ASECS, Cleveland: Frances Burney at Court, overturning how we see her life-writing

Windsor Castle, Henry VIII gateway (1775) by Paul Sandby (1731-1809)

Dear friends and readers,

A third blog on the ASECS at Cleveland, one which also continues a series I’ve been writing on Frances (Burney) D’Arblay’s life-writing. As with my previous, this is just on one session. The papers were so good I managed to take more detailed notes; the second half of this blog I dedicate to providing more context by summarizing a few recent papers which are overturning a perspective on Burney’s life-writing which prevented real analysis of what’s there from going forward: Burney (FBA) may be said to have written 4 novels, the 4 traditional ones (three very fat) and a 25 volume novelization of her life.

This is the conclusion I had come to after reading through the fifth volume of the Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (1782-83), as edited by Lars Troide and Stewart Cooke, which I’m now going through slowly. As I realized in front of me were writing from at least six different sets of years, all intertwined, some obviously rewritten, interpersed with letters by others (saved by Frances or provided by an editor or editors), and accompanied by notes from different editors, I began to wonder what it was I had in front of me and how many people at different times wrote it.

The “bouleversant” perspective as outlined below allows for a whole new way of approaching the life-writing. It becomes possible to apply to it techniques hitherto reserved for the fictions. Many of our close reading techniques (coming down ultimately from I.A. Richards) depend on the idea the text is imaginative, creative, and the sites or conventions of character, setting, theme (&c) seemed inappropriate for history based on some kind of factual truth. Now we can for example, look at how Frances D’Arblay used epistolarity in her final arrangement of her books. The real problem in treating his massive new “fiction” will be it’s so large. Critics and scholars will necessarily have to deal with a couple of volumes or one phase of her life at a time.

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Detail from Vermeer, A Lady Writing

The Burney Society session began at 9:45 and there were 3 papers. Lorna Clark’s “Burney’s Methods of Narrating the Court Experience”, a result of her long work on 2 volumes of the court journals, came first. A summary (as far as I could manage it):

Frances Burney (D’Arblay) is one of the UK’s great diarists; within a few years of her death, her life-writing began to be published, first by Charlotte Barnett, a sanitized censured abridged version of 6 volumes. Kate Chisholm expressed the traditional view that what they represent was the work of a reporter, a keen observer who witnessed so much.

A new preliminary view from Clark’s own work on 2 volumes is redefining the nature of the text, reshaping our view. Contrary to the view taken of her years at court, Ms Clark suggests that the most creative and crucial years of her writing years are those at court. Burney wrote more than at any other time. Dobson pointed out that the 5 years at court take up 2 1/2 of Barrett’s 6 volumes. If we look at our present 25 rescued ones, the court journals represent 25% (or 1/4). Though the court journals are presented as a chronological account written to the present moment (the phrase is first Richardson’s), that’s a fictional device. Burney wrote up her journals 12 to 15 months later; they are creative, diverge to make into wish fulfillment versions of what happened. She would hoard notes she made obsessively, compulsively. She was herself someone who loved spontaneity and found the obsessive control of the queen’s court killing. We can see how she built up her texts fro her reaction to a meeting with George Owen Cambridge (who she had fantasized about since 1782), which he instantly hastily retreated from. Burney evades this realty, streetches out the drama into several phases (referring later on to a heart-to-heart communication). She takes his avoidance as him conforming to customs, and hiding original serious intentions. It’s an artificially heightened, carefully crafted account. This process is repeated in her depiction of her encounters with rprosecutor, William Wyndham, at the trial of Hastings; she turns these into full-scale arguments about Hastings which she wins.

She has two people for her audience and critics of her court journals: her beloved sister, Susan Burney Phillips, and her close friend, Frederica Locke; these would arrive in instalments many months after the events had occurred. Susan would respond to the tale as if she didn’t know the present situation, but only in terms of what’s narrated, most of the time as if she didn’t know what was to come, as if it were a novel. Frances was actually producing a pathetic sorrowful text. She’d write of the early days of her relationshiop with Stephen Digby much later by which time Digby was already married. What we have is a memoir developed in tranquillity [using Wordsworth's not altogether appropriate term here]; not something written to the moment where she doesn’t know what the future will bring. Claire Harman uses the phrase “super-retrospective:” we have someone not letting go of the past.

We see her doing this in 1812 where she tries to catch up to what’s happening. Frances echoes Boswell: she felt she could enjoy nothing without relating it. Again there had been 10 years where she was removed from relations and friends, this time interned in France.

If you compare the actual manuscripts to Barrett’s edition, you disover she sanitized in favor of the bland. Barrett removed the intensely effusive, the trivial and petty, some purely family news; some harsh criticism from Hester Thrale Piozzi, from the woman who married Goldsworthy (another courtier); pruned tediousness, repetition; anything too obviously egoistic. Barrett marginalized the male attention FBA made central to her stories. The summer at Cheltenham where the relationship with Digby (as a kind of Orville) is so central is cut entirely, including sentimentalized discussions, his reading of love poetry to Burney, lyrical passages of serenity, tender scenes of parting. All expunged. What FBA likes most to write about is what is removed. What appears to be a journal of George III’s illness is a journal of Digby’s courtship of FBA, which is structured as a romantic comedy in the vein of Evelina and Cecilia.

What we have is multi-layered complex re-structured life-writing
adrift in time, someone writing intensely while in isolation. The 5 years at court improved her technique enormously; she worked out something of a system for writing. After she was released from court, she quickly recovered from her depression. The court years were crucial, and what has been suppressed was we have here one of the UK’s great fictional writers masquerading as a diarist.

Ball at St James, 1786, Queen’s birthday

Elaine Bander’s paper, “Fanny, or a not-so-young lady’s entrance into the world,” was an account of FBA’s time at court from a perspective very different from that of Hester Davenport.

FBA entered the court at age 34; she was separated from her family, with no hope of marriage, her father delighted; Mary Delaney wanted FBA near her. Frances expressed her intense anguish to Susan alone; it was an exile from the country retreats at Chessington with “Daddy Crisp” where she had been so happy (a home free of the stepmother); at Mickleham with Susan, at Norbury Park with the Lockes. The ritual and customs of the court meant she had to devise strategies to get alert time to herself. the 1st year: a primary scene of battle was Mrs Schwellenberg’s tea-table. Visitors preferred to talk to Burney; FBA much preferred to spend her time with Mary Delaneybut was not able to. The way Burney survived was to sit there silently, which shocked Mary Delaney when Delaney saw it. Frances told Susan she tried to free herself by remaining aloof.

The 2nd year Burney renewed her resolve to make the best of her life; Peggy Planta (another courtier) told her they all longed to be free of the tea-table, but Delaney warned Burney not to try to make changes without the queen’s permission. In her earlier life Burney liked social assemblies, was eager to make new acquaintances; this delight in the world continued until 1784-86 when she begins to express frustration with the duties of social life. Burney began to find uncongenial the preoccupation with what’s expensive, dress and surveillance. These years saw the conflict with Hester Thrale emerge; Burney would not visit her in Bath, could not acknowledge that Piozzi was acceptable. So Hester Thrale Piozzi dropped Frances. George Owen Cambridge seems to be a real suitor, but he never declared himself. They enjoyed one another’s company sometimes deliriously; as years went on the relationship mutated; he was invited to parties and then for months he’d be absent. Frances felt the bluestockings watching her became insupportable.

So Frances began a campaign to extricate herself from her father’s socializing; she would say how tired she was. One 1784 letter shows her longing for quiet, to be by herself in the quiet, Norbury seems a refuge from George Owen Cambridge too. This new replacemtn for Chessington was lost when the Queen’s offer came; it would be 5 long hard years before she regained it.

Sandy, Windsor Forest scene

Geoffrey Sills’s paper, “Journalizing as epistolary fiction” carried the story to 1789, the year of the Court journal he is editing.

Building on Lorna Clark’s paper in the Age of Johnson on “Epistolarity in Burney,” he showed her characteristic techniques and moods as an epistolary narrator. Her writing and sending journals to Susan was more than therapeutic; she “aimed to enlist her readers’ sympathy, to reshape reality, not reflect it.” The journal’s real emphasis is the romance; FB ignores US and French revolutions, and the madness of George III mostly.

Lorna Clark tells the story of Digby’s courtship of FB. Digby’s family was socially well above Burney’s, but he was the 5th child in the family so not about to inherit a lot of money. His wife died; as he appears in the journal, he is pessimistic and melancholy when it comes to thinking about achieving happiness in life. Life resembles the “grotto of grief” in a Spectator paper of 1712. Burney’s taste did not always turn to the gothic; when she heard Walpole’s Myserious Mother read aloud, she declared it “truly dreadful” from “the atrocious guilt:” the play’s themes include incest between a son and mother, and Fb showed an indignant aversion to this “wilful” story. Another courtier, M. Charles de Guiffardiere (the queen’s French reader called by her Mr Turbulent) troubled her too with his sense of the depravity of human nature; he once grabbed her wrists to see what she was writing so she erased what she had.

The summer at Cheltenham enabled her to escape Guiffardiere and construct Digby as an ideal hero. George III’s illness figures as part of her romance. Digby burnt whatever papers he wrote; Burney presents him as a potential serious lover who stays in her room to escape the socially stultifying world; she records her emotional conflicts at night. By 1789 she was looking to Digby to rescue her; the possibility was remote; she was told about Charlotte Gunning but refused to believe Digby would marry Gunning; she insisted to herself he would remain unmarried except if forced by his family or Miss Gunning. But in December 1789 a letter from the queen with a wedding present for Digby forced her to face reality.

The several phases of her presentation of Hastings’s trial: Hastings had come to stand for ruthless colonialism; it had been expected that Pitt would stop the impeachment, but he did not. The trial lasted from 1788 for 7 years; a third to 2/3s of the peopele had died and the tide turned against making Hastings a scapegoat. Claire Harman compares FB’s recording to a transcript that appeared in the news; instead of seeing that she is miraculously getting down word-for-word just as the reporter, it could be she took the report and rewrote what she had. This enabled her to pose as a chronicle of the time; yet we know that she sent off some version to her sister & Fredy Locke quickly after the trial scenes were done. At the same time Susan was sending very long very well-written journal letters to Frances.

The texts are prisms, many sided narratives where you are locked into the stories, but once you go outside and have someone else’s take or evidence, it contradicts FBA. Charles Burney loved the second wife whom Frances claimed he never liked.

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Sandby, Waterfall — a watershed

The discussion afterward was lively and provocative (I did think of Cecilia’s project in Book 5 of that novel to leave off wasting time with “undermining” people and read much more), but I thought instead of recounting what was said I’d cite a number of texts by the people giving papers and others which argue for the same or supporting points of view on FBA’s life writing.

Claire Harman’s literary biography on Frances Burney D’Arblay is the first book centrally to use the idea that the life-writing is brilliant imaginative rewriting and journalizing. This was very courageous of her because at the time Lars Troide was the controlling force of the editing staff and he insisted in his volumes and essays that the texts were all historical records, perhaps fixed a bit, but essentially history. He kept to the story of a miraculous memory and that line of argument dominated as did he for at least a decade. Harman’s is also a very enjoyable insightful book which unlike all but Hemlow does justice to Frances D’Ablay’s later years. Julia Epstein’s The Iron Pen had voiced the idea without elaborating.

Lorna Clark has three articles in this vein: “The Diarist as Novelist: Narrative Strategies in the Journals and Letters of Frances Burney,” English Studies in Canada, 27 (2001):283-302; “Epistolarity in Frances Burney,” Age of Johnson 20 (2010):193-222; “Dating the Undated: Layers of Narrative in Frances Burney’s Court Journals,” Life-Writing Annual 3 (2012):121-42. “Epistolary” goes over the use of epistolary techniques like those we find in Richardson, which partly accounts for the immediacy of the texts, as well as how the writing of the texts themselves becomes part of the story. “Dating the Undated” seems to me the most important because there Ms Clark from her long experience of editing shows how FBA wrote her narratives much later in time, sent them to Susan who responded as a good critic-novel reader; the two were collaborating in the re-writing of FBA’s life “in a way that answered her deepest needs.” A “turmoil” is continually going on beneath the surface of all her journals; in the court years she “remains deeply traumatized and fixated on the failure of her first love affair, and her rejection by George Cambridge. When she realized that Digby would not rescue her, she broke down altogether and began her campaign to escape through illness.

