Fanny Burney: A biography - Softcover

Harman, Claire

3.88

115 ratings by Goodreads

9780006550365: Fanny Burney: A biography

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006550363 ISBN 13: 9780006550365

Publisher: Flamingo, 2010

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Dazzlingfull of special delights. Harman excels in the vivid presentation of scenes, the selection of detail[a] marvellous and beautifully written book. Elspeth Barker, Independent on SundayAt the age of fifteen, Fanny Burney made a bonfire of all her works, with the sincere intention to extinguish for ever in their ashes her scribbling propensity. She was anxious that she might turn into an author, a fate incompatible for a woman with respectability.Her hope was in vain. Not only was she to write four novels (Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla and The Wanderer), all of which are still in print, she also kept a voluminous diary for the next seventy years and was a prolific letter-writer. Daughter of the eminent music historian Dr Charles Burney; friend of Sheridan, Garrick, Burke and Johnson; second keeper of the robes to George IIIs Queen Charlotte; wife to a refugee French aristocrat; detained for ten years in revolutionary France; horrified witness of the aftermath of Waterloo; victim of a mastectomy without anaestheticFanny Burneys life was as eventful as any novel.

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Review:

Claire Harman, author of the prizewinning biography Sylvia Townsend Warner, turns her attention to another English novelist, this one an 18th-century pioneer. Fanny Burney (1752-1840) caused a sensation with the 1778 publication of her epistolary romance Evelina. Aptly subtitled The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, the book offered England's burgeoning middle-class reading public a story that was both exciting and "decent," in contrast to the raucous tone of works by Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollet. Unlike her male predecessors, Burney knew how women thought and felt, and her novel's freshest moments honestly and amusingly show inexperienced Evelina making a fool of herself--though of course she's rewarded with a happy ending. (Unsurprisingly, young Jane Austen was a big fan.)

Burney herself, who didn't marry until she was 41, had a sharp eye for the vagaries of men other than her adored father, a noted music historian whose worshipful biography is her least interesting work. Harman offers a shrewd blend of social history and psychological analysis to explicate the complicated Burney family dynamic and its impact on Fanny. Her father was a self-made man who proudly joined the circle of rising middle-class merchants and intellectuals shaking up English culture, including Samuel Johnson and his patrons Henry and Hester Thrale. They would also be friends to Fanny, who had a much less sheltered upbringing than most 18th-century young ladies yet was always anxious to appear unshakably proper. To that end, she polished up the truth in her diaries and letters, and Harman's careful disentangling of fact from wishful thinking and manipulation in those documents is a model of the biographer's craft. Her smooth account of Burney's life captures a complex, conflicted woman and makes vivid for modern readers a key moment in the development of the novel. --Wendy Smith

From the Back Cover:

"Harman's excellent biography of Fanny Burney is unlikely to be bettered for many years to come." --Kathryn Hughes, New Statesman

"We are priviledged to have this new and meticulous account of an extraordinary life. Harman's account is full of special delights. She excels in the vivid presentation of scenese, the selection of detail. A marvellous and beautifully written book." --Elspeth Barker, The Independent on Sunday

"An elegantly written biography . . . Harman recognizes Burney as a person of her times and not the feminist heroine that academic industry has often made of her."--Alex McLaughlin, Evening Standard

"Sensitive and immaculately researched."--Simon Sebag Montefiore, Mail on Sunday

"Harman's biography scrupulously resists gossip in favour of a sober engagement with important questions of truth, identity, and the nature of biographic enquiry. She invites us to rethink our perspective on Fanny Burney, and suggests new approaches to reading a woman's life and work."--Pamela Norris, Literary Review

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