What the miscarried letter contained is of less importance than at which address it was ‘lost’, Burney’s or his wife’s, and by whom ‘found’. ‘Some carelessness of conveyance’ – such a throwaway phrase – would have had to involve, in this case, either somebody wrongly opening a letter addressed to someone else, or reading a letter already opened by the addressee. The children had probably guessed that something was afoot between their father and Mrs Allen. Perhaps the discovery of the letter was an accident, perhaps not. If it was a deliberate act of snooping, it backfired nastily. We may wonder, but not wonder too long, given the authorship of that feeling phrase, who it was that found the incident so ‘cruelly distressing’.
Perhaps in order to give the children time to accustom themselves to the situation, Charles Burney and his new wife continued to live mostly apart. By July 1768 it was no longer possible to hide the fact that Elizabeth was pregnant, but she still retained her spacious dower-house in Lynn and spent most of her time there. Fortunately, the Burney girls loved their new stepsister Maria Allen, and took their cue from her generous and optimistic view of the prospects of the new arrangements. Their devotion to their father was such, too, that they would not openly have said anything to hurt him. Fanny’s wording is interesting when she describes how the sisters ‘were all earnest to contribute their small mites to the happiness of one of the most beloved of parents, by receiving, with the most respectful alacrity, the lady on whom he had cast his future hopes of regaining domestic comfort’.67 One gets the impression that even if Elizabeth Allen had been an ogress, the children would have made an effort for their father’s sake. It does not mean that the shock of the news or their embarrassment was any the less.
For Fanny, writing in the 1820s as an old woman alone in her house in Mayfair, the recollection of this period provokes two strong associations: one the memory of her dead mother, abandoned, as it were, by the abrupt and unwanted change in the family’s life, and the other of her own lost last chance at being given an education. The Paris plans for herself and Charlotte, kept on hold for years, were given up entirely when the new household shook down. Seven-year-old Charlotte went away to school in Norfolk, young Charles went to Charterhouse, but at sixteen Fanny was too old for schooling. Her third-person account in her biography of her father fails to contain the resentful disappointment she felt:
The second [daughter], Frances, was the only one of Mr Burney’s family who never was placed in any seminary, and never was put under any governess or instructor whatsoever. Merely and literally self-educated, her sole emulation for improvement, and sole spur for exertion, were her unbounded veneration for the character, and unbounded affection for the person, of her father; who, nevertheless, had not, at the time, a moment to spare for giving her any personal lessons; or even for directing her pursuits.68
Much has been made of the violent antipathy that grew up between the second Mrs Burney and her stepdaughters, but the relationship started out well enough. Fanny’s efforts to like her new stepmother, whom she immediately and without irony called ‘Mama’ or ‘my mother’, may not have been wholehearted (as is evidenced by the completeness with which she gave them up), but they were sincere. The new Mrs Burney recognised Fanny’s sensitivity and singled her out as a possible ally, though typically, she seemed to be giving with one hand and taking away with the other when she remarked in company in the very early days of the new household, ‘Here’s a Girl will never be happy! Never while she Lives! for she possesses perhaps as feeling a Heart as ever Girl had!’69 The new Mrs Burney’s manner was emphatic, her opinions set and her voice loud. She was robustly unaware of getting on anyone’s nerves, and, seen in a good light, this passed for artlessness. Certainly, Charles Burney loved and admired her uncritically – referring to her as ‘my beloved’ and ‘the dear soul’ in his memoirs70 – and the girls greatly appreciated how much happier she made him. Proof of her fondness and partiality for Fanny is shown by her pathetic appeal to the sixteen-year-old to look after her baby if she should die (as she feared she might) in childbirth. The ‘feeling’ teenager could not but have been moved, both by the appeal and also by the role allocated to her as substitute wife to her father:
Allow me my dear Fanny to take this moment (if there proves occasion) to recommend a helpless Infant to your Pity and Protection […] & you will, I do trust you will, for your same dear Father’s sake, cherish & support His innocent child – ’tho but half allied to you – My Weak Heart speaks in Tears to you my Love,71
The baby, a boy named Richard, was born safely in November 1768 and was much-loved by his half-sisters.
As late as 1773, Fanny was writing in her journal with genuine concern for her ‘poor mother’, whom she was nursing through a bilious fever: ‘this is the third Night that I have sit [sic] up with her – but I hope to Heaven that she is now in a way to recover. She has been most exceeding kind to us ever since her return to Town – which makes me the more sensibly feel her illness’.72
This must make us treat with caution the suggestion first made by Charlotte Barrett in the introduction to Madame D’Arblay’s posthumously published Diary and Letters, and adjusted into fact by subsequent writers (including Thomas Macaulay, Virginia Woolf, Austin Dobson and Emily Hahn), that Fanny’s stepmother disapproved so strongly of her ‘scribbling propensity’ that on her fifteenth birthday Fanny burned all her manuscripts and resolved to give up writing. The bonfire, which took place in the yard of the Poland Street house (with Susan, in tears, the only witness), seems to have been real enough, but the motives for it are cloudy. Fanny Burney first wrote about the incident in the dedication to The Wanderer, published in 1814, a piece of writing that seeks to justify the appearance of her latest novel by dramatising her vocation as in itself a kind of inextinguishable flame. Her motive for destroying the ‘enormous’ pile of early works was, she says, shame: ‘ideas that fastened degradation to this class of composition’ convinced her that novel-writing was a ‘propensity’ to be struggled against, an ‘inclination’ to be conquered only by drastic action: ‘I committed to the flames whatever, up to that moment, I had committed to paper’.73 She tells the story again nearly twenty years later in the long third-person narrative in her Memoirs of Doctor Burney that deals with her own writing history: ‘she considered it her duty to combat this writing passion as illaudible, because fruitless. […] she made over to a bonfire […] her whole stock of prose goods and chattels; with the sincere intention to extinguish for ever in their ashes her scribbling propensity’.74 Neither of these accounts, the only ones left by Fanny herself, indicates the influence of a third party; the first of them is specifically concerned with making a much larger statement – as we shall see later – about the value of the novel as a form. Mrs Barrett introduced the wicked stepmother into the story in her introduction to the 1842 Diary, describing how Mrs Burney’s ‘vigilant eye […] was not long in discovering Fanny’s love of seclusion, her scraps of writing, and other tokens of her favourite employment, which excited no small alarm in her’. Alarm and, it is implied, resentment.
Hindsight and wishful thinking, as we have seen, are likely to have coloured anything Madame D’Arblay told her niece about this period of her youth. The second Mrs Burney was unlikely to have had any influence at all over Fanny at the time of the bonfire (variously placed ‘on my fifteenth birth-day’, i.e. 13 June 1767,75 ‘from the time she attained her fifteenth year’76 and ‘in the young authoress’s fifteenth year’,77