The Literary Afterlife of Frances Burney and the Victorian Periodical Press

The publication of the Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay (1842) converts Frances Burney from a hazy recollection to an iconic figure of the recent past. Once a literary phenomenon responsible for best sellers such as Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782), novels whose widespread market appeal matched their critical acclaim, Burney died in 1840, leaving behind seven volumes of her personal journals not only intact but primed for the press. When these intimate writings were printed two years later, it altered the posthumous reception of Frances Burney irrevocably. Captivating the Victorian public imagination with first-hand accounts of a Georgian woman who had shot from anonymity to literary celebrity, hobnobbed with the literati of her day, and taken a position in the court of King George III, her diary was instantly a success. At the same time, it opened the door for critics to re-evaluate this novelist in light of her private life. As the critics reviewed each successive volume over the next five years, however, they not only infused their assessment of the writer's work with that of her personal life, but made the periodical press into the principal site for a negotiation of Frances Burney's literary afterlife. A detailed examination of the press response to Burney during the Victorian period not only clarifies the varied incarnations that emerge in her literary reception. It also reveals a complex dynamic through which the permutations of a celebrity afterlife become fused with a project of self-valuation that originates with individual periodicals and their writers but gradually extends to encompass the whole genre of the periodical press itself.

As Leo Braudy explains:

The continued interest in the most famous is similar to our continued fascination with a great work of art or an important historical moment: The ability to reinterpret them fills them with constantly renewed meaning, even though that meaning might be very different from what they meant a hundred or a thousand years before. Such people are vehicles of cultural memory and cohesion. They allow us to identify what's present with what's past.¹

Significantly, these famous figures also allow the critics of posterity to attach themselves to the afterglow of these luminaries, or conversely, to establish their own eminence in discerning opposition. It is the aesthetic evaluation and re-evaluation of these symbols of "cultural memory" that endorse the utility and credibility of Victorian reviewers and their periodicals. Moreover, Burney, whose diary was the first of her sex to be published, posthumously accrues a prismatic charge capable of galvanizing a contradictory mix of curiosity, anxiety, affection, and intimacy in her readers. This, coupled with her renown and the immense scope of her work for interpretation, commentary, or criticism, meant that her literary legacy, recently exposed and functionally pliable, was particularly susceptible to media attention.

The late Victorian period witnessed innumerable reprints of Frances Burney's diary in a range of revised editions, along with a legion of other non-fiction texts about this authoress, the most significant being her inclusion in the prestigious English Men of Letters series. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the media coverage, though enormously varied in its estimation of Burney's literary merits and feminine decorum, had produced a mythologised legacy of Frances Burney that emerged alongside a sizeable, though minority, interest in her fiction. The result, according to some Burney scholars, is that she gets neatly repackaged, and ultimately shelved, as a reassuring figure of past-tense femininity whose eminence as a diarist undermines and eventually upends her reception as a novelist. However, it may indeed be Burney's vitality in this mythologised form that facilitates the survival of her fictional oeuvre and ensures that she is still read and remembered in the twentieth century. The example of Burney's reception in the Victorian press thus points to the way that the self-reflexive motivations of periodical critiques may function as a mutually beneficial mechanism for both the reviewer and the reviewed.-

In the final years of her life, Frances Burney pruned and polished her personal records with...