Earlier accounts include Ingrid Tieken Bouvan Ostade,”Stripping the Layers: Language and content of Fanny Burney’s Early Journals,” English Studies, 72:2 (1991):146-59. Remarkably because based just on a real reading of the first of Lars Troide’s Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, Ostade comes to the same conclusions as Clark and all the others I’ve cited here. She carefully distinguishes the different layers which is helpful. Here I should not omit John Wiltshire’s “Journals and Letters” in the recent Cambridge Companion to FB, ed. Peter Sabor where based on 3 of Troide and Cooke’s EJL, Joyce Hemlow and her team’s 12 volumes and filling in with Ellis and Dobson’s editions from the papers and Barrett Wiltshire sees clearly that what we have is a many layered multi-voice fictionalized life-writing.

Paul Sandby, an untitled genre scene

I had high hopes for two further articles which disappointed me. One by Kathryn Kris, “A 70 Year Follow-up of a Childhood Learning Disability: the case of Fanny Burney,” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1983 (34):637-53, I thought might be of real help, from a psychoanalytical periodical, supposedly showing her compulsion to write the result of her 8 year dislexia and the humiliations it caused; it made a little stir in Burney studies, where people acknowledged she was “onto something,” but then anxiously hurried to deny FBA was disabled permanently or even at all. The essay itself was written in such a mild tactful it was almost useless. It didn’t convince because Kris was unwilling frankly to discuss FBA’s lifelong writing of her life as a fictionalized novel where much that we have is made up and starting with the court years written much later with the addition new habit of going back to earlier years and rewriting these to some extent too.

I also thought I’d like Linda Lang Peralta’s “Clandestine Delight: Frances Burney’s Life-Writing,” in Women’s Life-Writing: Finding Voice/Building Community (Bowling Green State University Press, 1997):23-43. Peralta’s idea — very reasonable — was that the persona or mood and attitude of FBA changed over time. I’d noticed this many times and know I prefer the later FBA, especially the woman who wrote the journal-letters of her time in Europe where she follows, stays near, and finally rescues her husband from Waterloo. Her later writing is more emotional, franker, more openly melancholy and yearning. But Peralta is taken by the work of Mary Field Belenky which purports to give a scientific documentary basis to Carol Gilligan’s book on a different psychology and development for women. The problem is it’s not scientific; Belenky claims too she did this working out with a team of women who wonderfully came to the same conclusions. It’s all Utopian (one can see that some of the women dominated over the others) and the schemes are too rigid and upbeat. The essay is good when it does into specifics, e.g., accounting for say Burney at the time she rejects Madame de Stael upon the advice of her father, but as a general account is not persuasive.

Among other things, what is happening is the Burney people are admitting that John Wilson Croker’s famous attack on Burney that it was impossible for her to have remembered so much, and the work was a fiction. Also the assertions of the few who had themselves witnessed the events told in the diaries or knew people who had and had told them something of them that FBA’s account was very far from an accurate record. We need to say that the value of the writing is in its imaginative realization.

Ellen

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ASECS, Cleveland: how to write a biography & women’s travel memoirs

Sir, the biographical part of writing is what I like best — Johnson as quoted by Boswell

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve written about the social life and place of this year’s ASECS meeting in Cleveland; now I’ll turn to some notes on the sessions and papers. I discover that I have rather more notes than usual on three related sessions: Biographies, travel-writing, and “Frances Burney at court” (this combines life-, travel and fiction writing). So I’ll begin by transcribing my notes from just two of these three panels and on another day go on to Frances D’Arblay (once again).

I’m with Johnson: there’s nothing I enjoy reading more than a superb literary biography or someone’s life-writing when well done; and I think the author or artist remains central to how we understand their art. All the forms of life-writing as an art first emerged in the long 18th century. . I bring together two really marvelous and informative sessions on writing biography and 18th century women travelers.

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Charles-Joseph Natoire (1700-77)

Eight in the morning on Thursday and after pouring myself a coffee in the central meeting area, I went off to a room on the side to listen to five people tell of their experience in writing a biography. Reed Benhamou was the chair and began: how does one write a biography? She wanted to learn things about the authors she was devoting her life to and for herself she felt she had to like her subject. So she chose Charles-Joseph Natoire, a French painter and director of the French academy in Rome. She wanted to re-insert him among his peers, and she examined known cases where he was accused of unfairness, bigotry, expelling a student unfairly.

Vin Carretta who wrote a life of Olauda Equiano (using the autobiography) and edited the poems of and wrote a biography of Phillis Wheatley. He soon found he needed a methodology: “trust but verify.” One of his subjects had written an autobiography and so he had to re-construct the puzzle where pieces are missing using this text. You have to cope with problematic and contradictory evidence. What do you do with critics today? Prof Carretta felt the best biographies move straightforwardly, and the problem is you can be tempted to fill your narrative too strongly with reception history or allow yourself to spend too much time answering literary critics. He mentioned that people had looked at Equiano as a precursor of Frederick Douglas; he wanted to show how Equiano had dealt with previous biography. As to Phillis Wheatley, With enslaved women their identity is reached through property papers; married, their existence can be buried. You must turn to her poetry.

Gene Hammond wanted to write about Swift as a humanist. His problems included what do you do with a series of letters widely apart in time. Where is it best to cover something? Where is it best to cover something? Swift is said to have been deserted by his mother between the ages 6 and 18; he looked at shipping records to see if she ever visited him; he found Swift’s grandmother did. Esther was illegitimate and thought Swift would marry her; they probably had an affair, and when he didn’t marry her, she threatened blackmail or to kill herself. When Swift later in life tells of his young years, you must put the information in the young years, yet the writing reflects the time it’s written in. How seriously do you take letters? His most powerful influential years were 1710-14 and later he tried to help those women who wanted to to flee the noxious town. Biography is also a story of several characters.

Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz (1772–1816

Kathryn Libin told a story about how after the communist party lost control (1989), she was hired to come to Czechoslovakia to inventory the private music papers of the wealthy Lobkowicz family. She asks us to imagine her sitting on the floor of the local large library surrounded by the papers of a Prince Lobkowicz of the Habsburg empire who had been Beethoven’s patron. The family had collected thousands of sheets of music. There had been no archivist. The archive is rich beyond belief and she has been formulating a chronology. Her difficulties included access, the ancientness of some of the materials. Her talk centered on the actual circumstances in which a research project is carried out and how that affects what the biographer can write.

Anastasia Robinson (1692-1755)

Kathryn Lowere’s subject is the 18th century soprano and actress, Anastasia Robinson. There is a story Robinson was born in Italy, her father died, and she had gone into a theater for first time in a long time. Lowere found fashion to be helpful chronological evidence. Anastasia was involved in Queen Anne’s court as a vocalist-musician and when the planes went down she broadened her appeal by learning to sing Italian opera too. This to carry on earning a living. She knew a lot of people (Mary Delany, Italian diplomats), lived in an English nunnery; her Catholicism is often marginalized in biographical sketches of her. Her letters are scattered everywhere (she is known to have asked Handel to rewrite her letters).

There was then general discussion among the panelists, and ideas thrown out: epigraphs can help you start a chapter; when a person’s life has gaps, you have to decide how much context outside to give. Who do you think your core readership is going to be controls what you write. Every biographer has to deal with a series of specific issues. Leave no stone unturned. You have the right to take control of your narrative. You can treat something as a mystery as long as you are forthright about it. When and where people are born limits their life’s choices. You can write a biography of someone from different people’s points of view.

The audience did join in: a few people told of their projects and the art of biography was defended as the basis of understanding a writer or his or her text in fundamental common sense ways. I told of my work on later 17th century women’s life-writing, Anne Finch, and how I had to have a story of a life in my mind to annotate Anne Murray Halkett’s remnant autobiography and the poems I have translated by Colonna and Gambara.

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Later that day (11:30) I went to a marvelously informative session on a form of writing related to biography and autobiography: travel-writing is a special form of memoir. This particular set were by women, where 3 were seen as offering knowledge of “exotic” places (Fay, Clive, Falconbridge), 1 seemed wildly adventurous (Ashbridge) and a last by someone thought to be a poetic genius and is filled with intelligent political thought (Radcliffe). They are all joined by the reality that what influences them most on their journey is the male closest to them. Abusive male sexuality, a domineering presence, or (in the case of the lucky Radcliffe), a kindly husband who is equally intellectual but just as cautious. This relationship remains what counts most — unless the woman goes out on her own.

Melissa Antonucci spoke about Elizabeth Ashbridge’s (1713-55) conversion narrative as moving into “self-authorship.” Ms Antonucci felt that women who move away from home to another place, usually stay, and develop for themselves a new world and life. When a girl Ashbridge had a love affair that made her resolve to elope with him; he died young, and what was left were painful memories. She found herself financially destitute, homeless, and relied on neighbors until she left for Ireland for the first time. She seems to have remarried a stocking weaver, and had a conversion experience into Quakerism. She went to the US through indentured servitude, and when she got there was sold illegally by a man called Sullivan whom she did not love. They moved to Rhode Island, and again she joins with someone who is not good for her. She and her husband kept moving, partly because the husband wanted to jolt her out of her religious piety. They go from Boston to Pennsylvania. A story is told of how her husband tried to get her to dance at an inn and she refused. They went on to Freehold as teachers, again among Quakers, and he threatens to kill her. They moved again and she genuinely tries to reform him, but he gets drunk, enlists, moves to Cuba. He died. She returned to Ireland and became an itinerent Quaker preacher. Ms. Antonucci suggested an early exclusion from the dominant community had led to Ashbridge choosing quakerism and here she could “share the light” with like-minded people.

Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823)

JoEllen Delucia discussed Ann Radcliffe’s A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794. Ms Delucia suggested this text feels anomalous after her gothics, but that this text has gothic, picturesque and sublime description. Radcliffe availed herself of antiquarian sources and history, and held onto her native tongue. Mr Delucia felt this book was written to change the way people were regarding Radcliffe who wanted to present herself as British foremost. In her journeys Radcliffe comes close to genuine want, hunger, and does not seek to be picturesque. She goes through zones of war and sieges and suggests that as a nation we are an artificial construct, easily dismantled bit by bit. She also knew fear: she and her husband were stopped at the Switzerland boundaries, and the roughness with which they were treated made both of them fear imprisonment in a place where the individual has no or few rights. So they turned round and went home. As far as she gets Switzerland is described sublimely. In the later journal (it’s not clear when she went) through English lake district she was seen to anticipate Wordsworth and looks at her books once again and seeks history and place. Ms Delucia’s insight was to notice how the aesthetic categories of Radcliffe’s usual modes dissolve away once she moves into an imaginative passionate encounter with experience, history, past people.

I suggested afterward that the Journey book is not anomalous but rather another way of presenting the same violent and disquieting matter. Even in the lake district she visits dungeons and shows how rituals are forms of tyranny. Ms Delucia agreed that the Journey book is another face of the same gothic artist.

