Frances Burney born (1752 – 1840)

About:

Fanny, or Frances, Burney was a wicked satirist and writer of romantic but very funny novels which were to have a direct influence on Jane Austen and the great writers of the British domestic novel. She was a huge best-seller in her time, but remained fairly unknown in modern times until her recent ‘re-discovery’ since when she’s become highly fashionable - not least for the journals of her extraordinary life, including one of the earliest mastectomies, entirely without anaesthetic, having her first baby at the age of forty three and being there at the Battle of Waterloo.

Frances Burney was born in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, England in the summer of 1752. Her father was a highly respected musical historian and Frances was the third in a line of six very accomplished and academically gifted children. She was however slow to learn and it has been suggested that she may have been dyslexic. She was not therefore treated to the highly expensive education her father afforded the rest of her siblings. She did however mange to teach herself at about the age of eight not only to read, but to speak French and Italian and when at the age of ten, her mother died, she began what she would call her ‘scribblings’.

However, when she was fifteen her father remarried and the social pretensions (along with the fierce temper) of her new stepmother increased the pressures on Burney to cease her ‘unladylike’ writing. In a moment of high dudgeon she burnt the manuscript of her first novel – The History of Caroline Evelyn. She couldn’t resist writing however, and in 1778 she completed Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (the daughter of the previously burnt Caroline Evelyn). She persuaded her brother to take the manuscript to a London publisher’s in disguise and the novel was published anonymously. It was an immediate hit, becoming the must-read book amongst the upper classes, not least through the efforts of her father. He had, of course, been very unkeen on her publishing the novel but, as soon as it became clear that the novel was going to be a success, he used his position to ensure its distribution amongst the important literary and social figures of the day.

It is the questionable effect of her father’s presumably well meant influence on the rest of Burney’s career that has made her so popular amongst literary feminists – (along with her very witty satire on the fairly appalling roles doled out to the women of her times!). Evelina was the only one of her novels and plays to be written without the ‘help’ of her father and various other important literary figures such as Samuel Crisp and even Dr Johnson. Her natural wit and leaning toward satire and comedy were deemed by those around her, including her circle of bluestocking female cohorts, to be low and unbefitting a woman. In 1785, partly as a response to the huge popularity of her novels Burney was called up to the Court of King George III and offered the position of Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte (who was reputed to have greatly enjoyed Cecilia). Burney absolutely did not want to take the post but, her father’s influence won out again and she began a miserable five years of Court life, during which she found it increasingly impossible to write. She eventually persuaded her father to request her release from the Court and she returned to live with him.

She began to write again and in 1792 met Alexandre D’Arblay, General to the French revolutionary hero La Fayette, who had fled to London with many other early revolutionaries in response to Napoleon’s increasing grip on France. This time Burney resisted her father’s strong warnings against so lowly and penniless a match and the pair married in 1793. She was forty two years old and one year later they had a son – Alexander.

In 1796 Burney published Camilla, or a Picture of Youth, which made a fortune. She enjoyed a few merry years of wealth and success and contented family life and when in 1801 D’Arblay was offered a position in Napoleon’s Government, the family moved to Paris where they expected to remain for a year or so. However the outbreak of war between France and Britain intervened and trapped them there for ten years. During this time Burney developed breast cancer and underwent an astonishing mastectomy without anaesthetic.

Apart from a brief return to Britain to nurse her father (who died in 1814), Burney followed her husband through the many turns of Napoleon’s extraordinary campaigns in the early nineteenth century, including personal experience of The Battle of Waterloo. She wrote of her experiences, as she always did, in her superb journals which for many years were more renowned than the novels. But in 1818, D’Arblay contracted cancer and died and the sadly bereaved Burney returned home to Britain to be with her son who was studying at Cambridge. She lived until she was eighty eight, outliving even her son.

Burney’s novels, although wildly popular in her own time were all but forgotten and attention focussed on the brilliance of her letters and journals, but in recent times she has been well and truly ‘rediscovered’, and particular praise and attention has been lavished on Evelina. She is now becoming thought of in the same bracket as her immediate follower Jane Austen, whose admiration for Burney’s work extended to the taking of a title for one of her own moderately successful works from a particularly enjoyed line in Cecilia - ‘…if to pride and prejudice you owe your miseries…to pride and prejudice you will also owe their termination’.