In Our Time - Fanny Burney

Episode Date: April 23, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the 18th-century novelist, playwright and diarist Fanny Burney, also known as Madame D'Arblay and Frances Burney. Her first novel, Evelina, was published anonymously and caused a sensation, attracting the admiration of many eminent contemporaries. In an era when very few women published their work she achieved extraordinary success, and her admirers included Dr Johnson and Edmund Burke; later Virginia Woolf called her 'the mother of English fiction'.With Nicole Pohl Reader in English Literature at Oxford Brookes UniversityJudith Hawley Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonandJohn Mullan Professor of English at University College London. Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Virginia Woolf called Fanny Burney, the mother of English fiction. Bernie's first novel, Ivelina, published anonymously in 1778, was an immediate sensation and success. With this and her later books, it's claimed that she inspired a generation of writers, including Jane Austen. Fanny or Francis Burney is arguably even more remarkable for her letters and journals in which she vividly describes events such as the Mad King George

who chased her around the gardens at Q being in Brussels the night before Waterloo and her own mastectomy performed at home without anaesthetic apparently shy in the enemy of snobs she lived a remarkable life at a remarkable time with me to discuss Fanny Burney R. Nicol Pohl reader in English literature at Oxford Brook's University Judith Hawley, Professor of 18th century literature at Royal Holloway, University of London,

and John Mullen, Professor of English at University College London. Judith Hawley, what was life like in her family for Francis? Well, Francis Burney was born in 1752 in Kingslyn in Norfolk. Her father Charles was organist at the church there and a music master. And Kingslin was, compared to London, was something of a backwater in those days. Bernie, her father, was an important musician, but he had moved out of London for his health, and he felt kind of becalmed in the area. But it was an international port and a very lively, bustling city with a thriving merchant class

who supported local music. So music and the arts and social relations are very important themes throughout her life. She was the third of six children of Charles Bernice's first marriage to his true love, Esther. sleep and it's a very close-knit family. They had all sorts of secret code words and throughout their lives they banded together both to support each other but also to keep the lid on things. There are lots of family secrets that she kept throughout her life. But she did have a very happy childhood though she was something of a slow starter. Apparently she didn't learn to read and write till she was eight and when Charles Bernie was going to send two of us, was going to send two of us

two of the family are off to France for education. He said, let's keep Fannie at home because she's a bit of a slow bunny. So there's no obvious impression that she would be... We're talking about happiness and sort of idyllic little women contentment, but it was devastated by the death of her mother when she was 10. Yes, that's right. So there are a series of blows in her life, and the first really serious one, as you say, is the death of her mother when she was 10.

By that time, the family were living back in London. She was really knocked sideways by it. Five years later, her father remarried. He married a woman that the family had known in their King's Lynn days, but she was never happy with her stepmother. And that presence of her stepmother, a substitute for her real mother, I think cast a shadow over her life. Can you just tell us a little more about Charles Bernie, her father? He's back in London. What significant part he played in her life? He played a significant part in her life and in the cultural life of the country.

And both of those aspects are important too. because they always have this sort of public role. He was a loving and a doting father, but I think in some ways a bit of an oppressive presence, she idealised and idolised him and was constantly seeking for approval. And if he withheld approval, it would be devastating for her. He was a very talented musician, an organist, a composer,

a musicologist as well. and when he moved into a sort of writing career, writing a very significant four-volume history of music, Francis was his secretary. And he had a massive library? Yes, and he allowed her free reign in the library. So she was not entirely self-educated, but she had a very interesting mixture of freedom

and access to the most extraordinary culture and the most extraordinary range of social contacts, but at the same time was slightly, I think, hobbled by, sort of shackled by the close-knit and almost blanketing nature of her family life. Was that just the family life

or the fact that she was a woman at that time? Well, I think that's a very good question. It was a combination, I think, of her family but also internalising public expectations of what a proper lady should be like. She is obsessed with propriety

and manners. And that went into, John Mullen, that went into the way she in her mid-20s delivered the book Evelyn that she'd written. Can you talk about that? Yeah. I mean it's a bizarre, slightly farcical

story that she turns she sort of turns her shyness, her shyness about a novel, which she has, after all, written and an elaborate and sophisticated novel. She turns her shyness about it into a sort of game.

So she wants to have it published, but she wants to have it published, anonymously and she wants even the publisher Thomas a man called Thomas Lans not to know who it's coming from so one of her brothers dresses up in kind of a great coat and a broad-brimmed hat

to deliver this negotiations happen by letter under pseudonyms even the manuscript of the novel Evelyn is written out in a sort of feigned hand so she changes a handwriting because she's worried she's been acting as Judith says as a secretary to her father, Charles Burner,

she's written out his history of music. So she's afraid that people in the print shop or somewhere will recognise her handwriting. So she goes to elaborate lengths to disguise her involvement. What's your analysis of why she does that? Is this personal or is it because a lot of women at the time thought they'd be better off if they pretended they were men? Well, it's complicated because men do this a bit,

