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

Johnson’s domestic character – much less ‘Johnsonian’ than the Boswellian portraiture. He had a particular tenderness for his little ‘Evelina’, as he was pleased, jokingly, to call her.
    Exhausted by child-bearing, Frances’s mother had died in 1762. The sisters in the family were largely self-educated and after the loss of their mother they were drawn into a close-knit nucleus, exchanging letters, sharing journals, keeping diaries. We know more about Burney’s milieu than about any other writer of the period. Frances began ‘scribbling’ for her own and her sisters’ entertainment very early. She did not inherit (as did her sisters Hetty and Susanna) her father’s musical ability and was slightly the less favoured for it. They were sent to Paris to be finished and her brother went to Cambridge, while she was kept at home. But by way of compensation there was plenty of raw material for a future novelist. As Burney’s biographer Kate Chisholm notes: ‘The novels that Fanny was later to write are sometimes accused of being too full of dramatic incident to be credible, but within the family there were three elopements, innumerable affairs, disappearing children, and a possibly incestuous relationship.’ Her brother Charles was one of the most successful bibliophile-kleptomaniacs in English literary history (his memorial is the magnificent Burney collection of early newspapers, now in the British Library) and he advised her on literary matters.
    On her father’s remarrying, in 1767, a woman whom the girls considered unsuitably crass (the widow of a prosperous King’s Lynn wine merchant) Fanny burned her already sizeable
oeuvre
in a ‘grand firework of destruction’. At the same time she began keeping a journal which survives as one of her most interesting compositions. It opens with an apostrophe to ‘Miss Nobody’, in which she promises to record ‘my every thought’. One thinks more than one writes and Burney’s private memorials, some twenty printed volumes, massively outweigh her four novels (long as they are) and eight surviving plays. Only one of the latter was ever performed,
Edwy and Elgiva
, and it closed after one night. Her most interesting drama,
The Witlings
, a satire on bluestockings, was suppressed by order of her father and her other ‘daddy’, the man of letters and friend of the family, Samuel Crisp.
    Fanny’s sisters married and mis-married at the appropriate young age; Frances did not. In Jane Austen’s cruelly complected universe, an unmarried maiden’s ‘bloom’ is passed by the age of twenty-five (Anne Elliot is on the very brink of fading). Bloomless she might be but by her mid-twenties Fanny Burney was flourishing as a writer. In 1778, aged twenty-six, she published her first voluminous novel,
Evelina
. Epistolary in form and sub-Richardsonian in tone, it was subtitled ‘A Young Lady’sEntrance into the World’ – that ‘world’ being the
monde
, not the Hogarthian street scenes she must have seen from her Soho windows as a child.
    Despite the poem at its head,
Evelina
was published without her father’s knowledge or permission. The author’s own susceptibility as a ‘Young Lady’ in a man’s world is confirmed by her parting with the manuscript of what would be her most popular work for a measly £20. Evelina made a fortune for everyone but her creator. The novel opens with a fighting Preface, in which Burney masquerades as a male author, defending ‘the humble Novelist’. Like all her fiction,
Evelina
is a courtship novel which assumes, as its starting point, that women have just one area of freedom in their lives – the right to decide, by acceptance or rejection, who they will marry.
    The success of her first novel inspired a successor,
Cecilia: Or the Memoirs of an Heiress
(1782). The plot pivots on the plight of an orphaned heiress whose marriage chances are complicated by the requirement that her husband, whoever he may be, must sacrifice his manly