Henrietta Clive, Countess of Powis (1758-1830)

Mona Narain told us about two women British travel-writers who went to India: first, Eliza Fay. Fay’s book was published posthumously. Fay was alone, a daughter of a sailor; she had married “up”, a lawyer who hoped to prosper with her. The marriage was unhappy; he had an Indian mistress and child. She conveys her personal feelings. When she and her husband were imprisoned for a short time, she seemingly couldn’t believe treatment could be this bad. Later she finds her husband cannot make a living as a colonist, most cope with his intemperate behavior, and slowly return home (England). She discovers she is more at risk from her husband’s failures than from Indian people about them. Henrietta Clive published more than her travel book; at the time of her arrest by her husband she was reading Birds of Passage. Gender is but one valence by which we understand a travel book: class position, reasons for travel, stance in writing all affect and shape the process and thus product. She shows us the national pleasures, cultural aspirations, and argues for spontaneity and heterogeneity. Her aspiration is everywhere. Seh married Edward, Lord Clive’s oldest son who was appointed governor of Madras; they travelled richly with a huge retinue to impress the Nawab. Nonetheless Lady Clive wanted to return home but they had to stay to recover costs and get out of debt. She learns material circumstances are not enough as a basis for existence and that she was fooled by Mary Montagu’s Turkish Letters. Her framework with her husband fell apart too. For both women male sexuality was central to their experience, and they find they can activate their own agency only by travelling alone.

Elizabeth Zold’s topic was Anna Marie Falconbridge’s (1769-1816?) 2 voyages to Sierrra Leone. For the rest of this summary see comments.

Ellen

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The problematic nature of life-writing & Frances (Burney) D’Arblay’s on-going ever-changing epistolary novel

Frontispiece of an inexpensive 1854 7 volume reprint of Charlotte Barrett’s edition of her aunt’s life-writing

Dear friends and readers,

A careful reading of the 5th volume of the Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, 1782-83, ed. Lars Troide, Stewart Cooke, gets me thinking about the multi-level problematic nature of all life-writing, especially Frances D’Arblay’s.

I am wondering if this or the other volumes can be said to have had a single or even a double author. Volume 5 has several including Frances at several stages of her life. This is not just a matter of how far Frances D’Arblay later re-wrote her early life-writing books or at the time made up what she was putting down, but when did she do it. There is the year of the first brief entries: 1782-83 when she was Burney. There is the time after her husband’s death in 1817 when he conjured her to go back to the life-writing and write up everything. Then she is writing in the 1830s, when, as D’Arblay, she is known to have rewritten much or written up for the first time and did destroy much of her father’s writing insofar as she could and wrote her own autobiography as his biography. I’ve seen so much evidence to show she revised and imagined over and over, coming back with inserts at a later time again and again. Frances as Burney and then D’Arblay inserts the letters she was responding to or talking about; she inserts letters that shed light on what her letter is about; she is thinking of us, her later reader she’s planning on. She destroys thinking of us too.

She dies and others get to work. 1841 when Charlottte Barrett
made the first edition and used the term “Diaries.” She emphasizes the Evelina, Streatham and Court journal years. Then the later 19th century, with an edition of earlier journals than CB started with by Annie Raine Ellis, and the new re-editions by Dobson. The small amount of the later years known are again re-done, this time rescuing much destroyed or half-destroyed material in the 1980s, with three different teams doing it — under Joyce Hemlow. Then in the 21st century under Lars Troide, there’s a return to 1768 and a newly determined “full book.” Now with Troide’s retirement, Peter Sabor and Stewart Cooke seem to have taken over as general editors. Each time there’s something of a name change.

Not only are we back to Frances since the retierment of Troide, the silence over how much is made up, or the stubborn insistence that Frances had a miraculous memory such as is rarely seen so that we are to believe if not her every word, her every nuance or implication.

The kind of recent changes I’m thinking about is seen in both Betty Rizzo’s heavily-annotated fourth volume (Streatham, 1780-1781) and Lars Troide’s 5th. Just one small example, Troide (and Stewart?) seem to belive that Hester Thrale and Frances Burney were not that close friends at the time — I see all sort of tones and evidence that there really had been intimate liking and trust and closeness. Well, what is done is Troide inserts in a footnote a diary entry by Hester Thrale Piozzi 17 days after she has sent strong praise to Burney about Cecilia. The letter to Burney shows Hester remembering the characters, living through them, admiring this and that in the book, showing that it came alive in her mind. The footnote (not to Burney) is strongly critical and suggest the book is limited: the types of characters are time-bound and the novel will not live. The effect is to make Hester seem insincere when she’s writing Burney. This is making a different story from the one we’d come away with were we not to have this note.

It’s the insert that makes this effect. There are so many different kinds of motives for these inserts and erasures. I’ve now read a long one by Betty Rizzo where she (in effect) lambasts James Burney for his rebellious behavior which was but one reason his promotion was delayed. In comparison, Troide is silent when Frances tells Susan about Jem’s struggles and politicking.

Eventually Susan’s husband so outrageously mistreated her, it’s not exaggerating to say he caused her early death

And I’ve noticed that Frances does not reprint her sister, Susan’s letters nor insert them, and the editors have followed suit. They can now use them for a separate two volume edition of Susan’s life-writing, but originally they probably just imitated Frances. But why did she leave these out? Was her sister quickly not as happy as she asserts? it seems so if her sister’s need for her and then the other sister come to subsitute is a sign.

John Wiltshire in a particularly insightful essay in The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney on the journals and letters in a throw-away line says the editors have continued the tradition, begun by Barrett, of making an epistolary novel by many people, constructed out of materials gathered together. I own a copy of Barrett’s book and read much of it some years ago. To me it read like a mid-19th century epistolary novel, differentiated from others by the determined innocence of the perspective of the editor. Wiltshire’s comment reminded me of Richardson who said writing Clarissa gave him such pleasure because he could personate so many voices and then the reader could enter into contrasted characters. These modern editors think of themselves as so objective, trying to present truth’s full complexity. But these are books in the tradition of the niece, Charlotte Barrett’s 6 volume book?

So who is novel-making here?

Come to that in Burney D’Arblay’s case of voluminous writing, to what extent are the novels life-writing? In the 5th volume, when Frances finishes her re-writing of Cecilia, her corrections, and it is published, she refers her sister, Susna, to Cecila’s “project” in the 5th volume of the novel where Cecilia vows not to waste her time on ignorant “underminers of existence” (people who are vain, proud, people who drive you to network, to waste time) but instead follow her own spirit in reading and enjoying the deeper pleasures of existence among friends and in solitude. Unfortunately that’s just what Frances Burney didn’t do when she took a job at court. But she means to. The section shows she wrote Cecilia as an alter-ego.

So where does life-writing end and how are we to judge it? I have yet to read the article suggesting an early experience of disability partly accounts for Frances’s long-time compulsive writing. So much to do, so much to think about when writing a review of such enrichened life-writing.

Of course I have in mind what we’ve seen in Austen’s life-writing, only there the problematical nature of the life-writing takes on a very different aspect: among other things, she didn’t live to doctor the stuff, others did …

Ellen

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What’s in a pseudonym? a shared attitude of mind. Francesca Scriblerus & Mrs Ashton Dennis

The 9 Living Muses by Richard Samuel (1779).

What’s in a pseudonym? I’ve discovered that Frances refers to herself as Francesca Scriblerus — and more than once. In the first context Burney (at the time, 1778) is inserting herself into the male satirical culture: in a letter she mocks and distances herself from Bluestockings who are said to be authorities and commenting on women she, Burney, has met and commented on. Gossip gets about.

We might think of Burney’s (dangerous, insulting her father and Crisp thought) turning the Nine Muses into Witlings as her form of Dunciad.

Recent production

In 1809 Austen used a pseudnoym too. She signed herself MAD, Mrs Ashton Dennis. In context her letter is written in hot indignation to the publisher holding onto a fair copy of NA as Susan. In contrast to Burney, the awkward insider, Austen is the outsider, she who cannot get published, writhing figure excluded from the popular publications that the Scriblerians had trashed.

Austen’s whole career may be seen as that of a woman battling with ridiculous windwill heroines. She turns Lennox’s Female Quixote

Illustration to an edition of Lennox’s Female Quixote: Arabella deluded

into Love and Freindship:

Joan Hassall illustration (1973)

Francesca Scriblerus and MAD did not see themselves as writers of romance. When we satirize though it has many motives, and one of them is to feel powerful over those who alienate us. It has it real limits. Frances was not permitted to stage or even share The Witlings. The publisher wrote a sneering threatening letter and the NA manuscript was not returned until years later when Jane’s brothers turned up and paid the man back his ten pounds.

Ellen

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Frances (Burney) d’Arblay: “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose … “; Thaddeus & McMaster & Kris

Frances Burney by her cousin, Edward Francesco Burney (c. 1784-85)

Friends and readers,

My subjects: We ought to be calling “Fanny Burney” Frances D’Arblay with Burney in parenthesis because of the long mistakenlly Anglo nomenclature — the choice of “Burney” privileges her English family and Anglo-side; a review of Thaddeus’s Literary Life (good on criticism, but presentist; excellent article by McMaster on Camilla, and Kathryn Kris’s insightful article on Frances as having a disability: the article has needed explanatory power.

It’s time to confide something: it’s not just the reading over the past two weeks that has brought to the surface my conviction that we ought to be calling Fanny Burney Frances d’Arblay; rather seeing that Burneyites are still fighting over this, and coming across different ways of referring to Miss Burney, I decided I might as well stop this discretion which has made me chose the half-way house of Fanny Burney D’Arblay. I agree we can no longer call her Madame d’Arblay, the name she apparently choose for her memoirs as brought out by her niece, Charlotte Barrett. Certainly we’re not going to go around referring to her as “Frances Piochard d’Arblay, otherwise La Comtesse veuve Piochard d’Arblay,” the way she signed herself in her last quarter century of life. But the great happiness of her life began at her marriage, she called herself d’Arblay ever after, she chose Frances for public life. Burney in parenthesis preserves the tradition of her as Burney for scholars. I suggest it was chosen to make her sound English and differentiate her from French women writers and emphasize her family and father. Since then there’s been readers calling themselves Burneyites and using the parenthesis keeps them in the picture (they would not want to be D’Arblayites and it’s too late anyway); it does preserve the link central to her life of her brilliant clan.

You think I’m mad. Have a look at the Burney Centre website at McGill. I am morally persuaded that the Burney team did not go on to do a 6th Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney when Lars Troide retired because they wanted to change her name. They skipped the two years and renamed what was to be the 7th in the set as The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney until 1791, when Joyce Hemlow’s later 12 volume Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney begins. They will then return to the end of the story of George Owen Cambridge’s ambiguous romancing of Frances Burney and the tragic misery of the lead-in to her taking up the position of Keeper of Robes for Charlotte, queen of George III, to be called Additional Journals and Letters of Frances Burney. In the introduction to my Vol 5 she is no longer called Fanny even if the title of the volume to be uniform is Early Letters and Journals of Fanny Burney. She is Frances (Fanny) Burney.

But it’s hypocritical to leave off the last name she wanted too. I suppose the Madame d’Arblay grates as the Victorian icon, but we can drop the Madame as is nowadays done for 17th through 19th century French gentry women of letters. Fanny Burney d’Arblay is contradictory. I have discovered here and there a simply “Frances d’Arblay” in my reading.

And we might as well admit she loved big hats. When she does not have a big hat on in her portraits, she wears a wig and her hair piled so high, it’s like a crown.

Frances is also drawn by her cousin in a straw bonnet: these from The Duchess (Keira Knightley and Hayley Atwell, Georgiana and Bess Foster)

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From Juniper Hall: the layout of the world that allowed Frances to create a life she liked

The last couple of days I more or less finished Janice Farrar Thaddeus’s Frances Burney: A literary life, read again in chapters and essays and other books, most notably the best essay I’ve read on Burney in a while: Juliet McMaster’s “The Silent Angel: Impediments to Female Expression in Frances Burney’s Novel,” Studies in the Novel, 21:3 (1989):235-252. I thought I’d report on these tonight — to help my thinking.

Thaddeus book has value: she does situate Frances Burney in the context of recent literary critical traditions, and for each of her sections she briefly reviews the critical outlook for each novel or phase of d’Arblay’s existence. Since Joyce Hemlow’s restoration of Frances Burney’s life and later papers, the feminist movement has rescued Frances; some of the finest essays and work on her has been by feminists. It begins in the 1970s with Rose Marie Cutting’s “defiant woman” and her revaluation of The Wanderer.