actually, and the games that 18th century and indeed later 19th century, some 19th century writers play with anonymity and pseudonymity are complex and not restricted just to women. So it's quite normal for a novelist in the 18th century to publish at least their first novel, sometimes all their novels anonymously. Fielding publishes his first novel anonymously. Richardson publishes his. Lawrence Stern publishes his first novel anonymously. What's a bit different about Bernie's after publication,

after successful publication, the men I've mentioned rather want to be found out. The books are success, it's widely admired. Richardson keeps leaving copies around so that people who visit who don't know, will know, or if they do know, will raise the topic. Bernie's a bit different, and that's, I think, when both her personality

and the fact of her gender make a big difference. After the books are huge success, almost an instance of the bestseller, everybody's talking about it. I think everybody in the late 1770s is going, at last, another really good novelist. We've been waiting. It's almost 20 years since the last good novel,

Tristan Chandy came out. Now we've got a good one. She remains incredibly reticent and sort of sits listening to people in her intellectual circles, talking about this novel in front of her, not knowing it's by her. And he's particularly worried, I think, about what her father's going to say about it. For those who I can't bring to mind the plot, a story of the novel,

could you summarise it in a succinct brief? Oh, very succinct. Very succinct. I'm absolutely. Okay, well, I'm on your side with this one. Right. Well, in a sense, it's two novels intertwined. There's a kind of, there's a plot, and it's a slightly fairy tale plot. about a young woman, Evelyn, who is very important. She is largely the narrator of the novel.

It's mostly written in letters like Richardson's novels that have gone before Bernie and are the great sort of exemplar in the 18th century, serious fiction. So it's written in letters by this young woman, and this young woman has been disowned by her father, who's an aristocrat, and who doesn't realize that she's his daughter because he's got another daughter who he thinks is his... daughter and he was secretly married to Evelyn's mother in France where all sorts of dodgy things happen and this secret marriage, a marriage that nobody knew about apart from the people who,

the husband and wife, has been erased and he's destroyed the documents and he claims it never happens. And so she's a sort of orphan, her mother's dead of heartbreak and she's being looked after by a guardian who's a sort of virtuous clergyman. It's getting like one of those terrible plots in it. Well, she's a kind of floating nobody, and this happens quite a lot in Bernie's fiction. But the most important thing is it's a young woman who comes to London, enjoys the pleasures of London.

I'm about to tell you about the second bit. Yeah, but there isn't all that much time. All right, the second bit. So the plot is about how is she going to get her birthright back? But the second bit of the novel, which is intertwined with this, is about a young lady's entrance into the world, as the subtitle. it. And she comes to London and then later in the novel goes to Bristol and the great kind of life of the novel

comes from the fact that in these letters written by this 17 year old girl, she describes the contemporary bustling, pleasure-filled, risky, animating life of Georgian London and Georgian Bristol. It's full of satirical portraits, social types, snobs, vulgar, jumped up no-nothings. And it's very humorous. So this romance plot exists alongside this sort of bustling contemporary satire. Thank you very much. That was all right, was it? That was very good. No, no, no. Nicole, how did Fanny,

who did she meet in the social circle when her father moved back to Lundon? He moved back to Soho. That's right, yeah. Can you tell us about the circle that was attracted to his house and to his company? What's quite interesting is that there are kind of two phases here for social life. So as as the other said, the family moved back to London in the 1760s,

and the close friend, the other daddy, Samuel Crisp, suggested that. And he said, oh, London is, you know, sent of riches and extravagance. The other daddy being a friend of her father's whom took a great interest in her rights. That's right. She always says she had two daddies. So they moved to London. They went through the trauma of losing the mother, and then there's a remarriage.

And the second wife and Dr. Charles Burney, they were very good at attracting lots and lots of. visitors. Obviously Charles Bonnet because of his musical connections and he gave tuition as well, invited people like Garrick, Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, so the great thinkers

of the time. That's not bad, the top actor, one of the top painters and one of the top orators. And then we have of course Dr. Johnson, we have James Beattie and Elizabeth Montague and has Sathreel Piazzi as well. And these people came on a regular basis and in fact

also invited them as well to their own little soirees and assemblies. And after Fanny Burney published Evelyna, she was the kind of talk of the day. And people said, some Barbeau said later on that she was sort of as famous as the air balloon. So everyone wanted to meet her. And I'm not sure this is a compliment or not. You must have been very pleased.

I know. But everyone was meeting her with great curiosity. that this, I've read quite a bit about this for this prayer. Do you think that the praise was given to her? This is a very awkward question. Probably unanswerable, but it's interesting. Do you think that they were praised because she was a woman and it was so extraordinary

that a woman should write this and she was a vivacious, present young woman, our father was famous? Do you think it was that or they really thought it was an excellent book? A, I really thought this was an excellent book. But I'm with John on this. There is a game here, self-fashioneding,

that Fanny Bernie was reticent, she was shy, she was a slow learner, as Judith said at the beginning, but I think there's also a kind of convention here that other women writers and other writers in the 18th century practice, which was you play a certain part, you fashion yourself. Now, what became very clear is when she entered the circle of Dr. Johnson and Hester Therreepiopiozzi is that she really loved that professional environment because the difference between the Thrail circle

and, for instance, the blue stockings is that the circle around Dr. Johnson saw themselves as professional writers. The idea of play, just to transfer the word for a little, that his plays were much more, as I understand it at the time, famously, much more highly regarded than novels. And she wanted to write plays, and she did write plays, eight in the end. And the first one was called The Whittlings.

