The novelist Fanny Burney (1752-1840) lived the uneventful existence of a Regency spinster, aside from an unhappy stint at court as Queen Charlotte's inept Second Keeper of the Robes, until romance finally dawned and she married at 41. From then on, her days certainly became livelier, culminating in 10 years spent in France, much of it while interned by Napoleon and close to the action at Waterloo. From about the age of 16, having already burnt her juvenilia, she kept a precocious, detailed journal. Even in an epoch of tireless letter writers and diarists, she appears to have written non-stop; candidly, at times viciously and not always truthfully. Ten volumes of letters were published from 1972 to 1981.
All of this, plus her long life - she lived to be 88 - spanning the mid-18th to mid-19th centuries, certainly makes her the stuff of classic biography. Undoubtedly a rich subject, she has equally been lucky in her biographer. Claire Harman has cast a cool, dispassionate and perceptive eye on the life, the work and the London which was Burney's world. The result is a superb, highly intelligent, readable study which is not without a disciplined humour as well as a detached, at times exasperated, sympathy. Above all, Harman's wryly neutral tone is ideally suited to the material; if a biography may claim perfect pitch, this one can.
Burney is best known as the author of a quartet of long novels, the finest of which are the first two, the hilarious Evelina, (1778) always a welcome revelation on university English courses (also the sole work she published anonymously if not unegotistically) and Cecilia (1782). As a novelist she is very important, not only for the fact that she was a woman writing at a time when wealthy women married well, usually had many children, lost several and died early, while poor women suffered, also had many children, lost most of them and died even earlier. Harman does not allow the reader to forget that Burney's was a society in which a woman's worth was rated by her beauty.
At her best, Burney is a natural satirist with a wonderful comic gift for dialogue; she is brilliant at exposing pretentions. As a novelist she provides the bridge between the epistolary works of Richardson and Fielding, and the calm craft of Jane Austen. A near-enough contemporary of Goethe, whom she never met and did not overly admire, Burney - who definitely influenced Austen - also shaped the comedy of Dickens and Thackeray, the latter of whom admitted his debt. Burney wrote like a Fury, yet Harman remarks, she "never completely outgrew her poor opinion of novels".
Even as a very young child she was an observer, nicknamed "the Old Lady". and was devastated by the death of her mother. Fanny had poor eyesight, was quiet, prone to blushing, seemed slow to learn to read and was noticeably ordinary in a family which produced two musical prodigies, her sister Hetty and cousin Richard, who captivated London music circles until little Mozart and his sister arrived there in 1764. Burney's father, Charles, a kindly, if haphazard, parent whose main preoccupation appears to have been how to become famous, is vital in understanding Fanny Burney's contradictory combination of shyness, secrecy and pushy ambition.
The self-educated, self-conscious Burney clan was in thrall to the snobbery of the aspiring middle class. Charles pursued any great men he happened to meet, pestering Handel and Voltaire with the tenacity of a career autograph hunter. Determined to ensure his fame through his General History of Music, he tried to use his daughter's acclaim as a writer to further his own ambitions and died a pathetic, bitter wreck in 1814.
Harman has achieved a convincing balance between Burney's life, her novels and the letters and journals. There is also a vivid sense of the England, particularly the London of that time, peopled by Burney's friends - the ageing Dr Johnson, Burke, Joshua Reynolds (who painted her father), Garrick the actor - as well as the good ladies of the Blue Stocking Circle and George III in his madness. Nor does she leave out the wild scenes of the Gordon Riots in 1780, which tore past the Burney front door.
At its best, biography should also aspire to good social history and this book does. Admittedly, Harman, an accomplished editor and critic, is no beginner; she has also written a fine study of another English (and equally long-lived) writer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, which was published in 1989. In that book Harman dealt with the relatively recent past - Warner died in 1978, and many who had known her were still alive. This time, Harman has gone so far back in time as to evoke another world. In both books, however, she demonstrates a feel for scholarly research and a confident use of material.
Her prose style is plain, almost businesslike; she does not attempt to climb inside her subject's head and instead allows her to reveal herself, which the careful, prudish, ruthless but courageous Burney does, time and again. It is a lively, unsentimental book; it is also a good story difficult to put down and replete with colourful characters who happen to have lived real lives.
In attempting to explain Burney, Harman looks to her novels and journals, but she also assesses the family, and invariably returns to its ambitious patriarch, music teacher and music historian Dr Charles Burney, an engaging snob determined to climb above his class. And class is a key word. The Burney family, for all its class obsession, often ignored the rules of the class it was so desperate to enter. There are many instances of the various characters proving cold to the point of cruelty. In times of crisis the Burneys shared a nasty family trait of preferring devious or passive means of problem solving to direct action.
But these people are not without feelings either - Charles Burney lost his beloved first wife and mourned her. He then wooed a widowed beauty. It seemed unlikely, but he was successful and she became the stepmother Fanny Burney politely despised. Burney's dishonesty peaks with her appalling revising - or, rather, rewriting - of her father's memoirs which, in fact, became her own story. Content to live with her father until she was "honoured" by the job at court she never wanted, Burney returned home aged 40 to share a bedroom with a sister.
In love she suffered two painful rejections, but at last met a man who returned her love, the appealing if weak General d'Arblay, a French, liberal Catholic - the three things most hated by her father. Burney and her husband loved each other, and his death in 1818 was a cruel loss, as was her father's, and the odd passing of her aimless, shadowy son at 43, when she was 84. Earlier, though, there had been the death of her adored sister in 1800 - and that of her mother, whom she never forgot. But as Harman proves, Fanny Burney was a consummate survivor, surviving even the horrors of a mastectomy at 59 without anaesthetic. Even more extraordinary is Burney's detailed description of her ordeal.
This is how biography should be written. Harman is as shrewd a reader of character and human motivation as she is of Burney's fiction. As a vivid portrait of a singular personality, this excellent, assured study is about as close as it is possible to get to the raw, energetic satiric genius of Fanny Burney, who brought the English novel a dazzling step beyond Richardson and Fielding.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