Alongside this is the supposed apolitical criticism. The first stage (Hemlow, Sherburn, Hester Davenport, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Kate Chisholm): This gives us a Fanny who enacts a conduct-book woman. “The fear of doing wrong” is what controls her behavior. In her Imagining a Self, Spacks was able to use a reading of the dynamics of fear in Burney to elevate the value of the novels over the journals and diaries, take The Wanderer seriously: “more clearly [much more] than the letters and diaries, the novels betray her anger at the female condition.” She was unable to “integrate her deep perceptions of the female condition into a believable fiction and instead set up fiction as a debate between defiant insightful women and silent exemplary conduct-book heroines who suffer a helluva lot.

Second stage is a double Burney emphasizing the violence underlying the controlled surface. Now it’s fear responding to outside forces. Repressed desire also creates narratives where the point of view that matters comes out indirectly — in the masculine” Mrs. Selwyn, the outspoken Mrs. Arlbery, and the rebellious Elinor Joddrel. In the novels “volcanic spillage produced when female desire is yoked to the service of female propriety.” Here we have Julia Epstein and Kristina Staub’s books.

Third stage might be called finessing it: the many-sided Burney, “protean, wildness, striking sudden ranges (especially in the fiction), repressed undersides, we get not just “comic individual aberration,” but grotesque and macabre symptoms of society’s own perverseness.” Claudia Johnson, Margaret Anne Doody (the best), Barbara Zonitch; a way of reading the plays (Barbara Darby)

Thaddeus says the task now (hers) is to bring all three Burneys into one: the one fearing to do wrong, the one repressing rage, the one unleasing it. Having now read her book I have to say while she does in each of her chapters try to justify all outlooks, her real thrust is to show us a 20th century strong careerist: her opening story exemplifying d’Arblay through D’Arblay’s winning out over a customs officer and keeping her manuscript through nuanced manipulation and tenacity says it all. Frances as businesswoman recurs repeatedly.

In her urge to make d’Arblay “like us” Thaddeus’s occasionally absurd: she declares how Frances must’ve love her husband’s poem, “Happy Fingers” (published only in the 21st century) about the joys of mutual masturbation (pp 111-12). It was found among papers apart from those Frances controlled. If this poem tells us how the pair managed not to have any more children after the birth of one son (Frances was 42 and could presumably have gotten pregnant a couple more times), it’s egregiously obvious she would have been mortified to see this written down. She might have just pasted it over as in his handwriting; OTOH, she burnt and cut and destroyed papers by her beloved sister, Susan and her father (there though I’m with Doody and see repressed hatred even, a desire to wipe out the small mean mind of the man who had shown an endless willingness to allow her life, writing career, emotional needs to be crushed).

Thaddeus cannot bring all three Frances’s together (she opts for Frances), for she basically skips the journals and letters which she appears not to value. She has a long separate chapter just on the admittedly dreadful as dramas plays — which she says Frances wrote because she knew such writing when successful brought in more money. Did it? The life-writing is important for historians (p. 101). She will admit Frances “theatricalised” her dialogues in her journals (p. 52) but then treat them as literally factual documents. For 23 years after her husband’s death as she rewrote the manuscripts, she was revising facts. I suggest the passionate interjections of this prose (e.g., pp 321-22) are a woman re-living as heroine’s agony and heroism the prosaic realities of her life. Thaddeus “may trust” her as she catches each coach seconds before it leaves because she finds the value of the journals can be only in their historicity and say her behavior examples of courage in the face of hazards unspeakable or daily (p. 223). The truth is she was romancing, creating the elegiac, the satiric, the people all around her adulating her and transparently making up to others (Mrs Delany before the Duchess of Portland).

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Said to be an unknown lady dressed as Evelina by John Hoppner (1758-1810)

I’m giving the jist of Juliet McMaster’s “The Silent Angel: Impediments to Female Expression in Frances Burney’s novels,” Studies in the Novel, 21:3 (1989):235-252

McMasters says “To examine Burney ‘s concern with expression, I find, is to arrive at a further feminist reading. For the impediments to expression that she presents with such variety and vividness in her novels are peculiar to women, and a source of agonizing distress to each of her heroines … their fables have dramatized the injustices which by good fortune they survive.”

Burney “won’t make her heroines feminists, or overtly be one herself. Instead she creates heroines who suffer under the social sanctions that maintain women’s subordination, and are conscious of them as disabilities; but like their author they abide by them …”

From the Early Journals and Letters:

O! how I hate this vile custom which obliges us to make slaves of ourselves! … [my ellipsis] Yet those who shall pretend to defy this irksome confinement of our happiness, must stand accused of incivility,?breach of manners?love of originality,?and… what not. But, nevertheless… they who will nobly dare to be above submitting to chains their reason disapproves, they shall I always honor if that will be of any service to them …

From McMaster:

Her heroines are not authors, but they too are made to feel guilty about self expression. Propriety and their authority figures declare that they must never tell their love, even though their happiness and often that of the men they love depends on their declaration. They abide by the prohibition, but it takes its toll in their emotional stability, and produces severe distress, neurosis and even madness. There are other reasons, too, for their silence. Often they must withhold explanations of their behavior, even when revelation is crucial to them, in order to shield some third party (always a male, and usually a brother); or they dare not speak for fear of provoking male violence (usually a duel). These are the typical ordeals of Burney’s heroines. Their lips must be sealed, and because of the men. One aspect of Burney’s growing sympathy with the silenced woman is her progressive disenchantment with male authority …

The text that most makes McMaster’s case is Camilla:

In Camilla the hero, Edgar Mandlebert, intends to be, like Lord Orville, both lover and moral guide. But the emphasis shifts from his pleasure in promoting Camilla’s right conduct to his desire for her unquestioning obedience for its own sake. By the end of the novel he has more need to reform than she; and he must finally admit that his conduct has been “a fever of the brain, with which reason had no share.”11 The novel presents besides a whole array of defective authority figures of the older generation, including Edgar’ s mentor Dr. Marchmont, a bitter misogynist, the absurd pedant Dr. Orkborne, and one female, the spiteful governess Miss Margland …

Between the writing of Cecilia and Camilla Frances Burney experienced for herself, and in an acute form, a relationship in which expression was painfully inhibited: The young clergyman George Cambridge paid her marked attentions; Frances responded, and everybody expected them to make a match of it. But, for whatever reasons, he failed to exercise his male prerogative of choice. Agonized under the scrutiny of curious onlookers, Frances had to act as though she didn’t care, and treat him with a proud aloofness, as Cecilia treats Delvile. According to her biographer, Joyce Hemlow, the situation was painful on both sides, torture” on hers. A timely explanation on the state of their feelings would no doubt have cleared the air and eased them both. In her next relationship she resolved to be less inhibited by convention and the spectators.15 This change in her position informs Camilla, which is a long and bitter consideration of the burden of silence imposed on the woman. Too long, perhaps. Some modern readers have been apt to agree with Jane Austen in noting a certain laboring to “keep [the lovers] apart for five Volumes.”16 But Burney is giving full treatment to this particular female difficulty.

For the woman in love, according to Camilla’s father, mere silence is not enough. She must guard against any inadvertent revelation, by any sign whatever, for “There are so many ways of communication independent of speech” (p. 360). Such a policy must involve an elaborate cover-up amounting to deceit. Self expression is so far from being approved that Camilla is exhorted to “struggle then against yourself as you would struggle against an enemy” (p. 358).

Agonies of silence and body repression.

McMaster does falter over The Wanderer, for manifestly the woman who argues for liberty, Elinor, is castigated and the silent woman, Juliet, rewarded. She writes:

If the fable of The Wanderer rewards Juliet’s terrific obscurity, the rhetoric allows Elinor the best lines. And in fact the two positions are almost evenly balanced as two ways of looking at the same problem; so much Burney signals by the similarity in their names, Elinor and ‘Ellis’ (as Juliet is called for most of the novel).

She instances Austen’s similar balancing of Elinor and Marianne and says it’s enough to give the position of liberty a “sympathetic hearing.”

Here, having tried to read the book, I’m not convinced: too much weight given to similar sounding names and what Austen did in her book will not prove D’Arblay did it in hers.

I also know that for long stretches Burney’s books after Evelina are flat, have (to quote John Dussinger) “a machine-like smoothness that deflates the emotion it attempts to describe.”

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View of Fauconberg Hill in Cheltenham: Majesties taking an airing; Frances’s room at the top of the building; the stairs at the bottom where she and Stephen Digby would sit talking

There is a solution of sorts. As I say, the value of Thaddeus is how she reviews the criticism repeatedly. At one point she quotes Kathryn Kris who in “A 70 Year Follow-up of a Childhood Disability: The Case of Fanny Burney” (The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, ed. ASolnit, R. Eissler, P.Neubauer, 1938) argues that Frances’s life-long compulsion to write is a product of a temporary childhood disability, a dyslexia until she was 8 where she couldn’t learn to read or to write. Kris sees “a life-long propensity for shame and cognitive disorganization” (p. 17, 229, n36).

Of course Thaddeus rejects this; she’s not have her tenure material have an actual disability — just as the Austen scholars and Janeites are not having their heroine have Aspergers traits. The dislike and shame before a disability suddenly flares before us.

There is much evidence for a cognitive disconnect and disorientation. Having read Hester Davenport’s convincing description of Burney’s behavior at court where a parallel maybe seen between her loss of Stephen Digby and her loss of George Owen Cambridge — and it’s not the easy one they never wanted her because they were such snobs (even Rizzo likes this one). Rather she couldn’t connect to them. She couldn’t see what was in front of her and didn’t know how to respond, to reciprocate. Cambridge later in life grew close to Frances and was an active mentor and patron of her son, providing for him the one decent position he had. Digby asked Miss Gunning to marry him only after Fanny refused to visit his family and many years of courting; after she died, he came back. She then froze him off.

Explain her blindness in front of her father. How her books do not come alive; that the characters are often despite her pellucid analytical efforts two-dimensional exaggerations. I will next week obtain this book from the GMU library.

Cela suffit.

Ellen

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Austen’s letter 97, 2-3, Wed-Thurs, March 1814, Henrietta St, to Cassandra, now at Chawton

Walter Launt Palmer (1854-1932), Snow and Sunshine (1909): we have several snow-y letters coming up

Dear friends and readers,

A snowy letter. So is the next.

Three months have passed, and according to LeFaye and the evidence of this letter itself Jane did visit Henry in late November after all. We will recall by early November she had been eager to go for 3 weeks, apparently she did go after all and LeFaye thinks one thing she did was contact Egerton over the coming publication of MP in May. We have no letters from this time, no sign of it anywhere, and no mention by Jane. Henry and Jane are clearly getting along but why the letters were destroyed we can only guess. At any rate she went home and did not return until spring.

In this letter Austen appears to have the proofs of Mansfield Park — or at least a copy for Henry to read. She is reading The Heroine, and presumably in the throes of early composition of Emma. She goes to the theater to see the great Kean, enacting Shylock in a new psychologically sympathetic way. She visits with Henry’s friends. She hears from Cassandra: poor Cassy stayed at Chawton after all – and was de-flea-ed. Jane discovers she is without her trunk of small clothing items so she must borrow or re-buy.

After reviewing this letter (with Diana Birchall), I attempt a comparison between Burney’s journalizing letters and Austen’s — this comes out of my reading of Burney the last month or so.

