brabazon. Phillips was a tyrannical and belligerent man, a heavy drinker and gambler who had no qualms about getting into debt (his huge loan from Dr Burney was never repaid, and he frequently called on James Burney for handouts). Susan had reason to believe that he had interfered with her letters to Norbury in the past and might be monitoring her letters home now; her correspondence with her sisters therefore became circumspect and evasive, making use of conspiracy tactics from the past, such as the use of code names (one of hers was ‘Mrs le Blanc’; Phillips was referred to as ‘the Climate’, or ‘le Temps’) and removable ‘cuttings’ at the edges of the writing paper.*
Still, Fanny had little idea of how poor her sister’s health had become. Her hopes and ‘violent wishes’77 were centred on getting Susan back to England, which she did not believe was really possible before order had been properly restored in Ireland after the uprising of 1798. The Major put off his wife’s ‘visit’ to Chelsea from season to season, and cold-heartedly exploited the family’s increasing desperation in order to extort money from them for supposed travelling expenses.
In the autumn of 1799 Fanny heard with mixed delight and dread that Phillips had finally decided to let Susan go because of the state of her health. Though she was sure that Susan would revive as soon as she got back to England, the prospect of her starting a journey at the beginning of winter was so alarming that Fanny offered to go over to Ireland herself to nurse her rather than risk her setting out. D’Arblay went up to town to lodge £50 at Coutts’s bank in Susan’s name towards these expenses; the Lockes also sent money secretly.
However, Susan’s journey went ahead in early December while she was still very weak; she only got as far as Dublin before she had to retire to bed again for weeks, waiting to regain enough strength to continue. She was by this time desperate to get home, probably because she knew she was dying. She left these fears unspecified in her letters, and Fanny could only interpret the references to ‘something […] which has happened’ as possibly connected with ‘a danger she has never yet apprehended from rebels’.78
The Phillipses, with their seventeen-year-old daughter Fanny and eight-year-old son William, set out from Ireland at last in terrible weather at the end of December, not sure whether the yacht they had borrowed would put in at Parkgate or Holyhead. Charles Burney junior, who had volunteered to go and meet his sister and bring her home in ‘a proper travelling Chaise’ instead of one of Phillips’s cheapskate contraptions, reached Chester by the mail coach on Boxing Day with his fourteen-year-old son Charles Parr Burney and heard that his sister and her family had sailed on to Parkgate, though when he got there he heard that they had been blown back to Holyhead. Charles set off along the north Wales coast road in the snow, only to find that the boat had gone on to Parkgate after all, and he had to hurry back towards Chester again. When he finally found his sister, in lodgings in Parkgate on 2 January 1800, she was not surprisingly much the worse for the long, cold sea-voyage. Charles’s first impression was that Susan, emaciated, coughing violently and suffering from dysentery, ‘could not live two days’.79
Susan must have rallied enough by the following day for Charles to have justified his rather extraordinary decision to take Phillips and the children to Liverpool for the weekend, leaving his sister at Parkgate to gain some strength in peace. When they got back on the night of Sunday, 5 January, Susan’s forty-fifth birthday, she seemed ‘apparently better’,80 but she spent the night in great pain and was so ill the next morning that she didn’t recognise or attempt to speak to her brother, and died a few hours later.
Meanwhile, preparations had been going ahead at Chelsea to receive the travellers, and at West Humble Fanny was waiting impatiently for news from her father and looking forward with anxious excitement to ‘embracing my dearest Susan in your arms & under your roof’, not knowing her sister was already dead. The letters from Parkgate arrived on the ninth; Charles had written to his father, Phillips to the Lockes, asking them to ‘communicate this intelligence to Mrs D’Arblay’. The Chevalier heard the news first; he had called at Norbury Park that morning on his way to London, and had to turn back.
’Tis wonderful to me my dearest Fredy that the first shock did not join [our souls] immediately by the flight of mine,’ Fanny wrote soon afterwards to Mrs Locke, ‘but that over – that dreadful – harrowing – never to be forgotten moment of horrour that made me wish to be mad – over – the ties that after that first endearing period have shared with her my Heart come to my aid.’81 The d’Arblays set off from Surrey immediately, hoping to reach Parkgate in time to see the body and attend the burial, but the roads were snowy and the mails from London to Chester all booked up until the twelfth. They were forced to retreat to Chelsea, where they heard later that the funeral had taken place while they were kicking their heels there on the tenth. Charles had been the only mourner.
So the new century began for Fanny in seemingly irreparable heartbreak. As an old woman, annotating letters she intended to pass on to her heirs, she marked the little note she had sent her father on 9 January 1800 in anticipation of meeting Susan again, ‘These were the last written lines of the last period – unsuspected as such! – of my perfect Happiness on Earth.’82
* His parents and elder brother were all dead long before the Revolution, and his only sister had died in 1792 or 1793, a fact he probably didn’t yet know.5
* Fanny uses exactly the same words in the Memoirs to describe the Burneys’ beloved old friend Dolly Young’s appearance.
* The passage has been wishfully interpreted as an allegory of the heroine’s ‘inability throughout the novel to speak or write clearly’, and of female creative problems in general by the critic Julia Epstein,35 the title of whose study of Fanny Burney, The Iron Pen, derives from it. A pen of iron, it might be necessary to point out here, was an engraver’s tool.
* Some of these melancholy documents, slips of paper typically about an inch and a half deep and filled with minute writing, are preserved in the Berg Collection.