The Fame of Miss Burney - Brief Article - Critical Essay

Women's Quarterly, Spring, 2001 by Charlotte Hays

AFTER The Madness of King George hit the movie houses in 1994, I waited expectantly for the Fanny Burney revival to commence. Burney (1752-1840), a trail-blazing novelist, diarist, and member of Dr. Johnson's literary set, served as lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte (played in the movie by Helen Mitten). Though Burney wasn't a character in the film, the screenwriter had drawn heavily on her diaries.

The time seemed ripe for a Burney vogue of the kind her admirer Jane Austen was enjoying. Austen herself hailed Burney as England's first woman novelist, and lesser female writers have certainly had revivals--indeed, I'll never forget going to the Folger Theater in Washington to see a play by the seventeenth-century adventuress Aphra Behn. It was heralded as a work that hadn't been staged for four hundred years, and I could see why.

What does Aphra Behn have that Fanny Burney doesn't? Burney's Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World was an instant sensation when it came out in 1778 and is still a great read. The heroine, Evelina, denied recognition by her rich baronet father, was brought up quietly in the country by a devoted clergyman, Mr. Villars. Now she is entering into the "great world" of London society. Her grandmother, Madame Duval from Paris (an English barmaid before ensnaring Evelina's grandfather), shows up and is a marvel of bawdy vulgarity. I am partial to Madame Duval, but Dr. Johnson's favorite character in the novel was Mr. Smith, a Cockney suitor of Madame Duval's niece.

Johnson compared Burney's deft hand with characterization favorably to that of Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones. Burney gleefully noted Johnson's praise in her diary: "O, Mr. Smith! Mr. Smith is the Man!" she quoted him saying. "Laughing violently, [he said] Harry Fielding never drew such a good Character--such a fine varnish of low politeness!"

Aphra Behn is more popular today because contemporary literary sensibilities are more attuned to the outrageous behavior and philosophy of Behn, once an English spy in Antwerp. She also has the dubious distinction of having extolled the virtues of the noble savage before Rousseau. Miss Burney's work simply does not easily lend itself to the distortions of fashionable critics, though some have tried.

In the you-can't-make-this-stuff-up category, the ingenious Susan Fraiman proposes in her book, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development, that "the similarity between 'Villars' and 'villain' may signify." Fraiman also ponders the meaning of names ending in "ville," managing to link Lord Orville, the gallant and doting nobleman who marries Evelina, and Mr. Villars as oppressors of women.

Burney is not an icon for women's studies majors. But the Internet bristles with sites devoted to Aphra Behn, gender rebel. An Aphra Behn Society website, for example, proudly states its purpose as the promotion of research into issues of gender and/or women's roles" in literature, while another glowingly describes Behn as a woman who "broke every rule."

Fanny Burney wasn't an angry woman our to overthrow the conventions of her society. Nor was Jane Austen. But Austen stayed at home in the vicarage, and modern theorists have found it easy to project their own ideologies onto her seemingly blank slate. Burney was truly a girl-about-town, moving in the "great world" of London, and thoroughly enjoying her literary fame.

BURNEY WAS perfectly situated to write about society: She had access to the highest levels, but, as the daughter of a musician, she wasn't quite of that world, which she captured brilliantly in nonfiction and in her novels. She wrote about life at court (where she was unhappy but loyal) and life beyond the royal confines, including a colorful account of the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, an East India Company official accused of corruption. Miss Burney tried in vain to persuade the prosecutor, Edmund Burke, a friend, of the fine qualities of Hastings, who was also her friend.

Fanny Burney, who became Madame D'Arblay in 1793, and endured a mastectomy without anesthesia in 1811, was quite a gal. Edmund Burke sat up all one night to finish reading Evelina and so might you, gentle reader. Let the Burney revival begin.