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Farnham, 19th century print

Diana went over Henry and Jane’s itinerary according to the map:

“A gap in letters of three months. We left her at Godmersham in November; Christmas is long past, she has gone to see Henry, and is staying with him in Henrietta Street. She has just arrived: Cassandra was wrong to think of them at Guildford last night, they stayed at Cobham. Cobham is 20 miles
southwest of London, and 10 northeast of Guildford, which shows us their route from Kent. Earlier they went through Farnham, which gives a picture of their mode of carriage-traveling, from village to village. Everything at Cobham was comfortable, and it is pleasant to think of the party sitting down to a “very nice roast fowl.” We don’t know why she could not pay Mr. Herington (a Cobham grocer, Deirdre guesses)”

I too was happy for Henry and Jane they “had a very nice roast fowl” (she likes to eat), “very good Journey, & everything at Cobham was comfortable,” but it would seem to have detracted from the atmosphere that she could not pay her bill. What bill was this? I assume Henry paid for the food and lodging. It was over £2, the amount sent by Mrs Austen which is now returned as useless. So she’s not a rich lady, is she? Why is Cassandra to “try her luck?” Is there some dispute over the amount? So we are still in the Bath world of tiny amounts — people made fun of the 1995 S&S film for having Emma-Elinor worry over the price of sugar and meat. It was true to Austen’s continuing experience.

But they did not begin reading until later, Bentley Green not far from getting back to London. Is it a proof of MP he has? If so, how do they have it? It is improbable that it’s a copy for selling, for then it would be put on sale. A MS? not likely as the revision process would make them a mess unless this was a copied out fair copy. Sigh. (Partly over the idea that this fair copy was not saved if it was one.)

Anna Massey as the scolding Mrs Norris (1983 MP)

“Henry’s approbation hitherto is even equal to my wishes; he says it is very different from the other two [P&P and S&S], but does not appear to think it at all inferior. He has only married Mrs. R[ushworth]. I am afraid he has gone through the most entertaining part. – He took to Lady B[ertram] & Mrs. N[orris] most kindly, & gives great praise to the drawing of the Characters. He understands them all, likes Fanny & I think foresees how it will all be.”

Angela Pleasance as the self-absorbed Lady Bertram (same production)

People talk to please. Henry says he foresees how it will be to please. He sees (Austen says it was kind in him) that she labored hard over Lady Bertram and Mrs Norris — so we see how the hard comedy of the novel is what she is conscious of. For Fanny-haters, note she is pleased he “likes Fanny.”

Her doubt in herself is seen in her comment on Henry’s reading, but more than that is suggested by her her comment: “I am afraid he has gone through the most entertaining part.” If you go to my calendar, you will find the calendar of the book shows what we have falls into three distinct parts:

1) Sotherton, the play, 2) the aftermath of Henry breaking off and then Mary stuck there, he returning to fall in love with Fanny, her growing up and ball, and the proposal, with the 3) last section in Portsmouth that forms an sub-epistolary novel suddenly not fitting the 1806-1809 calendar of the rest of the novel at all, but one for 1797-98.

My calendar shows (like as several other studies before me have done) the play sequence was written at a different time from the courting, and the real result of the play, Henry and Maria’s encounter in London and elopement part of the text written at the time the play was written. So the middle section (Henry going off, return, Fanny and Mary’s difficult friendship, his courting and falling in love with Fanny, the Ball, the trip to Portsmouth) are later interwoven stories filling the book out to 3 volumes and making it into a conventional novel about a nearly coerced marriage (between Henry and Fanny) which was luckily avoided.

Austen here shows she thinks the earlier material will be much more entertaining for her reader. It’s brilliant, the play within the play, the salaciousness, the investigation into the nature of love and marriage in Inchbald’s Lovers Vows as in the speeches rehearsed by Edmund and Mary, maybe too she liked the Sotherton sequence leading into it.

Diana’s comment: “If he foresaw all that, he had the cleverness of a Frenchman or an elf, because people have been debating for two centuries about alternate endings to MP!”

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Diana: Austen adds that she finished The Heroine last night and was very much amused; she wonders James did not like it better. . This is a novel by Eaton Stannard Barrett, an Irish lawyer and poet. The subtitle at the time JA read this was “Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader,” and was changed in a later edition to Adventures of Cherubina.

My commentary: The Heroine by Barrett was an influential book on other books beyond Austen’s, Austen used the previous text from MP to help her give structure and patterning to Emma. See my Barrett’s The Heroine … . The Heroine is a deeply conservative, nay reactionary text in the tradition of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (as pointed out by Gary Kelly among others)

I’m not surprised Austen’s oldest brother, James, didn’t like it. He writes sensitive melancholy landscape poetry.

I leave those who are interested to read the plot-outline of The Heroine and how it parallels Emma’s (destructive finally) friendship with Harriet and how Cherry-Emma learns a lesson and to depend on the sensible male Stuart-Knightley.

What it’s not is a parody of Radcliffe. There are allusions to Radcliffe’s book but what is sent up is not her style rather the outlook which makes important the heroine’s sensitivity and the whole exploration of sex is dismissed. From my blog:

“The text is presented as a series of letters from Cherry to an unnamed correspondent and begins as a transparent parody of Pamela. The style is nothing like Radcliffe; the prose is simple and direct. These really could be renamed Chapters as there is little use of epistolarity, but the mode combined with the obvious caricatured presences does has the effect of ironic distance.”

Austen is ever the partisan and just cannot see what is in front of her if she is herself involved — or she refuses to (as in the case of Byron in the next letter where she seems to shut her mind, snap it goes.) She is endlessly jealous of Radcliffe as a rival. Barrett is burlesquing many books, and the kind of attack he mounts would also skewer her Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park too. He is at his funniest when at the opening when he alludes to politics of the day (as in the idea that while other characters can appear in his hell, Junius remains invisible). Again my blog:

Barrett is enormously well-read in romance; my edition by Sadleir includes pages and pages of allusions from major (Goethe’s Werther) to minor and popular books (Children of the Abbey). If anything Radcliffe is a minor presence in his book; he may be thinking of her when he writes against “impassioned sensibility … exquisite art … depicting the delicate and affecting relations between the beauties of nature and the deep emotions of the soul” that seduce female readers sexually (“voluptuous languor”), but his text is far more like Walpole’s Otranto. Barrett’s hostility to the gothic, though, is undermined by his fascination with it — though he does not go so far as to enact it quite in the way of NA.

Austen also enjoyed The Female Quixote where the heroine is similarly taught a lesson against reading women’s romances and how she must depend on sensible men. FQ is exquisitely funny when it parodies later 17th century French heroic romance, but it has nothing to do with the gothic; about a third of the way into the book Charlotte Lennox can no longer keep up the burlesque, and her text becomes a domestic courtship romance.

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A. d’Arnaud, The Sleigh. 1776. Image @Marie Antoinette’s Gossip Guide

Back to the trip where Diana enjoys the line: “I was very tired, but slept to a miracle, & am lovely today.” I agree Jane is luxuriating and the allusion to Mr Knight (rich, he left Godmersham to Edward let’s recall) is to the rich way she feels herself traveling. “Bait” means to refresh the horses. They are wiped down, allowed to rest, given water. The next passage shows us they went on with the same pair.

They arrive, the upper servant, Mr Barlowe, knows his place, Austen unpacks, sends out letters to friends with the letter P (I feel like Mrs Jennings because LeFaye is no help. She does not like the Papillons, makes fun of them. My guess is single women of the type she has been visiting and visited by in towns she stays at for years.)

It is snowing. – We had some Snowstorms yesterday, & a smart frost at night, which gave us a hard road from Cobham to Kingston; but as it was then getting dirty & heavy, Henry had a pair of leaders put on from the latter place to the bottom of Sloane Street. His own Horses therefore cannot have had hard work

I like that Jane is aware of how the horses did suffer. Though they did not change horses, he paid for two more to pull them. She remembers there is a slaughtering colonialist war going on in Portugal and Spain — though she does not use this term she does show interest in it again and again throughout the letters though her reactions are not exemplary (how wonderful we know so few who are dead, her attack on that general). For those who don’t know about this war it was deadly and had slaughter after slaughter; Goya’s paintings and famous May 2nd comes from it. (A busy year Diana puts it — so too this year in Syria and Afghanistan — the latter a real equivalent. Bigland’s book (see letter 90) read aloud by Jane by the way includes a large section on European politics; and the stuff on Paisley connects too.)

So I take the unusual explicit reference to the weather (but remember the last letter registered the cold) as part of her awareness of the world around her. Horses overworked in the wretched raw March snow, men dying still not so far away.

Her “veils” reference is not so decent. She is making fun of how lower class people are getting above their station by wearing fancy hats with veils. She watches for them and takes pleasure in the women’s attempts to get above their stations because she feels so secure in hers.

All this brings to mind some worry Cassandra had yesterday and Martha Lloyd. Not exactly rich and easy Martha’s life (as we’ve seen) — that’s the association. Austen’s letters move by association. Jane hopes Martha had a pleasant visit to them or somewhere else and thus Cassandra and Mrs Austen could sit down to their beef-pudding without too much guilt. This cold and train of thought brings on the misery of the chimney sweep to her mind. She says she will think of his cleaning the chimney in Chawton tomorrow.

About the end of the first page, she turns her attention to London. Crowds are enormous for Edmund Kean. It’s probably worth it to say a new style of acting was coming in: not so much more naturalistic, but more willing to open up the inner vulnerable psyche. That’s what Mrs Siddons and it led to Shylock being presented no longer as this comic or vengeful villain, but a sympathetic outsider. This was only the beginning, but it was important. You can see a reflection of this in Scott’s Isaac of York in his Ivanhoe.

Diana comments:

“A good play for Fanny. She cannot be much affected I think,” she comments. Fanny is now aged twenty, and I suppose Aunt Jane is looking out for her, to see that the impressionable girl won’t take in anything she shouldn’t – which is pretty rich coming from someone who’d been reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses when she was several years younger than Fanny!”

I don’t see what one text has to do with the other> Why Fanny cannot be much affected by this play and therefore it’s good for her to watch is a puzzling statement. If Austen means to suggest she is aware Fanny is not exactly a sensitive original type when she watches a play then why is it good for her to watch this one? It had not yet been interpreted to be anti-bigotry.

Mrs Perigord was Madame Bigeon’s daughter who had left her husband (probably over his abuse of her). She cannot have much money so it’s important that Austen pay this bill for a willow for hat-making and she does. Muslin was delicate material and Austen has not yet allowed it to be dyed although “promised” by others several times. She probably means she wouldn’t let them. Why are people wicked for dying cloth? It may be a joke, word play as Diana says, with the underlying idea that white is pure:

Diana:

“Now comes another quote I love, and it is rather startling to see it in context of a fairly prim and prosy paragraph; we are suddenly moved to remember that the maiden aunt is Jane Austen, capable of anything. For Mrs. Perigord has come, bringing some Willow, and she mentions that “we owe her Master for the Silk-dyeing.” Jane, however, protests that her “poor old Muslin has never been dyed yet,” despite several promises. And then she says: “What wicked People Dyers are. They begin with dying their own Souls in Scarlet Sin.” This can only be written for the pleasure of the word play, the fancy.”

I don’t get it as dyes come in all sorts of colors.

In the evening Austen tore through The Heroine and Henry read more of MP “admiring Henry Crawford” only “Properly” “as a clever pleasant man.” This does sound priggish — she is saying that he does not admire Henry Crawford as a rake or cad who uses women (the way a man might).

The last sentence suggests that Austen is telling only the good things that are occurring or occurred that night or over the days: we have seen many times that Cassandra wants upbeat stories and what is not upbeat given a virtuous turn or told not at all. This is the best she can produce about their evening is another way of paraphrasing this.

And now a paragraph about Henry’s friends and business associates who naturally are invited — and just as naturally may well refuse. Performative behavior is nothing new.

I suggest by-the-way that Fanny Price and Henry Crawford would not do as partners because Jane does not herself find Henry that congenial nor he her. That’s (Jane and Henry Austen’s relationship) an undercurrent in the novel. All her novels are rooted in her life-story. She is attracted to Henry, he is amusing, but her dream life declares it would never do. — unlike dear Frank.

Austen does not expect John Warren and his wife actually to come. The implication of the next sentence is that she at least (and maybe Henry) regards this socializing as an affliction. It’s said in a jok-y way: “Wyndham Knatchbull is to be asked for Sunday, & if he is cruel enough to consent, someone must be sent to meet him.” The Knatchbulls were upper class people and Wyndham a learned man from Oxford (in Arabic no less). Fanny Austen Knight would marry into this family and become a Lady.

