Travels of a housewife
Margaret Drabble
The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney edited by Joyce Hemlow (Oxford University Press Volume 5, E17.00, Volume 6 £13.50) How hard it is to make up one's mind about Miss Burney.. Not because she is, as a character, elusive: on the contrary, she reveals all, she leaps to life in her letters, she chatters away over the centuries as though confident that we would be (as we on the whole are) interested in her son's colds, her social engagements, her impressions of foreigners both famous and obscure. It is easy enough to imagine her; the problem lies, as with an old but often irritating friend, in deciding what one really feels about her. She is so pretty, so trivial, so timid, so ambiguous about fame and society, so bourgeois, so lacking in moral independence, even, occasionally, so vulgar; and yet, just as one has decided that she represents all that was to be most deadening for Victorian womanhood, she will reveal herself as courageous, strong, daring. And, of course, she is always entertaining, when she tries to be so. She is an inspired gossip, an acute observer of the smallest details of dress and manners. Her account of the French social kiss is as amusing today as it was when she wrote it, in 1802, and could well be studied by those who, like her, have to contend with the difference between bourgeois and aristocratic manners, between the English and the French. The mouths of the two meeting persons, she tells us, "should advance merely to retreat, and that then each party should present the right cheek, for the sole purpose of drawing it hastily away, that each may present the left, which, with the same rapidity, approaches only to retire." Her account of her initiation into this practice, and of her occasional mistakes, is the stuff of social comedy and social history.
Not all the letters in these two volumes are equally interesting, as the conscientious editors would surely agree. With great care, and at great expense, Joyce Hemlow and her assistant scholars have presented the reader with every scrap, and some of the scraps are inevitably full of dull domestic arrangements, and of repetitions. Fanny Burney did not object to writing different accounts of the same incident to different friends, so we have to listen several times to the poor woman's anxiety over the dilemma presented by the attentions of the notorious Mme de Stael. We also have to pay a great deal of thought to her son Alex's worms. Volume five opens in 1801, with Fanny married and a mother, and her husband M. d'Arblay about to set off for France to sort out his inheritance: Volume six ends ten years later, with Fanny's return to England, after an unexpectedly prolonged absence, spent largely in Paris itself. So, inevitably, the chief interest of these volumes lies in their portrait of postrevolutionary France, of Napoleon, of the lives of former aristocrats and landowners. The letters dealing with the delayed departures of both the d'Arblays are less than gripping, but as soon as Fanny sets sail to follow her husband the story comes to life.
She is an excellent narrator, and does not waste good material: the horrors of sea sickness, the fatigue of travelling with small children, the alarms of customs officials, the surprise at finding the French at Calais are neither swarthy gipsies nor bloody monsters, as she admits she had anticipated all this is recounted to her father in vivid detail. And she continues to write home, during her ten years' stay, describing old friends rediscovered, new friends, ceremonies, parties, dresses, illnesses. Her chief interest is not politics, but people, and their public behaviour. Although married to a Frenchman, and acquainted in England with many French emigres, she starts off with the common English belief that French women are likely to wear too little clothing, and to behave in an immoral manner. We see her relief as she builds up a little circle of thoroughly respectable proper friends, of sound morals.
And yet there is something in her that hankers after the dashing, the improper. She appreciates the wit of French conversation, so much more entertaining and intelligent than most that she had to endure during her five years' imprisonment at court in England : she writes with admiration of Caroline Murat's "Cleopatra style" beauty and her "very pleasure-loving eyes", and she evidently finds it painful to obey propriety and break off her connection with Mme de Stael, of whose charm, vivacity and good humour she had written so warmly on their first meeting in England. But respectability wins, and Mme de Stael's friendly, eager and kindly greetings are coldly rejected. Maybe Mine de Stael thought the prudish English author no great loss as a friend; it is certainly Fanny who emerges ridiculous from the episode. It is a neat illustration of the double standard Mme de Stael is refused, but her lover, Narbonne, remains d'Arblay's friend and godfather to their child. It is also one of those moments in history when one can feel the shift from the morals of the eighteenth to the conventions of the nineteenth century the shift that also moves like a tremor in the novels of Jane Austen. It is such a waste, to see Fanny Burney draw back from some of the aspects of life that fascinated her, and to note her continuing obsequious letters to Miss Planta and the English royal family. If Fanny had not spent five gruelling years at court holding gloves and emptying snuff boxes, if England had got rid of its monarchy in a revolution, if Fanny had been ten years younger when she went to Paris . . . but there she was, a woman in her forties, with a small and delicate boy, born late, a woman who enjoyed her little suburban house in Passy, who was more interested in the curious French habit of living up lots of flights of stairs, in the curious French passion for over-showy military uniforms, than she was in the rights of women. She was what she was. It is idle, perhaps, to speculate on the influence she might have had, had her life been slightly different.
Morally timid she was, but a reader of these volumes must end with a deep admiration for her physical courage. Her two voyages, to Calais in 1802, and home frorn Dunkirk in 1812, were undertaken alone, without her husband's support, in a dangerous political climate, and bad weather, and she coped with them admirably. But the most striking passage she ever wrote is the description of the mastectomy that she endured in 1811, without anaesthetics, fully conscious, her face covered with a cambric handkerchief. She had suffered for some years from a painful lump in the breast, and finally the distinguished army surgeon, Dr Larrey, told her he would have to operate. Her account of his behaviour towards her, her emotions as the ordeal approached, her faintness at the sight of the "immense quantity of bandages, compresses, spunges, lint," and finally of her actual sensations during the surgery, is enough to make one thank God that one was born in the twentieth century. If she could have felt it proper to use this material in fiction, what a novel she might have written. As it is, her gift for noting the telling detail of tone, expression, for remembering dialogue, makes this description as vivid as a piece of film.
There is no prudery or squeamishness here, but a bravery and common sense all the more striking for its historical context. Fanny Burney certainly knew how to rise to an emergency. And, happily, the operation was completely successful. She seems to have lost some use of her arm, but she lived on for many years, until she was over ninety. Finally, one cannot help but like the woman, even though she is suburban in spirit, even though she refers to her husband, Mrs Elton style, as her caro sposo, even though she often, like a true female gossip, praises a friend's character at the expense of her face (who would like to be called highly accomplished, highly gifted, and very ugly ?) One likes her because she is so interesting, and so ordinary at the same time.
An ordinary woman, with an extraordinary gift.
Previous page
