A Celebration of Frances Burney (review)

The debate over how to inscribe a memorial window in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner, dedicated to Frances Burney on the 250th anniversary of her birthday, captures the vagaries of the life and the reputation of the author who famously began her career imagining Nobody as her audience and consigned her first novel to flames for fear of familial displeasure. Ultimately, what made it onto the glass was only her name (but Frances not Fanny, and no d’Arblay) and the dates of her long life (1752–1840), with no attempt to choose among, and consequently prioritize, her novels, journals, and biography (a hagiography of her father that Roger Lonsdale has called her “last novel”). It is fitting, then, that the collection of papers gathered from the accompanying conference, aptly titled A Celebration of Frances Burney and dedicated to pioneering Burney scholar Joyce Hemlow, reveals the continuing appeal of biographical criticism in analyzing her opus. Indeed, our awareness of Burney’s tortured relationship with her father, resulting immurement in the royal court, late marriage, and feckless son, and the priceless information that scholars continue to glean from her journals and letters, compel such readings, as does the recognition that family demands heavily influenced how much she wrote, when she wrote, and in what genre. Accordingly, while two sections of Celebration critique her novels and plays directly, the remaining four (“Journals and Letters,” “Family,” “Life,” and “Context”) include essays on such matters as the nature of her friendship with Hester Thrale (by Betty Rizzo), her sea-bathing (by Hester Davenport), her friendship with Samuel Johnson (by Freya Johnston), the influence of her husband’s character on the portrait of The Wanderer ’s Harleigh (by Kevin Jordan), and the disjunction between the respect she accorded doctor figures in her fiction and her anxiety over the prospect of her son’s becoming a physician (a scruple that cost Alex a scholarship, Brian McCrea states).

The contributions by Lorna J. Clark and Marilyn J. Francus remind us that many of the best-known stories of Burney’s life are fictionalized (by her or others) or reductive, not windows into her life but instead testaments to the appeal of a well-turned tale. In comparing Burney’s novels with those of her younger half-sister, Sarah Harriet, Clark also notes that the dislike between the two women, typically demonstrated by a few acidic comments that the elder sister made after the death of Sarah’s mother, has been overstated. Their relationship improved in the remaining fifty years, with Sarah one of the few people allowed to visit the elderly Mme d’Arblay, who left her an annuity that, sadly, she was to enjoy for only four years before her own death. Francus, in turn, complicates the fairy-tale story of Burney’s evil stepmother, Elizabeth Allen, here recognized as the victim of triangulation. While not attempting to recuperate the reputation of a woman who undoubtedly was an aggravation (calling Susan Burney a “nibbeting yepping thing wretch”), Francus calls attention to the benefits of “stepmotherly erasure” in confirming the Burney children’s sense of cultural superiority (the stepmother is “indifferent to music” and dresses so badly that Samuel Johnson insisted she change her garments) and displacing anger towards their imperious father. As Francus writes, Elizabeth Allen “could not even die properly”: she asked Frances not to wake her father if her condition worsened at night, a choice Frances deemed “misplaced prudence” (57). Burney commits a parallel act of erasure, however, by all but eliminating her stepmother from her Memoirs of Dr. Burney (1832), on the grounds that while his first marriage to her mother had been “highly romantic, critical, and singular,” the story of his twenty-nine-year second marriage was “more in the common routine of life” and needed delicate treatment to “[render] it respectable” and “[obviate] illnatured strictures upon 2d alliances” (65). Francus also rejects the well-worn story of...