From The Loiterer I’d say Henry was a reader and fit into Oxford so I assume this joke is for Austen’s benefit who is not keen on social life. Then Kean mentioned with a sarcastic voice, as if she’s repeating other people’s cant. I do think LeFaye guess may be right: that Henry’s friend may have played in a performance as Frederick. I think it’s the MP Frederick referred to, so it may be that the friends joked that Tilson or Chownes was a Frederick-Henry Crawford type (rakish).

At the end of the paragraph we see Austen still cannot get over being someone who moves about in her own carriage: she is to call upon Henry’s friends this way: “Funny me.”

The next fortnight tickets for all good seats gone at Drury Lane but Henry means to buy ahead for when Cassandra comes. He does seem to like Cassandra; she was his choice when he was ill.
A pathetic vignette occurs right after a mention of Sarah Mitchell who LeFaye has discovered had an illegitimate child. So a servant whom Cassandra has had to hire (and didn’t like this at all): Jane wonders what “worst thing” has been forced upon Cassandra.

Well Cassy springs to mind. Let us recall how badly Cassy did not want to be left with her Aunt Cassandra. Well she was left and is apparently treated as someone with fleas. No wonder she was not keen to stay. I feel for the child who had wanted to be with her parents. There are not many beds at Chawton we see and she got her aunt Jane’s.

Then Austen answering some joke about grotesque looking people; Austen is alive to people’s bodies and she says she has not seen anyone in London with quite Dr Syntax’s long nose or as montrous as two figures in a comic afterpiece burlesque.
The whole paragraph is to me distasteful, unfeelingly jocular.

And so the evening comes to an end.

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A still extant modest 18th century trunk

The following morning she reports her trunk has still not come. A loss of her clothes could not be a small thing to Austen. Apparently she did not bring a second set of small things with her in case the trunk was lost or stolen, and now she may have to borrow “stockings & buy Shoes & Gloves for my visit,” but she says (ironically) that by writing about it this way (berating herself for her foolishness) that will make the gods relent and it will show up. There’s nothing the gods like more than people admitting to learning lessons

There’s a decidedly irritated undercurrent here starting with the mention of the “Warrens, or maybe it goes back to where Austen admits she is not telling what happened in the evening that was not good.

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19th century drawing of a “lady writer”

I’ve been reading Burney’s diaries and journals and thought I’d end today’s offering with a comparison. Austen’s letters contrast to Burney’s journals which are far more formal, self-conscious, fictionalized in part. Austen is immersed in life and reflecting it in her words. In some ways I much prefer Austen’s though concede the general public would find Burney’s “more entertaining” to use Austen’s diplomatic phrase

It’s sometimes said that Boswell’s Life of Johnson, huge as it is, once you see all Boswell’s journals emerges as an interlude where a secondary hero takes the stage, but it is no different in feel or outlook from the rest. I suggest that Fanny Burney’s novels — huge as 3 are — and her plays too — might be considered as interludes, special episodes in the 50 volume book that was her life. It’s easy to discover there’s a preface to Cecilia not printed in the present editions, but found in the diaries and journals, a previous partial manuscript of Camilla extant in the diaries and journals; you might say the novels spill over into the journals or the novels spill out. The plays are notoriously life-writing spilling out expressionistically. Burney saved the drafts of her plays.

By contrast, Austen’s novels not interludes or continuations in a new spirit within her epistolary writing; I have (I think) demonstrated that both S&S and P&P were originally epistolary (and so have others) and think parts of MP were epistolary, but they are no longer. The novels do not spill out of the letters, anything but … at least as we now have the letters. Once her book was published, Austen did not save her drafts. Perhaps she had only one fair copy or two at most and Burney had many more. Burney appears to have been given so much more time and liberty to write.

One problem we are having reading these letters is Austen is journalizing just as surely as Burney, loving to put down her life. But Austen appears not to have had as much time to work out her vignettes, she gets them down rapid-scapid. Austen died young and when Burney’s husband died (November 1817, a few months after Austen), she worked for 23 further years elaborating her 50 volume + work.

That Austen is aiming at the sort of thing Burney was but didn’t have the time or life span to work it out expresses one we have such trouble going over these letters. It’s like we have drafts of letters. And of course our editor is not only not up to it, she doesn’t want to help us for real. I had really meant to go through this letter thematically not chronologically (section by section), but it seems to me demand the step-by-step or sentence-by-sentence approach. I will however as in the previous two letters reprint the text in the comments.

An interesting parallel: Austen has one beautiful fair copy of a text prepared as if a presentation copy; clearly she wanted Lady Susan to last. So Burney did precisely that with one of the plays her father and “Daddy Crisp” repressed (Witlings?)

Of course it might be Austen poured herself into the novels while Burney poured into the life-writing. We don’t know this for sure as we are missing the majority of the letters and all but a few drafts.

I was amused to discover in A Scribbler’s Life, a one volume excerpt from the 40 volume set (before the court journals came out and emphasizing the earlier years) that Burney as a girl would “always have the last sheet of my Journal in my pocket, & when I have wrote it half full — I join it to the rest, & take another sheet.”

These pockets are great bag-like things inside one’s skirt — no need for a handbag and reticule just for show.

The niece who described Austen at Godemersham in the visit we’ve just read about (her hair long and black) also said that she remembered Austen walking about with her writing desk at Godmersham. It is somewhere in the family papers.

A comparison: for both the life of a courtier is a death-in-life.

Ellen

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Davenport’s Faithful Handmaid: Burney at the court of George III

Dear friends and readers,

When I finished this book I found I was enjoying it in the way I had enjoyed reading Burney and about Burney when I first read her — when I was 18 and reading a 3 volume version of her diary taken from Charlotte Barrett’s edition by Austin Dobson. I felt strongly sympathetic to Fanny especially in the last sad and deeply felt entries. So I thought I’d make a blog recommending it even if it is no longer a new book for most Burneyites or people interested in the area or women’s studies.

I write to recommend Davenport’s book on Fanny Burney d’Arblay at the court of George III. It’s one of the new books (for me) I chose for my reading towards my review of Volume 5 of Fanny’s early journals. From her book emerges a perspective on Fanny’s 5 years at the court I was unaware of and suspect has not been sufficiently emphasized in the reviews; of those who take the older or “first stage” view of Fanny in the modern scholarship (as Janice Thaddeus puts it); hers is a convincing and appealing portrait of Fanny as a women who did follow a conduct-book set or norms. I then try to explain why Davenport was able to made me feel warm towards Fanny as I had not done for quite a while, revivified in me the liking for Fanny I used to have when I first read Fanny’s journals when I was 18.

What’s original is the idea that two relationships Fanny had while Keeper sustained her and it was when they vanished, she became psychosomatically ill, unconsciously pushed herself into death rather than remain at court, and thus roused her friends and family to help her free herself of her life in perpetual service to the Queen. The first was Mary Delany, who was (it seems) largely responsible for Fanny getting the position in the first place. Fanny lives for these meetings she has with Delany, a woman of genius, an artist like herself, and when Delany dies, Fanny is devastated.

Paul Sandby’s romantic picture of Windsor Terrace (one of the king’s houses) at night

The other was the courtship of Stephen Digby, the trajectory of which, ins and out, nuances and outward events, Davenport traces with care. Fanny really thought Digby loved her, felt deeply congenial with him, was thrilled by the high status (though careful to avoid being snubbed by his family, which attitude he didn’t understand and so was hurt when she did not come to visit the family castle when the Royal Family stayed nearby); nothing anyone could hint or say (particularly her man servant, Jacob Column, who detested Digby) could rouse any fundamental distrust.

Stephen Digby by Joshua Reynolds (date unknown)

Further, as told by Davenport by no means was Digby all hypocrisy which I gather is becoming the consensus point of view. It’s said that like Cambridge, Digby never seriously considered marrying Fanny. The time he spent with her over several years belies this. Digby was really engaged emotionally and genuinely tempted and only towards the very end when perhaps they had had too much of one another without marrying and they had some misunderstandings, did he turn to Miss Gunning with finality. Digby was like George Owen Cambridge who similarly is presented as on and off again by Fanny: intelligent enough, sensitive, melancholy, just enough alienated form the stupidities and irrationalities of social life. From this point of view the relationship did not move into marriage because Fanny couldn’t act on what these men offered, did not know how to cope, only the overt direct, ceaselessly emotional d’Arblay could capture her.

It was not long after he disappeared Fanny’s condition turned deadly.

It was not that she did not value serving the king and the queen; again as told by Davenport and shown in Fanny’s own words, she clearly did. But it was a distanced relationship demanding self-effacement and repression on her side which was utterly stifling to her deeper private self, the one Proust so famously said was the important “true” self. Madame d’Arblay and Monsieur Proust where they count for us and for themselves live in the same terrain here.

Trial scene of Warren Hastings: Fanny a major witness during and after her time at court

Which leads me to the second perspective, one which shapes this book: Davenport makes a strong case for regarding the 5 years at court not as a loss but gain. For 5 years of work, Fanny gained 55 years of pension which enabled her to marry; the queen was centrally instrumental in providing Fanny’s son, Alexander, with a Tancred scholarship to Cambridge. It helped her brother, James, become an Admiral after years of being passed over (just before he died). The years brought her into contact with fascinating events and a made her into a independent woman (even if as a court servant) who was given fine quarters, servants, and a good deal of free time to write even if hardly any day was completely free of a schedule of tasks. She stays in fine places, has a summer by the sea. Meets interesting people. Everything she wrote testifies to how much she valued the position, the royal family; she learned to be a polished fine lady there. There is no proof she would have written another novel during the five years, and if she had, would that have been valued for more than adding another line to a biography.

Kew — another of the three houses Fanny lived in, from 1735 print in Dugdale

What Fanny has been valued for and made her written about is her time at court and connections. Her way of weaving her own life in with the signal events she saw close up makes them alive. Would five years more of tea-drinking, visitings, and bluestocking gossip have been better?

I realize this resembles the kind of justifications one comes across of governess servitude for poor gentlewomen, but in this case she is not just a governess of children in an obscure household. Further, Davenport is clever or sound enough to do justice to the other nowadays conventional standpoint and a much more critical one: Fanny did rightly feel imprisoned without air to breathe or anything to live for because cut off from her family and friends and close emotional ties; she was isolated from her status and the court atmosphere, one of intrigue which she tried to keep away from (as beyond her). That such a job could destroy someone like her, especially subject to the bullying of Mrs Schwellenberg. The Queen was capricious, not open, Fanny didn’t dare small talk. She was not of high enough status to get any extended vacations to visit friends and family.

Davenport does not dismiss the conventional ambitious perspective either. Novelists were not respected, especially not women. In the first phase (earliest) Fanny was Keeper of the Robes, she may have been buoyed by the prestige and hope she could actually perhaps help her family, and compensated a bit by her beautiful quarters, servants, periods of free time. Fanny was respected. Davenport’s insinuation that Fanny was exaggerating her misery does slide us into her strong pro-monarchical stance (at moments unself-consciously idealizing). She does see how the queen controlled her daughters so much that they led infantile lives and some were never permitted adult independence, but the year 1789 is described simply as filled with “terrible” events. Everything about the revolution is quickly deplorable. Davenport is a partisan for Hastings, like Fanny, turning him by implication into a benign misunderstood scapegoat — when he was a tough, controlling, exploitative man (he likes to take his lower colleagues’ wives).

Clare Harman identifies this as a portrait of Fanny in later life — after 1812 say.

Why did I finish and find I’d enjoyed it so? The portrait makes effective emotional as well as practical sense of Fanny’s whole life, the time before the court, and importantly the time after when Fanny did all she could to maintain her court ties and the royal family when it could reciprocated. Davenport’s book includes an opening chapter about Fanny’s life and family before she entered the queen’s service (a sort of prologue) and several chapters about her life afterwards. Like Clare Harman, Davenport does justice to Fanny’s later years. The journals from the later years are quoted to great effect: Fanny did become warmer, less inclined to laugh at people. I remembered the moving passages when Fanny’s husband, close siblings, and then her son predeceased her. I agree with her Fanny’s face in John Bogle’s portrait with its wistful “amused quizzical expression,” not a beauty, slightly pursed lips, a “marking” face is that of an individual not a generic beauty with great hat.

