A brave bohemian battler
Jane Gardam
FANNY BURNEY; HER LIFE by Kate Chisholm Chatto, £20, pp. 330 In her portrait, in a 'Vandyke gown', black ribbon tight round the neck, enor- mous, protruding, eager eyes — the eyes Virginia Woolf called 'the eyes of a gnat' — Fanny Burney looks confident and frisky. In fact Kate Chisholm shows in this widely researched and very readable biog- raphy — her first book — that Burney never quite knew who or what she was. She moved all her life in and out of different worlds, from various rackety Burney addresses to the circle of Dr Johnson, to the Court where she was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen (no pay, no holidays and sta- tus below that of the governess), to a ramshackle emigre community escaped into Surrey from the French Revolution, to Paris with her impoverished French aristo- crat husband, to the battle of Waterloo, to the London of 1840, where she died at a Mayfair address.
She lived to be 87, from Dr Johnson to Queen Victoria. She wrote three novels, many unacted plays — her novels are packed with dialogue — and the immense Journals that are still not completely edited. A team of scholars has been a long time at work in New York with infra-red technolo- gy to penetrate the long passages black- ened out by Fanny or her relicts, and `floating-off with steam old cutting and pasting. Chisholm has found fascinating scraps of new material at McGill Universi- ty, but there are still tantalising mysteries, especially to do with Fanny's early love affairs where she seems to have been both prudish and saucy. They burgeon and blossom and then are never mentioned again.
The best things are the notes and corre- spondence of the delightful Mr Samuel Crisp, an ancient friend of Dr Burney who became her mentor — he met her when she was 12, two years after the death of her mother which was a grief, she says, she never got over. The notes he wrote to her are lovely; clearly she owes much to his style.
What a slight piece of machinery [he wrote] is the terrestrial part of thee, our Fannikin! — a mere nothing, a vapour disorders the spring of thy watch; and the mechanism is so fine that it requires no common hand to set it going again.
For years she would retreat to Mr Crisp at Chesington Hall to convalesce when she collapsed with nervous exhaustion and fever and the machinery wound down, which was often.
Chisholm has launched herself into all these worlds and a daunting cast of charac- ters. The Burney family was large and widely scattered. She shows how Burney's anxiety for his children's respectability is echoed in the next generation by Fanny's behaviour towards her only child, Alex, born when she was 42, whom she nearly fussed to death. Charming Dr Burney, pen- niless social climber, author of the mighty History of Music, had had to watch his step. Good marriages for dowryless daughters were impossible. He was the father of a first child born out of wedlock, had collect- ed two step-daughters who ran off with scoundrels and died in penury and shame, a son who was sacked from Cambridge for stealing books (he ended up chaplain to George III) and another who left his wife and family to cohabit with a step- sister. In the background were relatives who lived in Cheapside!
All this, however, served Fanny well when she came to write her novels, and her scenes of low life and general knowledge of the impolite world are like those of no other contemporary woman novelist. Her descriptions of squalor, sickness, suicide and death made strong men blanch. Chisholm shows Fanny as a London girl going freely about. She walks by herself after a day transcribing her father's book, out of the house in St Martin's street, along Hedge Lane, now buried somewhere under Trafalgar Square (nice maps in this book) but not as idyllic as it sounds, and on into the London parks, before returning to write Evelina secretly in her bedroom all night.
She brings to life all Fanny's worlds and the picture of the d'Arblay element is very good. Poor Alex is so likeable, his only real vice seems to be an addiction to chess and idleness. When he gained a brilliant First in Mathematics at Cambridge Fanny worried that no girl of any quality Would want to marry a man on the salary of a science teacher.
The Count d'Arblay, his father, is a sweet man, flamboyant and loving and not above digging his own garden. When they move to Bath he seems to have rented something that sounds very like an allot- ment. He is determined, though, that poor Alex shall remember that he is the son of a count as well as a famous novelist. He seems to have been a clumsy man, always falling down and hulking himself. Once he was nearly killed by a passing horse and wagon. At Waterloo he bought a war-horse and galloped away (their life in France reads like a Georgette Heyer) but seems to have missed the fighting. Fanny, who missed nothing, ever, had to tell him about it.
The book gathers strength as it goes along, which, alas, was not true of its hero- ine who ended up deaf, blind and the last of her family. At the end she couldn't even be read to: 'My dear, I don't understand one word.'
The notes that make up the last third of the book are as good as the text. In them Chisholm lets herself go. They are full of surprises. Don't miss them.
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