Discoveries in the Archives: New Sarah Harriet Burney Letters at the Borthwick Institute for Archives

Moments of discovery in the archives have become less common in a digital age that has revolutionized methods of scholarly research. General searches on the internet can pinpoint the location of archival material while more focused searches of library websites may yield detailed catalogue descriptions or even digital images of holdings. Technical expertise replaces the kind of diligent on-the-ground research that used to involve much correspondence and travel.

Three decades ago, when I began my research on a little-known novelist, Sarah Harriet Burney (1772–1844), half-sister to the more famous novelist Frances Burney, I started with a search for materials, a quest that involved mailing some 2,500 letters to archivists, librarians, dealers, and collectors around the world. This task built on the ground-breaking efforts made twenty years earlier by Joyce Hemlow and her colleagues at McGill University, who managed (through a blitz of inquiries) to locate 10,000 Burney family manuscripts in 100 collections, including 168 letters of Sarah Harriet's.¹ My own more targeted search uncovered Burney manuscripts in another 30 locations, including 14 letters of Sarah Harriet that were previously unknown (and another found in a printed source). Such a modest result was reassuring, in that the letters I found were stragglers; no secret cache came to light.²

I published the 183 known letters in my edition of her correspondence, The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney (1997).³ I knew, of course, that the number of surviving letters represented a small proportion of the total number of those written over a lifetime. For Burney's contemporary, Jane Austen, a comparable number of letters (about 160) survive from all those she wrote, which has been estimated at 3,000 or even 7,500.⁴ The latter figure assumes an average of one a day over her adult life; a similar calculation for Burney (who lived much longer than Austen) would yield a total of 18,000 letters. A single letter of Burney's that has recently come to light shows why it is difficult to calculate how many letters have been lost. Affectionate and lively, it was written to a previously unknown correspondent, Marianne Nicholson, an artist who gave drawing lessons to Burney for a brief period.⁵ In Burney's extant letters, her name is mentioned just once, so the closeness of their friendship and the fact that they corresponded was not evident. This discovery underlines the fact that any number of letters might have been written to previously unknown and unimagined correspondents (friends, colleagues, neighbors, tradesmen) and lost without a trace. Their number is incalculable.

Possible losses also include runs of correspondence that I deduce must be missing, in whole or in part. For instance, relatively few of Sarah Harriet's letters to her half-sister Frances (Burney) d'Arblay survive and none at all to Esther Burney, despite mentions of letters that passed between them. Many letters to her favorite niece, Charlotte Barrett, were kept but far fewer to Charlotte's mother, Sarah Harriet's favorite half-sister, to whom she also wrote frequently. There are relations on her mother's side, including her half-brother, aunt, and cousins, to whom just a few letters are extant, the remnants, no doubt, of longer runs of correspondence. Sarah Harriet's brother Richard probably kept in touch with her after he sailed to India, given that some of his children certainly did; a few tantalizing references to letters she received from them remain but not the actual letters.

Among Burney's habitual correspondents were members of three families—Gregor, Wilbraham, and Crewe—for whom she worked at different periods either as governess or companion and from whom she frequently mentions hearing. I made a special effort to find some of this missing correspondence, particularly with the Crewe family, whose papers were deposited at the Cheshire Record Office. Among these papers, I could find nothing relating to...