I’ve one more book to read, Janice Thaddeus’s Literary Life before I return to Volume 5, skim, outline it and write.

Ellen

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Considering Fanny Burney d’Arblay (1752-1840)

Fanny Burney as painted by John Bogle in 1783

Dear friends and readers,

Since sometime in January when an editor contacted me with an offer of Vol 5 of The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (ed. Lars Troide and Stewart Cooke, 1782-83), for me to review, I’ve been reading Burney’s fifth volume and dipping into other of her diary and journal volumes as well as her novels and reading critics and scholars about her and a number of the central people she dramatizes or writes to in this volume. In a few days I’m going to force myself to write the review. I say force because I’ve not come to any conclusion about what perspective to take, or even quite what is my stand on central issues of Burney studies, even though I’ve written quite a lot about her, both conventional publications and on the web.

Since it’s a case of her non-fiction writing, the first question is how fictionalized are the journals? It’s not a question of what happened, but rather the emphases in the presentation, changes of detail (which would be important) and Fanny’s biased and self-defensive understanding of what happened. I incline to Claire Harman’s view that Fanny Burney’s preternaturally strong memory is a myth. “Self-conscious, attention-grabbing” vivid reconstructions of what she remembered mixed with imagination, her 24 volumes represent “creative autobiography.”

I realize this is not a popular stance among faithful Burneyites and in the volume at hand which represents the young Fanny, the way say George Owen Cambridge half-courts and keeps away from Burney is so puzzling and enigmatic, so half-shown, filled with things not susceptible to explanation beyond that it happened, her text here is in fact a reflection of what was said and done.

George Owen Cambridge (1756-1841)

It’s also true that while in some cases what we know of a happening otherwise recorded only by Fanny belies her account in others the two cohere. Still so much is retrospective and partisan stories of fabulous “tape-like” memory (decades later) arouse common sense scepticism. Of course part of the reason for this continued adament idea (especially in Troide) that the diaries are transcripts of reality has been their value has been their factual nature, their authenticity and it’s hard to give that up — even if only in part.

Clare Harman says she wants to unpick the layers that went into Burney’s journal and letter writing, but how does one do this when for the most part Burney is the only witness of her scenes and thoughts.

The second question is what makes her writing valuable, and inevitably since they are distinct, are the novels where her greatest genius and interest for content lies or are the journals and letters. I used to say I was one of those who preferred the life-writing, but now that I’ve read so much more of it, I see many flaws. She misrepresents people (blind to them and especially some close ones, like her father), her retrograde political views (or sometimes no political understanding beyond narrow partisanship) get in the way of her describing what she sees (Hastings’s trial, riots); her fiction becomes increasingly stilted as she ages.

OTOH, her non-fiction writing is one of the most vivid and sheerly alive word styles I’ve ever come across. As Patrica Meyers Spacks says, the novels are what betray her anger at women’s position and condition; her protesting women may be castigated or punished, but these women characters say and experience feels true and just, is expressed eloquently, concisely, pithily. Her saturnine meditations are as complex as Samuel Johnon’s. Relatively trivial events occur in the life-writing, crucially significant and understood to be so in the fiction.

Margaret Anne Doody says we must try to be adequate to the depths of apprehension and complicated thoughts in Burney. From my attendance at the recent day-long Burney conference I know readers of Burney value her hard comedy, the mockery and raucous burlesques, and don’t flinch at her anti-feminism; also valued are her critiques of capitalism vis-a-vis women: FB and the Marketplace, Love and Money.

Miss Austen as subscriber to Camilla, perhaps the first time her name appeared in print

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What are the central topics and people of Volume 5. It covers her correcting Cecilia, writing its fair copy and its publication; Burney’s reporting on and reaction to the wild screams of praise everyone seems to shower her with (much of it hardly sincere or thought out for real).

Recent edition

This is oen of Hester Thrale’s view of Cecilia whic she did not send Frances:

Her new novel called Cecilia is the Picture of Life such as the Author sees it: while therefore this Mode of LIfe lasts, her Book will be of value, as the Representation is astonishingly perfect: but as nothing in the Book is dervied from Study, so it can have no Principle of Duration — Burney’s Cecilia is to Richardson’s Clarissa — what a Camera Obscura in the Window of a London Parlour, — is to a view of Venice by the clear Pencil of Cannaletti.

But equally she also sent ecstatic praise and enjoyment that can hardly have been faked (Vol 5, pp 48-52:

Such a Novel! indeed I am seriously & sensibly touched by it, & am proud of her Friendship who so knows the Human Heart … This Letter is written by scraps & Patches, but every Scrap is Admiration & every Patch thanks to you for the Pleasure I have received … Had I more Virtue than Cecilia I should half fear the Censures of such an Insight into the deepest Recesses of the Mind

(I’ve been reading the Blooms (editors) on Hester Thrale Piozzi; also Spacks, Norma Clarke, MacCarthy, Clifford)

What money she did or did not get for the book.

Her family including her sister, Susan’s marriage. Her cousin Edward’s attraction to her. Her very ambivalent relationship to Hester Thrale by this time a widow in love with Piozzi. Burney does seem to me to lie to Hester Thrale and give her hateful daughter, Queeney, an advantage.

Hester Thrale Piozzi (1790s, by George Dance)

Johnson as a burden she feels loyal to: he is very old and sickening, dying and, unwilling to suffer fools (irascible), ostracized, often alone. Visits with the bluestockings, with Burney signaling out Mrs Vesey as absurd, Anna Barbauld as dull.

Betty Rizzo gives solidly persuasive corrective analyses of a number of the women who feature in Volume 5, including Mrs Elizabeth Vesey, Mrs Mary Delany, Mrs Montagu.

Mrs Elizabeth Hancock Vesey

The meeting with and first intense friendship with Mrs Mary Delany and intense hostility of Delany’s niece’s daughter who edited (expurgated, censored) Delany’s autobiography and letters.

Mary Granville Pendarves Delany when young

I’ve a good biography on hand, Molly Peacock, The Paper Garden, and one article, not very critical of Delany — Verna Linna, “A Passion for Botany, A Passion for Art,” Eighteenth Century Women, 1 (2001):203-35, accepting her complacency. My view: Delany was an artist, a scientist of botany in effect, a genius in a different area than Burney and thus they came together.

Above all throughout the volume George Owen Cambridge’s on and off again courtship with his father, Richard’s similarly enigmatic behavior. (Ive read Stewart Cooke on George Owen Cambridge twice now.) During the time of this diary one sister (or daughter) is dying. He really is leading her on. His father is clearly for it too. A problem in reading this one is it is very artful – as Austen’s is not. So I think she is showing us that there are several places where GOC is not as sensitive, perceptive as she and takes cant and coarser views of things. Edgar Mandlebert’s watching, scrutinizing, seeking to control Camilla as he distrusts her is Fanny’s reading of GOC’s behavior when it was she who watched, scrutinizing, wondered what GOC would be at. Hester Davenport’s analysis of Fanny’s analogous thwarted relationship with Stephen Digby, the king’s high equerry and courtier in later years shows how someone acting like GOC could tie Fanny up in knots, leave an indelible searing misery on her mind. Digby was very like GOC: highly intelligent enough, melancholy enough, sensitive too, just enough alienated from the stupidity and irrational demands of social life.

Burney does not make her irony or hidden views explicit. A rare moment is where she has presented what Soames Jenyns (introduced to Fanny) said he thought (so much at a loss because so many people about) and what she feels he really felt; “I dare say, if the truth was known, it was my silence & gravity that disconcerted him.” So you have to give her credit where she does not give it to herself explicitly. Her insistent detestation of discussing politics as if she had no opinion, but she does have one which comes out and Montagu tries to discuss it with her. Was it considered unlady-like or is this conservative reaction?

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General issues throughout the volumes to consider:

Drury Lane, 1775 (modern version of older illustration)

No longer easy to tell which writing Burney meant as private (she and one other person) and which as semi-confidential (she within a group of select people). Whose eyes she meant something for is important, but then she did plan to publish after her death so it is finally everyone’s. I’ve read Peter Sabor and Lars Troide’s history of the earlier scholarship of the fiction and non-fiction

A comparison of Austen and Burney is fruitful:

Burney artful, Austen immersed in reality; Burney implicitly continually self-defensive, Austen partisan. Burney can write disinterested literary criticism, Austen can’t or won’t. Burney can talk about art disinterestedly including her own in critical terms of her era; Austen goes on and on about literal versimilitude and which characters she’s fond of, occasional pointer to themes. Burney has wonderful dramatic vignettes making sharp social critical points, capturing daily life. Austen’s vignettes capture her own reaction, personal private, bodily sense of people, emanates from the gut. Fanny enjoys while satirizing social life, Austen studies it from askance point of view.

Burney a town person, knows rich, famous, well-connected, real geniuses; Austen a country person and knows only her narrow circle, often fringe people. You never hear Burney mention servants or truly marginalized people when they are large elements in Austen’s life and non-fiction. Consider Madame de Stael introduced Burney to her husband, and it was Burney who ended the intimacy; Austen was too uncomfortable to meet Stael in the first place. Austen’s life more like Anne Hunters, Ann Radcliffe’s.

Austen left Mme Bigeon whose picture we do not have (Sylvie Herbert played the part in the film) £50

Burney has terrific editors, Austen the editor-as-family-friend, Deirdre LeFaye.

Males who mattered: for Burney, her father, Charles Burney; James Crutchley (perhaps an illegitimate son of Henry Thrale: Burney’s cousin, Edward Burney; George Owen Cambridge, Stephen Digby; Alexandre d’Arblay. For Austen: Thomas Lefroy, Samuel Blackall (?); probably Harris Bigg-Wither (about which proposal we know almost nothing), her brothers, but centrally it’s Frank; someone unknown, a clergyman met one summer season (though maybe this is myth); Edward Bridges, perhaps Charles Haden. Then women, Austen with perhaps lesbian leanings: Martha Lloyd; and then friends with Anne Sharp, Madame Bigeon. Close sister relationship: Cassandra. For Burney: Susan herself a fine perceptive writer too; then Maria (badly married), Hetty, Charlotte (and her daughter, Burney’s editor); outside the family, Mary Delany, Hester Thrale Piozzi; Anna Ord, Fredy Locke; she let her father ruin her friendship with Stael.

Ellen

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Austen’s letter 96, Sat-Sun, 6-7 Nov 1813, Godmersham to Cassandra, in Henrietta St

Fanny (Imogen Poots) and Jane Austen (Olivia Williams) having frisks at Godmersham — drunk and running about garden (Miss Austen Regrets 2008)

Dear friends and readers,

The second of the two letters we’ve discussed this month on Austen-l (see letter 95). Very long, written within 3 days of the first, it represents the actual rhythm of exchange, and is (further typically) filled with people of whom we know nothing and LeFaye is disinclined to give away; there are many tiny vignettes, if incisive still half-formed, so to close read is quite a job. On the first week Diana Birchall took us but 1/3rd the way in.

I’d like to try as an experiment a different way of proceeding than we have been doing lo these weeks, months, and years. I will for a change do a general reading zeroing in on themes — because I feel I am ready to see larger patterns now (having gone through 95 letters just about all by Jane Austen), and get them right as I was not when we began. I will scan the whole letter and place it into the comments for reference. As Diana remained faithful to our proceeding all along, she has the last word.

Gentle reader, if you feel you can, comment on this different way of proceeding and say which you prefer.

