The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D’Arblay)

THOMAS AND JANB WBLSH CARLYLE 177 most dramatically with the challenge of this opposition within the experience of man, an opposition which had been epitomized a century before in the formality of Pope's verse, 'The glory, jest, & riddle of the world!' (PETER MORGAN) THE JOURNALS AND LETTERS OF FANNY BURNEY (MADAME D'ARBLAY) The new edition of Fanny Burney's journals and letters prepared by Professor Joyce Hemlow and a team based at McGill University' is very welcome for a number of reasons. For one thing, it gives us a considerably more reliable text than has been available heretofore, for many interesting passages given here were obscured by family editors, and the pieces of some letters are in institutions separated by the Atlantic Ocean. Merely tracing and reassembling the pieces has been a formidable task, and the situation was so complicated that it was almost a prerequisite for Miss Hemlow first to compile and publish A Catalogue of the Burney Family Correspondence 1749-1848 (1971). When this edition is completed in ten volumes, we will have a good deal more of Fanny Burney than has been in print before. For another thing, the editing will be in some respects a model for scholars and a cynosure for readers. The letters are presented with all the minutiae we were taught to look for by Shelley and his Circle, with a few additions, such as a discrete symbol to indicate the end of a manuscript page. The annotations posed a formidable problem in how to elucidate the proliferating textual references to minor social figures and the aristocracy of several countries, and the method and energy brought to the solution are admirable. The footnotes distill the harvest not only of relevant published works, but also of unpublished church registers and wills for individuals as minor as the servants of Fanny Burney's friends. Occasionally, particularly in Volume 1, notes seem to be presented because they are interesting rather than relevant, and the editorial style sometimes seems to savour of some language other than English - say German or Time Magazine. However, it is difficult to imagine relevant infor· mation which will not be found where it is needed here in the footnotes. But the edition is most welcome for the quality and significance of Fanny Burney's writing itself, now most clearly visible in this admirable edition. She wrote voluminously - '1 could eroploy two pens almost incessantly in merely scribbling what will not be repressed' ( 1, 73) - and with a wonderfully sure eye for evocative detail. Thus in 1793 she writes of a friend: 'The Journals and Lett." f Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay). Volume 1. 179 11792 Letters 1-39. Ed. Joyce Hemlow with Curtis D. Cecil & Althea Douglas. Volume D. Courtship aod Marriage 1793 Letters 40-12!. Ed. Joyce Hemlow & Althea Douglas. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1972. Vol. I. v-lxxv, 1-261; 3 plates. Vol n : ix-xxxv, 1-205 plus index for Vol. I-D; 3 plates. $12.00 each. UTQ, Volume XLU, Number 2, Winter 1973 178 G.E. BENTLEY, JR She says now she has really seen one of the French Gentry that has been drove out of their Country by the villains she has heard of, she shall begin to believe there really has been a Revolution! & Miss Kitty says 'I purtest I did not know before but it was all a sham!' - - [II, 130] Such details demonstrate again that Fanny Burney is one of the minor masters of English style. The most important aspect of these letters and letter·journals, I believe, is their connection with fiction; they fonn a marvellously illuminating parallel not only to Fanny Burney's own novels, but to all courtship novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Most novels of the time deal with courtship, and the modern reader naturally wonders at the proximity of fictional courtship to fact; can these intricate minuettes be like reality? This edition of Fanny Burney's letters, particularly Volume II, is likely to remain the best place to see the wonderful realities of courtship in 1793. These courtship rituals were so convention-bound, artificial, and intricate that they seem to be the very stuff...