From the many self-conscious references in the diaries she began to write several months after the bonfire, it is clear that Fanny was going through a phase of experiment, the results of which often dissatisfied her (and tempted her to commit the journal itself ‘to the Flames’79). Destroying her juvenilia could thus have had more to do with a resolve to write differently, rather than not write at all. Having read the contents of her bureau through to Susan, perhaps Fanny realised that she had written herself into something of a dead end with ‘Elegies, Odes’ et cetera. ‘Caroline Evelyn’ was a gloomy novel, and she was not feeling gloomy any longer. The fact that she wrote a sequel to ‘Caroline Evelyn’ which used the same characters but transfigured the story into a comedy is surely of significance. As an attempt to ‘annihilate’ the passion to write,80 the purging bonfire, with its overtones of amateur witchcraft and spellcasting, was spectacularly unsuccessful, and was not repeated.
The journal Fanny started in March 1768 was the ideal testing ground for a variety of rhetorical styles, from the sublime (usually curtailed with self-deflating irony) to the commonplace. The first entry, in which she sets up her alter-ego, the ‘romantick Girl’ Miss Nobody, is pure performance, executed with brio by the ‘backward’ fifteen-year old:
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! For what chance, what accident can end my connections with Nobody? No secret can I conceal from No—body, & to No—body can I be ever unreserved.81
‘I must imagion myself to be talking – talking to the most intimate of friends’, Fanny had decided. The second entry attempts this ingeniously, with a send-up of ‘girl-talk’: ‘O my dear – such a charming Day! – & then last night – well, you shall have it all in order – – as well as I can recollect’.82 The diary allowed her to be skittish, serious, even dull: ‘Nobody’ was a tolerant audience, ‘the most complaisant friend in the world – ever ready to comply with my wishes – never hesitating to oblige, never averse to any concluding, yet never wearried [sic] with my beginning – charming Creature’.83
The first years of the diary (patchily kept up) are the only part of Fanny Burney’s huge output as a journal-writer that can be thought of as secret or confidential. Interestingly, they show that the sensitive, ‘feeling’ teenager actually possessed quite a cold eye. Here she is describing the family’s cook’s wedding:
The Bride. A maiden of about fifty, short, thick, clumsy, vulgar; her complection the finest saffron, & her Features suited to it84
and here a performance of Rowe’s Tamerlane by the schoolboys of the Soho Academy:
the young Gentleman who perform’d Selima, stopt short, & forgot himself – it was in a Love scene – between her – – him I mean & Axalla – who was very tender – She – he – soon recover’d tho – Andrew whisper’d us, that when it was over – ‘He’d lick her! –’ St[r]atocles amused himself with no other action at all, but beating, with one Hand, his Breast, & with the other, held his Hat.85
She didn’t develop this mode of comic writing, but it clearly worked as a release valve for a highly intelligent teenager who was never allowed to utter a harsh word in public. ‘Participation or relief’86 were the two reasons she gave for keeping her early diary. ‘I have known the Time’, she wrote in 1771, ‘when I could enjoy Nothing, without relating it’.
The creation of an imaginary confidante allowed Fanny to write the journal as if it were a series of letters; she went on to write letters to Samuel Crisp, in the avid correspondence that she started with him in 1773, as if she were writing a journal. To her sister Susan, she was to write journal-letters, blurring the distinctions further. The discovery of how fluid form could be was emancipating: Fanny Burney wrote a novel in letters that people said sounded like a play, and a play that ended up being partly reshaped into a novel. There were also tragic dramas that aspired to the condition of epic poetry and that weird hybrid, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, a biographical autobiography, using novel-writing techniques. It seems paradoxical that a writer who in her maturity was so anxious about the moral and intellectual acceptability of her works’ content should grant herself this licence with form (and with style and usage too). Perhaps both stemmed from her perception of what was appropriate to her sex; ‘lively freedoms’ in her works were unthinkable, just as too much elegance might have seemed pretentious.
Fanny Burney’s inventiveness with language is an aspect of her achievement that has been largely overlooked. Her work is so full of significant coinages, conversions, new compounds and new formulations that one commentator has felt moved to say that ‘she seems worthy to stand alongside Pope, Dr Johnson and Sir Walter Scott as one of Bradley’s “Makers of English”’.87 Left to educate herself, Fanny had been inventing and adapting words from an early age, and grew up happy to adjust language to suit the requirements of the moment, as a sardonic journal entry from 1775 shows: ‘Making Words, now & then, in familiar Writing, is unavoidable, & saves the trouble of thinking, which, as Mr Adison observes, we Females are not much addicted to’.88 Family usage encouraged the habit of coinage: the Burneys employed quantities of catchphrases, nonsense terms and nicknames, for fun (a very new word) and the sheer pleasure of invention but also as a form of private language, a family code that was impenetrable to outsiders. The critic R.B. Johnson has deplored Susan Burney’s ‘barbarisms’ and her father’s ‘passion for hybrid phrasing, and the pseudo-wit of made-up words’: the whole family, he complained, ‘was too impatient of solid culture to acquire sound literary taste’.89 It may well be the case that this generation of Burneys was ‘impatient of solid culture’, though it is hard to see how the characteristic Burney letter style could have gained more than it would have lost from classical polish. Fanny’s success as a novelist owes a lot to the quirky, ‘unsound’ family register which she reproduced in her journals and letters and took, in modified but distinctive and expressive forms, into her published works.
Fanny Burney’s coinage of words, particularly evident in her early diaries, was mostly humorous and deliberately inelegant: ‘snugship’, ‘shockation’, ‘scribbleration’ – these words draw attention to themselves, and were meant to. More widespread, but less obvious to later readers – because her usages have been so well assimilated – are the examples in her work of parts of speech she has transposed or converted: ‘to fight shy’ is one such, ‘to shilly-shally’ (contracted from ‘to stand shilly-shally’), ’beautify’ (used intransitively), ‘to make something of’, and, going from verb to noun, ‘take-in’ and ‘break-up’. She might have invented these forms, and was certainly the first person to record them. The ‘common language of men’ was of perennial interest to Fanny, and the realism of her novels derives in great part from her use of contemporary slang and colloquialisms (such as ‘I’d do it as soon as say Jack Robinson,’ which first appeared in Evelina90). Each of the novels relies heavily on the power of speech to reveal character and class, and contains long stretches of dialogue which are essentially