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18th century print of Streatham

There’s Jane’s view of herself. It is clear she does not get many compliments and is inclined to think she is not valued, and is sceptical about all such utterances. Towards the end we get a strong statement about how she values Cassandra and the Bigg sisters. She likes being with them better than being at Streatham or Bookham (you can have these fancy houses you see). She says she can’t get used to seeing them in Henry’s carriage. What a view she has of herself. We saw how she couldn’t get over seeing herself in a carriage. She comes back to the weather several times. It’s apparently nice for November. She does this to say to Cassandra that she knows Cassandra is making the most of this in order to enjoy life as best she can. “I was in hopes of your seeing the illuminations and you have seen them.” It’s here an association comes which makes her remember Frank’s use of the past participle or country accent as a boy so fondly. I see an important undercurrent here, which leads me to …

Austen as reader and writer. From the standpoint of books Austen read and admired and her work as a writer: again there is the liking for Crabbe; she’s pleased that the conservative (anti-Jacobin is the phrase used) Elizabeth Hamilton admires her work sufficiently; she does not care if the people at Cheltenham really don’t like her books if they are willing to buy them (“a disagreeable duty”), still “so as they do it” makes her happy. She is working on the 2nd edition of S&S — those long mornings we’ve observed mentioned in other letters must be when it’s done. There is a reference to Madame de Sevigne which suggests that Austen had read her letters. She likens Mrs Hamilton’s relationship with her daughter to madame Sevigne’s with hers.

Cheltenham, the 18th century spa era … again highly idealized

Her brothers: She wants to visit Henry and he has been ill (she says we rejoice sincerely in his gaining ground), and she is aware that the illness is his anxiety and his state of mind for the past year or so (so since Eliza’s death), but it’s clear she is not certain he wants her around. She may see that she’s an uncomfortable person in some ways to have around (she does not like social life, is part of it only it “bits and starts” either because she’s snubbed as older, single, poorer), but she would like to go to be there. I don’t think this is ironic as she repeats the idea more than once. Note she has these plans 3 letters ago to go to Henry quickly but not stay long and has yet to leave.

She also is remembering language as a child that Frank used, with a kind of cherishing — again that strong love for him, which we’ve had some evidence comes from their childhood. The remarks people make about Frank as a boy all come from her passing phrases. He apparently would use the past tense participle when he should not and she imitates this several times even to ‘draved.” It may be she is also imitating his country accent. Poor Mary in the last part of the letter is a reference to Mary Gibson Austen. She was pregnant again. Frank is stuck in the Baltic. Jane thinks of this, and feels for Mary vicariously.

Bath, the River Avon

Edward and she have become quite companionable since Elizabeth’s death: it’s worth remarking that the sharp asides about his miserliness, possessiveness over land, egoism have stopped. She notes that he hates to be around sick people in a previous letter with respect to Lady Bridges. I remind everyone in a previous letter Lady Bridges and her doctor (Parry) and coming to Bath were mentioned and Jane said Edward won’t go to Bath now rather than be around sick people — even if Louisa is going (Edward has had a letter from her we are told at the close). The Lady B seen here is the same sick lady of the previous letter that Edward wanted to avoid, e.g., “Dr Parry does not want to keep Lady B at Bath when she can once move.”

Edward (played very well by Pip Torrens, MAR 2008)

But no sharp comments about Edward over this — earlier much earlier she made fun of his going to Bath for his health and again there is no mockery of this type of him any more. Perhaps the absence of Elizabeth made her like him better. There’s only “you may guess how Edward feels.” He wants to avoid this sick lady and will bring back Fanny Cage (who we must assume didn’t like being around the sick either.) Again I see in John and Fanny Dashwood aspects of this brother and (now dead, mercifully I expect Jane would admit to herself) sister-in-law. Lady B has money and status; as Diana remarks when Lady B wants to leave, she ups and does — unlike Jane who must wait on everyone else. (Anne Elliot’s powerless has its source here.) And Jane admires the decisiveness. I rather suspect she really was so frustrated in the time she had to waste with dullards; the irritation is not so strong as it once was.

Jane and Fanny look through window at men playing cards (MAR 2008)

Jane’s niece Fanny whom we have to accept was her favorite by this time is not too keen on the aunt just now. She favors the younger people around her and Mr Wildman. Jane enjoys running about with them outside the house, sitting in a row for fun — this is used in Miss Austen Regrets (2009) we see Olivia Williams just with Fanny drinking a lot and running about (to be scolded by Edward Bridges in the person of Hugh Bonneville). She does find companionship with Mrs Lefroy’s sister, Mrs Harrison, but note the repeated self-consciousness. She cannot resist praising people who are not eager over the concert (Lady B). She kids about Miss Lee who likes Crabbe and talks up a ball too much — perhaps the woman was pompous.

Yes Jane does not like over refined and elegant people – or laughs at them, or tries to. They irritate her probably because of her own lower status and it must have grated knowing herself to be so much more gifted and yet so undervalued for this.

Notice how she is often paired with Miss Clewes. This is the common way at Godmersham, Aunt Jane and the governess.

On people important to Austen, people who are not relatives: The Hattons (some of whom she has a relationship with) come and go and so do the Bridges. There is another mention of Edward Bridges with an enigmatic statement about why he keeps coming “for more reasons than one.” Apparently Austen did not like him by this time at all. We’ve seen this growing since the beginning of a previous visit to Godmersham. I agree with Diana that Austen at Chilham must’ve met Mr Breton (spelt here Britton), an intelligent man would make it a decent party (“the pleasantest party ever known there”) but note she does not say so. It’s curious how she represses this kind of thing — Cassandra would not like it?

Tomalin remarks how loathe Austen was to mention First Impressions in her letters. This is the same reluctance. Harman sees this as the result of her literary work not being valued by her society or her family enough — or her fear they would think she was getting too full of herself.

The Sherers are really gone — remember last week’s letter (this is the problem with taking such time over these) how she lamented they were really going. She likes Mrs Sherer especially. Perhaps this woman and Mrs Harrison valued her for real somehow the others did not — parts of her personality no one else responded to.

I think by this time she has become cool with Martha altogether. At Worthing might have been a high point for them, but life has intervened. Martha persisted in wanting to marry; is a poor dependent who must sell herself as a companion. They are apart too much and she expected too much of Martha. She expected less of Miss Sharpe and consequently the friendship stays easier — we lack many letters they apparently exchanged.

As will be seen I did this letter differently. I’ve deliberately picked out what is important here.

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A costume used in the 1995 S&S film

Now for the minutiae which make up style and tone. In her first posting on this letter, Diana admired the sweep, concision of “very snug, in my own room, lovely morning, excellent fire, fancy me” — it shows a confidence with language found and way with words like Dickens’s in Pickwick Papers, the famous passage ending “sagacious dog, very.” Austen does the same thing with Mrs Elton only then the style is to send Mrs Elton up. I agree there is a feel of bitterness in her references to the Fowles’s buying her book reluctantly.

Authorship is not paling, but she has not the same first elan and ecstasy after 30 years waiting. It’s only human when you have felt your 2nd edition staring you in the face. The truth was she was not independent, far from it, not making anywhere near enough money to effect a life change.

She is though in the same letter genuinely pleased to be older, to be out of the “rat race” of procuring partners, and looking attractive to young men: “as I must leave off being young I find many Douceurs in being a sort of Chaperon. I am put on the sofa near the Fire & can drink as much wine as I like.” she does not want to be old but as time has enforced age upon her, she finds real compensations.

She finds some of her guests dull, but some she takes real pleasure in and there’s are these strong utterances:

“We had a beautiful night for our frisks.” Like lively horses.

“Dog-tired” the next day. (Why are dogs proverbally tired?)

“The shades of evening are descending, & I resume my narrative” is an interjection between a list of people’s names who might be a “a good ball next week, as far as females go.” Maybe the local area didn’t support assemblies, book circulating libraries.

Jane Austen no longer goes to balls to find male partners. Company, good female company is what she wants — and we see this in this letter from her enjoyment of Mrs Harrison, to her gratitude to Mary Plumptre whom Jane would hardly have known but “was delighted with me, good Enthusiastic Soul!” By contrast, men are “useful” (Mr Gibbs), provide carriages (Henry) or they are “unsteady” (Mr Paget). A rare sort of proto-feminist quip Diana overlooks: “what is wrong is to be imputed to the Lady — I dare say the House likes Female Government.”

Rex Whistler (1905-1944) painting bought by Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tritton at Godmersham is now in the possession of Mrs. Sam Hood (daughter of Mrs. Tritton)

Diana picks up on the quip about Sophia as “comer” (more comments on women) and how Jane disses the Hattons — she is always dissing them, if not the women, then George. This is not the first came and sat and went about them. They were above her socially, lived in far greater luxury, with a bigger library … but now I’m looking for phrases, style, tone that matter I am struck by this:

“Dear Henry! what a turn he has for being ill! & what a thing Bile is!” This attack has probably been brought on in part by his previous confinement & anxiety.”

She hopes it is going fast and then resorts to that time-keeping one sees in her novels: she will look for a good account from Cassandra on Tuesday, but since letters come on Wednesday she can’t hope for the letter written on Tuesday to arrive before Friday. I don’t know why a letter to Wrotham would make Henry feel better. Jane is concerned. When I read this passage and think of the undercurrents about him and his living over his business since Eliza’s death, I am not surprised at his later retreat to a plain woman and quiet curacy. He’d had enough.

Cassandra (Gretta Scacchi) at Chawton (MAR, 2008)

By contrast, Cassandra’s letter is “excellent sweetness … to send me such a nice long letter — it made its appearance, with one from my Mother, son after I & my impatient feelings walked in.’

Her impatient feelings have feet too. Diana ended on something not explained, well after she mentions her mother’s letter she writes; “How glad I am that I did what I did! I was only afraid that you might think the offer superfluous, but you have set my heart at ease.” This brings her back to Henry and her determination to stay with him whether he will or not, “let it be ever so disagreeable to him.” But she has not time or “paper for half I want to say.”

We cannot know what Jane did that she was so glad about and she thought Cassandra might find superfluous except it be her offer to visit Henry. In context it feels to me to be more about her mother. I take the above to be some of the more important tones and sharp memorable turns of phrase and minutiae in this letter.

For Austen’s text and Diana’s close reading see continuation in the comments.

Ellen

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On the Oscars

Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina (2013)

Dear friends and readers,

Although 20th century awarding of recognition for achievement in movie-making may not seem appropriate for a blog intended for matter Austen, 18th century and women writers, artists, and I admit I write just about all my film studies blogs on Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Two; nonetheless it is rare that an art that can so exquisitely capture aspects of life’s fantastical array of qualities be treated on TV with the equivalent of “Hail Stupidity!” so that Pope’s Dunciad becomes relevant. Since I went to most of the movies I saw with Izzy, it’s no wonder I agree with her favored list, and her assessment of the prize-receiving fool’s gold and the way the program was handled.

I am just now listening to a recording of a dramatic reading aloud of the whole of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; the reader is Davina Porter, and I see how brilliant and right was Matthew MacFayden as Stiva. And Knightley was as good as ever I’ve seen Emma Thompson, Hattie Morahan. Emmanuelle Riva was nominated for actress in a leading role (Haneke’s Amour). No one dared not vote for Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln. I assume the grave seriousness of the film was embarrassing to the voters. The great genius of film-making, Ang Lee, walked away with 3.

Still for the most part the choices and proceedings merit:

O Muse! relate (for you can tell alone,
Wits have short Memories, and Dunces none) [620]
Relate, who first, who last resign’d to rest;
Whose Heads she partly, whose completely blest;
What Charms could Faction, what Ambition lull,
The Venal quiet, and intrance the Dull;
‘Till drown’d was Sense, and Shame, and Right, and
Wrong— …
In vain, in vain, — the all-composing Hour
Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the Pow’r.
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of Night Primæval, and of Chaos old! 148 [630]
Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea’s strain, [635]
The sick’ning stars fade off th’ethereal plain …

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What new movie in a paying movie-house did I see this year in the movies worth seeing and great? The only ones that remain in my mind are Coriolanus, last February; Alfred Nobbs, last March. I admit since we go to HD operas, I don’t get to see enough new movies.

Ellen

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