Ellis’s approach prefigured that of modern scholars, who have laboured to recover every obliteration by means of the latest x-ray and photographic technology. The Burney Project at McGill University is dedicated to this task, which has been going on for some thirty years and is not yet within sight of an end. Joyce Hemlow, the great Burney scholar and biographer, brought out the first of what she expected to be a ten-volume edition of Fanny Burney’s Journals and Letters in 1972. In the event, she oversaw the publication of twelve volumes between that date and 1984 and the present team (under Professor Lars Troide) has published three of a projected further ten volumes of the Early Journals and Letters. Recently there have also been scholarly editions of Fanny Burney’s plays (all but one unperformed in her lifetime), Sarah Harriet Burney’s letters, Charles Burney’s letters and fragmentary manuscript memoirs, and there are plans to publish the letters of Susan Burney and possibly of Charlotte Burney too. By the time the Burney Project has exhausted its rich mine of material, we will know more about this logomaniac tribe and their associates than any other eighteenth-century family.
The very length and thoroughness of Fanny Burney’s journals and letters enforce their standing as a trustworthy record, but while they provide almost unrivalled documentation of fact, they also represent a huge input of authorial control over the interpretation of her life. Basically, a writer who seems to leave no stone unturned is not inviting interpretation at all. ‘Mystery provokes Enquiry’, as Burney herself warned her cousin Rebecca Sandford5 when she was arguing to keep intact the text of her forthcoming Memoirs of Doctor Burney – a book which, as we shall see, provides countless examples of the manipulation and invention of biographical fact. Burney’s nephew Richard was anxious about the book exposing the family’s humble origins, or, more specifically, his humble origins, since he had omitted to tell either his wife of twenty years or the College of Arms (when he was applying for armorial bearings in 1807) of his grandmother’s ‘undignified Birth’, not to mention – if he knew of it – his own mother’s illegitimacy. Fanny’s refusal to withdraw the Memoirs might seem to cast her in the role of fearless truth-teller on this occasion, but her motive was far more to avoid provoking Enquiry than to dispel ‘mystery’ per se. Her version of her father’s life may not have been the whole truth, but it was full: everything seemed to be accounted for. As a way of controlling information about the family it was highly effective; as proof of Fanny’s veracity it left much to be desired.
The Memoirs have consistently been viewed as an aberration, both of style and technique, an embarrassing filial rhapsody written by a woman in her dotage. Biographers look to Burney’s diaries (especially the early ones) as much purer sources of information: ‘we never turn from the Memoirs to the Diary without a sense of relief’, Thomas Macaulay wrote in his well-known essay on Madame d’Arblay; ‘the difference is as great as the difference between the atmosphere of a perfumer’s shop, fetid with lavender water and jasmine soap, and the air of a heath on a fine morning in May’.6 But since Memoirs of Doctor Burney was essentially Madame d’Arblay’s autobiography, based on and superseding her journals, they cannot be dismissed quite so readily. Nor does Macaulay’s delight in the heathy freshness of the Diary acknowledge the artificiality of the form which we take to show Fanny Burney at her most open and truthful. Burney began her diary in March 1768, aged fifteen, with a famous address to Nobody, surely one of the most self-conscious, attention-grabbing pieces of supposedly confidential writing ever composed:
To have some account of my thoughts, manners, acquaintance & actions, when the Hour arrives in which time is more nimble than memory, is the reason which induces me to keep a Journal: a Journal in which I must confess my every thought, must open my whole Heart! But a thing of this kind ought to be addressed to somebody – I must imagion myself to be talking – talking to the most intimate of friends – to one in whom I should take delight in confiding, & remorse in concealment: but who must this friend be? – to make choice of one to whom I can but half rely, would be to frustrate entirely the intention of my plan…. To whom, then, must I dedicate my wonderful, surprising & interesting adventures? – to whom dare I reveal my private opinion of my nearest Relations? the secret thoughts of my dearest friends? my own hopes, fears, reflections & dislikes? – Nobody!
To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal! since To Nobody can I be wholly unreserved – to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my Heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity to the end of my Life!7
Behind the elaborate joke of this is the admission that the whole enterprise is unsound, that there is, literally, nobody with whom the diarist can be completely unguarded.
On matters of ‘unlimited confidence’ and ‘unremitting sincerity’ Burney was, like all diary-writers, on shaky ground. Matters of fact, on the other hand, she felt to be her forte. Fanny Burney was blessed with a phenomenal memory and could repeat back quantities of conversation on one hearing, as if, as her father joked, ‘you carry Bird Lime in your Brains – for every Thing that lights there, sticks’.8 This knack seems to have had an affinity with her sister Hetty’s prodigious ability to transcribe or play back pieces of music (Hetty amazed the composer Sacchini in 1773 by playing from memory the overture to his new opera Il Cid, which had not yet been published).9 When Fanny memorised speech, the sound of the words was pivotal: ‘my memory was not more stored with the very words than my voice with the intonations of all that had passed’, she said when recalling part of the trial of Warren Hastings.10 On another occasion she wrote of a friend’s speech-mannerisms, ‘I think, if possible, his Language looks more absurd upon Paper even than it sounds in conversation, from the perpetual recurrence of the same words’, which suggests that she was transcribing from memory word for word. This wasn’t the only way Fanny Burney recorded speech – sometimes she remembered the argument and reconstructed the wording more loosely (I have included an interesting example of this process at work in her recollection of Warren Hastings’ trial in the Appendix) – nor was her diary always freshly written, however spontaneous it sounds. She came to rely on ‘writing up’ her journal – sometimes at a distance of weeks or months – using notes she had jotted down on erasable ivory tablets. There was some element of hindsight at work in almost all her autobiographical writing.
Fanny Burney’s phenomenal powers of memory may well have made her overconfident about her own rightness, which she extended from being reliable in matters of fact to being correct in interpretation. Even in her own lifetime, some people thought Fanny Burney too much of a novelist to be taken seriously as a historian or biographer, and when in her later years she published Memoirs of Doctor Burney, the critic John Wilson Croker thought her ‘recollections’ betrayed ‘consummate art – or a confusion of ideas which has had the same effect’.11 More damningly, several readers who had personal knowledge of people and events mentioned in the Memoirs objected very strongly to Fanny’s version. Her stepbrother Stephen Allen leapt to the defence of his mother, the second Mrs Charles Burney (who, as we shall see, came off extremely badly in the Memoirs), and Mrs Delany’s ex-servant, Anne Agnew, felt the portrait of her former mistress so faulty that the author ‘must fancy she was writing a novel and therefore could embellish her story in any way she liked’.12 In the light of these criticisms, the affectionate joke that Samuel Johnson made about Fanny back in the 1780s rings a little hollow: ‘[N]ever mind what she says. Don’t you know she is a writer of romances?’13
Ironically,