An Agent of History

...Such a fine varnish of low politeness...

...Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds...

...Burney drops some hints about "the generous sentiments by which liberal criticism, to the utter annihilation of envy, jealousy, and all selfish views, ought to be distinguished," and, throwing herself at the feet of her judges, manages to wag her finger at them at the same time...

...By the time Fanny knew her, 'the bloom of her ugliness,' as Horace Walpole wickedly put it, was only just going off...

...Charles was a struggling musician when Fanny was born in 1752, but had attained a modest level of celebrity as a music teacher and author by the time Fanny was writing Evelina in the 1770s...

...But Harman's answer does not quite satisfy...

...In particular Memoirs of Doctor Burney, written by the 80-year-old Fanny (now Madame d'Arblay) which Harman calls "a biographical autobiography, using novelwriting techniques," exposed the author to accusations of self-aggrandizement and deliberate distortion of the truth...

...Harman succinctly describes the significance of Burney's achievement: "The sophistications of Evelina were timely...

...Characteristically, Fanny was as giddy as she was anxious about her new status as an author, and spent a great deal of time eavesdropping on conversations about her novel and spying on booksellers...

...She had some unattractive habits—two of the young ladies-in-waiting at this time used to lampoon the way she wiped her dirty nose across her hand after taking snuff...

...Such anecdotes permeate Harman's account of Fanny's life, and their cumulative effect is a complex and vivid portrait...

...Stripping the novel of sentiment of its prurience and the comic novel of its vulgarity, Burney combined the two genres and infused them with a feminine perspective...

...One cannot help hearing in "the trifling production of a few idle hours" the false modesty of the coquette's "What, this old thing...

...Samuel Johnson said of his favorite character, the vulgarian Mr...

...The pedantic and inflated language of the Memoirs certainly had something to do with Fanny's extreme self-consciousness, just as her distortions of the truth clearly reflected her rather obsessive concern with her father's reputation...

...Herein, Harman persuasively argues, lies the key to much of Fanny's angst about authority...

...Reviewed by Kristen Case Editor, "Twelfth Street Review" "To the authors of the monthly and critical reviews: Gentlemen, The liberty which I take in addressing to you the trifling production of a few idle hours, will, doubtless, move your wonder, and probably, your contempt...

...Here is Fanny Burney at the height of her inconsistency: priding herself on her "reverence for the truth" while censoring and destroying her father's papers...

...The second daughter of Charles and Esther Burney inherited from her father an almost manic desire for self-improvement and a profound anxiety about the family name...

...What emerges from Harman's evenhanded and detailed life is how many of Fanny's anxieties were the anxieties of her age...

...They were representative of the coming class, the intelligentsia: self-made, selfeducated, self-conscious people in uneasy amity with their wealthy and wellborn patrons...

...her desire for fame and her fear of public failure...

...Upper- and middleclass women, meanwhile, strove to attain a voice in public life without sacrificing their feminine reputations...

...Burney, whom Virginia Woolf called "the mother of English fiction," is presented in Claire Harman's meticulous new biography with all of her contradictions intact...

...The late 1700s were heady years in England, and Harman skillfully evokes both the confusion over King George's "mad business"—to which Fanny was an eyewitness, having been summoned to Court by Queen Charlotte in 1786—and the quickly changing tide of opinion about the goings-on in France...

...The Burneys were indeed not 'People of fashion,'" Harman notes...

...The extreme self-effacement of the 26-year-old author is similarly double-edged...

...In the 1770s some people thought the novel had already outlived its usefulness, but Burney made it into a vehicle for refined entertainment...

...If Fanny was beset by "terrors and inhibitions" while writing the Memoirs, her markedly ««inhibited prose doesn't give any indication of it...

...It can be stated with confidence," writes Roger Lonsdale, a biographer of Charles Burney, "that hardly a single quotation" from her father's papers "escaped her interference...

...Part of Burney's interest as a biographical subject is her unwillingness to be seen for what she was...

...The story of the beautiful but penniless maiden, whose "entrance into the world" of London society forms the novel's central plot, is actually a spin-off of an earlier manuscript about Evelina's ill-fated mother...

...Novelists, like the members of the aspirant middle class, struggled to assert their new and precarious respectability...

...Smith, "—such a struggle to appear a gentleman...

...The missive is a masterpiece of doublespeak, the obsequious tone barely masking reproof...

...A conservative who nevertheless lamented what her stepmother called "a woman's destiny," she was neither the feminist heroine some scholars have suggested, nor the model of feminine passivity she sometimes pretended to be...

...She was a satirist par excellence, and the minor figures of Evelina are among the funniest in English fiction...

...Harman skillfully draws on her subject'sjournals and correspondence to evoke the milieu she was cast in, which included such luminaries as Dr...

...Just as Jane Austen was to outshine Burney, her literary heroine, Burney herself had surpassed her hero [Samuel] Richardson with a work that can be seen as something of a rebuke to the male novelists who for decades had gorged on the theme of 'a young lady's entrance into the world' without ever realistically representing a young lady's sensibilities...

...The result is widely thought to be the first "literary" novel in English, and was, at the time of its publication, a sensational success...

...and, perhaps most dramatically, her public and private selves...

...Although she defied the "conventional limitations" of the novel "in a manner that could be seen as rebellious, even revolutionary," she maintained her conservatism to her last day...

...Far from the "production of a few idle hours," Evelina was years in the making...

...Though privy to its permutations, she was an outsider to society life, perfectly positioned to observe the casual hypocrisies of the genteel, as well as the anxious strivings of the rising middle class...

...Harman offers an explanation: "The Memoirs represent the nether end, almost the logical conclusion, of Fanny's persistent neuroses about authorship...

...Prone to blushing, swallowing her words and rushing out of rooms, she was, in her writing, the consummate performer...

...So begins Fanny Burney's anonymous letter to her critics at the beginning of her first novel, Evelina (1778...

...Although she published Evelina anonymously, word got out (to her consternation and delight), and she became a celebrity...

...This tribute to her father was universally declared a disastrous piece of work...

...I would a thousand Times rather forfeit my character as a Writer, than risk ridicule or censure as a Female, " wrote the mother of English fiction...

...It is to Harman's credit that Fanny Burney emerges from these pages as neither a revolutionary nor a mere' lady novelist," but as a reluctant agent of history...

...Considered the dullest of the Burney children, she was plain, shy and female to boot...

...This was consigned to flames in 1766 or '67—whether due to her stepmother's disapproval or not is unclear (her mother had died in 1762...

...Burney's second novel, Cecilia, was well reviewed, and her later effort, The Wanderer (1814), has recently been rediscovered by feminist scholars, but she never again matched the success of Evelina—and toward the end suffered some significant literary failures...

...Evelina is an exercise in authorial brio...

...When she had to speak unequivocally in her own voice, the same sorts of terrors and inhibitions affected her that had disabled her at every public performance throughout her whole life...

...What is clear is that Burney's reserve as a young woman found release in her prolific "scribbleration" (one of her myriad of invented words), and that the bonfire represents a habit of self-censorship that Burney never completely overcame...

...Fanny had always been able to hide her own voice in fictional forms...

...Her first and last published works frame a lifetime of unreconciled contradictions—between her feminist instincts and her conservative beliefs...

...Her description of Queen Charlotte is replete with telling details: "The Queen was no beauty and had no interest in personal display...