Charlotte Barrett was nervous about the publication of her late aunt’s Diary and Letters in 1842, and it seemed with good reason. Croker continued his campaign against the author with a stinging attack in the Quarterly on her ‘extravagant egotism’, and many other reviewers followed suit. Madame d’Arblay’s vanity, according to the Eclectic Review, ‘obtrudes itself in almost every page, and frequently leads to prolixity, and minuteness of detail, which is wearisome in the extreme’. Within the family, Sarah Payne, James Burney’s daughter, was ‘very sensitive’ about the publication, and told her friend Henry Crabb Robinson that it was ‘a great reproach to Mad d’Arblay that she should record nothing but the conversation that respected herself, be it praise or blame – and that nothing else even of Johnson’s or Burke’s conversation made any impression on her’.1 Like the accusations of self-absorption (an odd criticism to level at a diarist), this was hardly fair. What really seems to have upset the readers and reviewers of 1842 was not so much that Madame d’Arblay’s diaries were self-centred as that they were relatively artless and unpolished, that they revealed ‘the conversations of eminent people’ like Johnson and Burke to be sometimes conversations of ‘ordinary mediocssrity’.2 No one wanted to know what Dr Johnson had said about rashers and mutton pies.
Of the ‘tautology and vanity’ of the diaries Sarah Harriet Burney had this to say to Robinson: ‘In her life, [Madame d’Arblay] bottled it all up, & looked and generally spoke with the most refined modesty, & seemed ready to drop if ever her works were alluded to. But what was kept back, and scarcely suspected in society, wanting a safety valve, found its way to her private journal. Thence, had Mrs Barrett been judicious, she would have trundled it out, by half quires, and even whole quires at a time’.3 Sarah Harriet implies that her half-sister was only able to appear ‘unoffending and unenvious’ in public because in private she was self-regarding. Though it is unpleasantly put, there is some truth in this: labouring under the belief that authorship and gentility, performance and sincerity, were not compatible, Fanny Burney’s public behaviour and private writing did not intersect very much at all.
Sarah Harriet, a novelist herself, knew all about ‘safety valves’ for a woman’s private feelings, but clearly thought those feelings shouldn’t be served up raw to the public. Fanny Burney, presumably, felt differently about her diaries: not simply that they provided ‘participation or relief’ at the time of writing, but that the ultimate revelation of her private thoughts was valuable and illuminating, that they complemented or completed the picture offered to posterity in her works. The story of the secret composition and publication of Evelina became central to her autobiography because the circumstances and difficulties of authorship were critically important to her, ‘more like a romance’, to quote her own revealing phrase, ‘than anything in the book that was the cause’.4 Her seventy-year diary therefore served as an elaborate apology for her public performances, ‘proof’ that her inhibitions were social rather than artistic.
For this very reason, Burney’s diary fascinates modern readers as much as her novels do. They show that ‘the Mother of English Fiction’, as Virginia Woolf called her, was an anxious and vulnerable pioneer. As early as 1810 Anna Barbauld, in one of the first critical works of its kind, wrote that ‘Scarcely any name, if any, stands higher in the list of novel-writers than that of Miss Burney’,5 but four years after this Burney herself was still talking of novels as ‘degraded’. Had she lived to read Macaulay’s claim, in 1843, that her work had ‘vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in a fair and noble province of letters’, she would probably have taken exception both to the judgement and the wording, so unfortunately reminiscent of the title of Miss Wollstonecraft’s book. What she expressed in the negative to Samuel Crisp in 1779 apropos The Witlings – ‘I would a thousand times rather forfeit my character as a writer, than risk ridicule or censure as a Female’ – held true throughout her life: she put a huge value on private life, friendships, family duties and her own behaviour ‘as a Female’, and to some extent deliberately neglected her potential as a writer. Even in her most famous and admired novels, Evelina and Cecilia, there are elements of wilful amateurism, a sprawling quality which she herself always put down to hurry but never attempted to rectify. Her revisions of Camilla, though they went on for decades, never seriously addressed the many structural and stylistic faults of that book. In a sense, she left it to Jane Austen to revise Camilla. Having played out in her own life the struggle to make female novel-writing respectable, her successors reaped the benefits.
I am uncomfortably aware of all the stories untold in this biography, the dense patterning of information, misinformation and anecdote in the Burney papers that because of the demands of biography to tell an (artificially) coherent and approximately chronological story has had to remain obscure. There is more than ever to know about Fanny Burney and her circle: reading the existing material is an occupation in itself, and scholars grow grey in its service. I believe that Burney’s anxiety to record her life in sometimes minute detail was not simply a compulsive habit but a form of acknowledgement that experience has a complex texture and that the truth about it is elusive. Few writers leave themselves so exposed to posterity as she has done. There is a sort of courage in it, just as there is courage in her frank admission, after the death of her husband, that Truth and Fiction were sometimes ‘indivisible’ in her mind.
Burney must have doubted that anyone, even her niece, would have read through all her papers – the residue, it must be remembered, of a much larger original archive. I have come to view the quantity of information that she left behind as an ironic challenge to anyone presuming to have the last word on this complex, wordy woman. As Fanny Burney understood all too well, ‘precise investigation of the interior movements by which I may be impelled’ was of questionable value, for, as she wrote in the rejected preface to Cecilia:
the intricasies of the human Heart are various as innumerable, & its feelings, upon all interesting occasions, are so minute & complex, as to baffle all the power of Language. What Addison has said of the Ways of Heaven, may with much more propriety & accuracy be applied to the Mind of Man, which, indeed, is
Dark & Intricate,
Filled with wild Mazes, & perplexed with Error.