While she did not always tell the full truth about some of the family difficulties, sins, and errors, she did not tell un-truths. As a biography, therefore the Memoirs is limited by the point of view and selection of material, but within its limits it is authoritative, and more authoritative than anything else written on Dr Burney, or likely to be written. It is based on knowledge that no other biographer can hope to have.15
This was surely exactly the response Fanny wanted to provoke: no one could ‘know more’ about her father than she did, and any sins of omission she may have committed by suppression of certain facts were in the cause of filial piety and family privacy, and therefore excusable. Unsurprisingly, biographers of Charles Burney have taken a less charitable view of Fanny’s tampering with the evidence. Roger Lonsdale claims, very plausibly, that the effect is sometimes ‘to destroy the true nature of [Charles] Burney’s personality’,16 and concludes that Fanny was ‘consciously dishonest’ at times, to the effect that she ‘cannot be trusted’.17
It seems likely that the experience of going through her father’s papers in the last twenty years of her life made Madame d’Arblay acutely aware of the problem of how to control her own posterity. She was shocked to find how much the self-portrait that emerged of her father differed from her own view of him and decided to ‘set the record straight’. This led to a general overhaul of her own ‘record’ too. Fanny’s account in the Memoirs of her first meeting with Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale on 20 March 1777, originally described in a letter to her elderly mentor Samuel Crisp, provides one of innumerable examples of how she rewrote biographical evidence to suit her own purposes better. In the Memoirs, the letter she quotes as offering ‘genuine detail’ of the occasion is an elaborate augmentation of the original. It is fascinating not just as an example of hindsight and score-settling (particularly in the material relating to Mrs Thrale) but of Fanny exercising an assumed right to shape her material; you can see in it both a novelist’s anxiety to convey character and a memoirist’s concern not to look foolish in his private and peremptory judgements. This particular letter was a prime candidate for careful polishing up, affording Fanny the opportunity to set in stone her ‘first impressions’ of the great man. Much of what she adds in her later version is decorative. Johnson arrived at the Burneys’ house in St Martin’s Street later than the other guests (Mrs Thrale, Miss Thrale, their cousin Miss Owen and the writer William Seward), disturbing the performance of a duet by Fanny’s sisters Hetty and Susan. Johnson was no music-lover, and was even more short-sighted than Fanny or her father. Instead of sitting and listening to the duet, he drew his chair up to the harpsichord and ‘poked his Nose over the keys’, as Fanny related in her original letter, expanding her description by several paragraphs in the Memoirs to include an account of her sisters’ discomfort at his behaviour and William Seward’s amusement at it. At other points in the Memoirs version, a few cracks begin to show. Not only does Fanny add a great deal more detail about Johnson’s uncouth appearance – ‘He is, indeed, very ill-favoured’ – but queerly apologises for noticing it at all, apparently addressing Crisp thus:
But you always charge me to write without reserve or reservation, and so I obey as usual. Else, I should be ashamed to acknowledge having remarked such exterior blemishes in so exalted a character.18
The description of Mrs Thrale – with whom Fanny later had a famous friendship and an even more famous quarrel – is brief in the original 1777 letter:
Mrs Thrale is a very pretty woman still, – she is extremely lively and chatty, – has no supercilious or pedantic airs, & is really gay and agreeable.19
In the letter quoted in the Memoirs this becomes a whole paragraph, with the superlative removed from ‘pretty’ and the following qualification added: ‘though she has some defect in the mouth that looks like a cut, or scar’. Giving with one hand in the revamp (‘she is full of sport, remarkably gay, and excessively agreeable’), Fanny is all too ready to take away with the other:
I liked her in every thing except her entrance into the room, which was rather florid and flourishing, as who should say, ‘It’s I! – no less a person than Mrs. Thrale!’ However, all that ostentation wore out in the course of the visit, which lasted the whole morning; and you could not have helped liking her, she is so very entertaining – though not simple enough, I believe, for quite winning your heart.
The last part of that sentence points up a bizarre aspect of Fanny’s rewrite: its ostentatious address to Samuel Crisp. Like almost everyone else mentioned in the original letter, Crisp was long dead by the time Fanny produced her new, longer version, but if anything, she invokes his goodwill and solicits his approval more in the false letter than in the real one. The futility of introducing such material is rather striking. Other sentimental tributes include an interpolation after the mention of the duet played by Hetty and Susan. Not only does Fanny adjust her elder sister’s name to the familiar ‘your Hettina’ (and use the opportunity to insert a jibe against the Thrale party’s lack of musical appreciation), she adds a convoluted and archly-worded eulogy to her father and Crisp: ‘But every knowledge is not given to every body – except to two gentle wights of my acquaintance; the one commonly hight il Padre, and the other il Dadda. Do you know of any such sort of people, Sir?’ Crisp’s answer, had he lived to read this, would have been a firm No, since Fanny never addressed him in her real letters in quite such gushingly intimate terms (though it is possible of course that she spoke like this).
Making up ‘private correspondence’ specifically for publication is a fairly unusual way of asserting one’s authority as a truthful historian. It gives some idea of the lengths to which Fanny Burney would go to create a strong enough impression of what she considered to be the truth. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that none of the best-known stories about her life bears close inspection; each is riddled with contradictory statements, inconsistencies, evidence of editing or elaboration. In the light of this, the extensiveness of the Burney papers begins to look less like a gift to a biographer than an intolerable burden. One begins to long for lacunae like those Cassandra Austen so thoughtfully provided for posterity when she burned her sister Jane’s private papers. And as the Burney archive continues to grow with the recovering of more and more formerly obliterated material, the problem becomes even more complicated. It is fairly obvious in most cases why particular passages in the family papers were suppressed – dullness, scandal, a hasty judgement, a literary blemish – but the reasons why others were rejected remain obscure, or worse, seem trivial. Trivial erasures are the most disturbing of all: the subjectivity of the whole procedure comes sharply before us.
Should we worry about Madame d’Arblay’s second and third thoughts? Are they not as likely to get us near the truth as her original statements did, for all her claims to being able to act like an eighteenth-century form of tape-recorder? As one pores over the details of her life, finding inconsistencies in the record, what is a biographer to make of this strangely creative autobiographer? Is she an inveterate liar, or an inveterate writer? I hope to demonstrate in this interpretation of her life that the layers of autobiographical information left by ‘a writer of romances’ may not be equally trustworthy, but can be equally significant. Fanny Burney understood intuitively that remembering things is a cumulative process, even a collective process, which the act of putting into words helps to arrest. Things didn’t ‘happen’ to Burney until she had put them into words. She then, typically, went on to find more words, and more again. By unpicking the layers of that record we may hope to see more clearly how her anxious and active imagination worked.