The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay) Volumes XI and XII 1818–1840 ed. by Joyce Hemlow with Althea Douglas and Patricia Hawkins

Abstract

Joyce Hemlow with Althea Douglas and Patricia Hawkins, eds., The Jour­ nals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay) Volumes X I and X II 1818-1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). xxvii, 1102. $195.00 How Fanny Burney would have deplored these volumes! They present, as fully as years of diligent work make possible, her surviving personal cor­ respondence from October 1818, when, recently widowed, she took up resi­ dence in London, until her death in January 1840 at the age of eighty-seven. These letters are occupied entirely with personal and family matters into which outsiders have no right to pry. And in those places where the writer felt it needless to give details, or contented herself with a mere allusion, why, these officious editors have meticulously filled in the gaps. Many a decent veil have they ripped away. The last years of Fanny Burney are here laid bare. This violation of her privacy, always so carefully guarded during life, reveals that these twenty-two years were no mere pendant, but an essential part of her career. The story these pages tell, perhaps inevitably, is a sad one, but the sadness is qualified throughout by the courage and even the high spirits with which this remarkable woman faced old age and its infirmities. In outliving all her siblings (she was survived only by her half-sister Sarah Harriet Burney), she found herself increasingly bereft of the warmth and understanding which had bound her so closely to her brothers and sisters. From childhood, it was to them and for them that she had written, and as they fell away she lost her most important and her most inspiring audience. In her own eyes, the crucial loss was that of her husband. The love which had led her to marry, against all rational calculation and her father’s political principles, had survived undimmed through a quarter of a century, and when he died in May 1818 she clearly felt that her own life was but a formality. (“My poor remnant life,” she called it.) As la comtesse veuve Piochard d’Arblay she had the duty of preserving his memory and defending his interests, but beyond these consecrated obligations she saw herself at first as having no existence. With time, this view was modified. She grew increasingly remote from her husband’s circle — though numerous warm attachments remained, she never revisited France, and after 1822 personal contacts were rare — and as the years went by she became more and more a Burney again. She recovered something of the delighted engagement with the details of everyday life so characteristic of her youth. She did so, how­ ever, only as a private and at times mildly reclusive individual; she might visit her dear Princesses, but she was far from the Court to which she had devoted the best years of her youth; equally distant from the arena of public affairs in which her husband had been a participant. Her world had shrunk, 337 drastically and irrevocably ; resilient as ever, she adapted herself to a different economy of life. Her husband had left her not only a memory to tend and unpaid emolu­ ments to collect, but also a son. Alexander Charles Louis Piochard d’Arblay was ordained deacon in September 18 18 and priest the following Easter Sunday. In October 1818 he was elected Fellow of Christ’s College, Cam­ bridge. He seemed to stand at the beginning of a brilliant career in the Church of England. The promise was never fulfilled. After a period of odd jobs separated by long intervals, he became Perpetual Curate of Camden Chapel, Camden Town. After twelve years in this uncongenial charge, he was appointed to the Ely Chapel, off Holbom, only to catch influenza there and die less than two months after preaching his inaugural sermon. His failure is puzzling. The symptoms are summarized in the index under “ character” : “amiability; artlessness; absence of mind; negligence; forget­ fulness; procrastination; health, uncertain disappearances; death and bur­ ial.” The underlying causes remain obscure. Perhaps a part of them is revealed by his mother’s response to his thought of augmenting his fellow­ ship by taking paying pupils: As myself...