Fanny Burney: A Biography Book

"Fanny was a good deal of what about a century later was called a 'Feminist'" noted Percy Scholes in his entertaining and erudite biography of Fanny Burney's father, The Great Doctor Burney (1948). It is this quality that has endeared her to a succession of modern biographers, from Joyce Hemlow (whose pioneering 1958 The History of Fanny Burney began the revival of interest in her life and works) up to and including Claire Harman. Like others before her, Harman has had to face the difficulty that Fanny Burney chronicled her own life so minutely there seems little left for a biographer to discover. Yet with Fanny Burney: A Biography she has produced a valuable addition to the growing Burney bibliography, steering a middle course between modern feminist lionising of Burney's pioneering works and 19th-century condemnation of her later effusions (described even by a sympathetic Macaulay in 1843 as written in "the worst style that has ever been known among men"). Harman achieves some real psychological insights. Fanny's ardent desire to remain unknown following the publication of her first novel Evelina, she notes, was more than simple diffidence: anonymity was to be prized for the freedom it allowed her as an author. When this freedom was eroded by Fanny's growing fame, as well as her reactionary attitude to social mores, it inhibited her strong feminist instincts, and the quality of her writing deteriorated. This tension between asserting herself as an artist and socially appropriate conduct for women exists throughout her work. Even Burney's excruciating journal account of her mastectomy in 1811 is seen by Harman as "a testimony to the inviolability of the ego". To her contemporaries Burney was the author of Evelina and Cecilia, the most celebrated novelist of her generation: to posterity she became the diarist of dinner-party small-talk among London's literary set, but to a new generation of biographers, among whom Harman stands out as one of the most balanced and insightful, Fanny Burney is a great deal more than simply the "little character-monger" so beloved of Dr Johnson. --Mark WalkerRead More