Free Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives by John Sutherland Page A

taken to be autobiography: gospel truth. Equiano was ‘the black Ben Franklin’. And so it was accepted for centuries. But a few years ago, scholars – notably Vincent Carretta – found convincing evidence (specifically a baptismal certificate and a ship’s muster roll) that Equiano had been born in South Carolina. He was American.
    This, if true (and it seems, currently, incontrovertible), means that the most vivid African and slave ship sections of the book – its heart – must be invention, fictional. It does not mean, of course, that the narrative is any less interesting, any more than Lord Jim’s experiences in the Indian Ocean are less interesting than Joseph Conrad’s in the same waters. But it does mean that what we have is not a memoir but a novel. One can compromise, and label it the first docunovel in English literature – or (given the South Carolina birthplace), American literature.
     
FN
Olaudah Equiano (renamed Gustavus Vassa)
MRT
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Biog
V. Carretta,
Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man
(2005)

12. Fanny Burney 1752–1840
    ‘And what are you reading, Miss—?’ ‘Oh! It is only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ‘It is only
Cecilia,
or
Camilla,
or
Belinda’;
or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.’
Jane Austen’s defence of her craft, via Fanny Burney, in
Northanger Abbey
     
    Frances (Fanny) Burney was born in King’s Lynn, the third of six children of the parish organist. Of humble Scottish extraction, her father dropped the shameful prefix to his birth name, MacBurney. Her mother had French blood, and could claim slightly higher breeding, if, with it, a taint of Catholic incense. Fanny’s father, Charles, was – as his later career proved – much more than a provincial instrumentalist. He could claim at the time of his death to be the country’s major musicologist (although the term would have struck him as barbarous). His career was crowned with the award of an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1769.
    Her father was by far the most important figure in his daughter’s long life. Her first published novel,
Evelina
, opens with a filial ode of devotion to ‘Dr Burney’:
Oh Author of my being! – far more dear
To me than light, than nourishment, or rest,
Hygeia’s blessings, Rapture’s burning tear,
Or the life blood that mantles in my breast!
     
    In the decades after her popularity as a novelist had passed, she dedicated herself to her father’s biography.
Memoirs of Dr Burney
was released to a world that had forgotten both of them in 1832. To him, to herself, and to her contemporaries (including, even Dr Johnson) she was ‘Fanny’ (‘Fannikin’ to close family friends). Under protest from feminist critics ‘Frances’ is nowadays preferred. She joins Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Arnold Ward as one of the posthumously rechristened.
    In 1760 the family moved to Soho, London, the bustling artistic heart of London where Burney made his way as a music teacher. His skill, learning and ingratiating manner made him welcome in drawing rooms as a guest and performer. There was never much money, but – given the age’s Hanoverian passion for
Hausmusik
– his genius fostered an unusual social mobility. The Burneys’ rise in the world is marked by progressively more fashionable London addresses. A summit in the family fortunes was reached with membership of Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale’s circle,in the Great Cham’s last years. Burney’s ‘Streatham Journal’ (1779–83), containing what Virginia Woolf calls her ‘gnat-eyed’ observations of the Thrale household, offers a snapshot of