And what happened to that? Well, the Whitlings is really interesting. Whittling, if you look up, Dr. Johnson himself, is someone who wants to be a wit. So incredibly satirical. She wrote it in 1779, and she was encouraged because of the success of Evelyna, but also of the lovely dialogue she used in Evelyna

to write a comedy. And Sheridan said, it will be performed at Dury Lane, you're okay. She wrote a comedy of manners, and at first sight, I would say, say she satirises that the literary society she in fact and her father depended on

and this was a problem. So Charles Bernie and Hester Thrail said perhaps because of all the implications and the illusions here to great people such as Elizabeth Montague let's not perform it because you will offend too many people. She was very offensive and

satirical towards Elizabeth Montague who was rich from the centre of the Brewstocking group so don't offend people who are going to help you along the way. You're just a first That I think is quite interesting with Fanny Bernan, so I don't quite believe her trope of being so shy and reticent. So she portrays this lady Smatter, who is in the Espri Club. And she satirises her to bits.

That's right. It seems to get quite a bit right, enough right for them to say, don't do anything with this play. Well, but if you look at the subtitle of the Whittlings, which is a comedy by Sister of the Order, she kind of includes herself on this as well, which is really important to think about. But the Tom Bonner deals that her father and her other father

and friends said, this is too near the market, it will do you no good. We're not going to let you put it on. And they said they weren't going to let her put it on, which is an important point in what they did in controlling her career. I think, let me tell me if I'm wrong. Judith Halley, the next novel she came up was Cecilia,

which was much longer than Molina. It was, again, a financial success. What's emerging there in the themes of her writing? John has already mentioned a couple of the clear themes that you find in Evelyn and you find I think in all four of her novels and they all centre on a heron and there's always an issue about who the heron is. There's an issue about identity, what's her real background and also what's her character?

Is she as virtuous as she seems? Bernie puts all of her herons in compromising situations, socially compromising situations in which they appear to. be flirts or coquettes or in some way improper or socially inferior. So one of the novels always end up as social comedies with the hero and being married to the right man and being recognised and achieving a stable social position. But often the hero is tested as well. He has to recognise her true worth.

And in the case of Cecilia, it's even more of a fairy tale set up. There's an heiress, there's a condition in her will that if she marries a man, he has to take her surname, which is Beverly, otherwise she'll lose her inheritance. So money is another theme throughout her novels. She has three guardians, she has to choose between, and seven suitors. So these kind of magical numbers. And she ends up in a sort of dance relationship with Mortimer Delville, and they play around each other. and they misunderstand each other and are constantly rushing away from each other. But clearly she's at the mood of the moment again, John, didn't she? John Mullen.

Yeah, yeah. And Cecilia was very successful. And, I mean, you have to remember, I think, that there is no, as it were, occupation of novelist at this time. So Fanny Burney is not sort of, as somebody might now do, if they wrote their first novel and it was very successful, oh, right, I'm going to be a novelist now. That's my occupation. So I think, you know, the Whitlings episode that Nicole has described is a sort of frustrated avenue down which she might have otherwise gone. And I think readers of Cecilia would, if they've read Avelina, might think that the satirical portraits,

which have sort of come thick and fast in the Whitlings, are slightly more spaced out in Cecilia. I mean, it's an immensely long novel, as you say. And she has to kind of engineer lots of misunderstandings to kind of keep the plot going. But at the time, it was regarded, I think, as a sort of demonstration that fiction could be proper, sincere, genteel. Lots of the qualities which I think now a reader might think are the things that hampered Bernie, were the things which at the time people praised and valued about it. can go back to the plays for a second with you John.

She eventually wrote eight plays and clearly wanted to keep writing plays. Now only one of them was put on. And was she daunted, what was going on there? Well, I think you have to realise that one aspect of the sort of the life that Nicole gave a sort of wonderful capsule description of

was that the theatre was a big thing for her. She knew Garik and Sherry. These people came round. Garrick and Sheridan. Garrick would perform in the parlour. She lived, for the most part, when she was in London, five minutes walk from the two main theatres. She went to the theatre all the time.

She did amateur dramatics. The family did amateur dramatics in the home. It was absolutely natural, I think, that she was intoxicated by theatre. Were they just not that good, her plays? I think that it's a tricky one to answer, because I think the Whitlings is clearly our first play. And one of the reasons that,

one of the other reasons I think Charles Bernie, her father, was very dubious about women writing plays, was not just the depictions of particular people. But also, if you wrote a play, you then had to turn up at rehearsals. You had to go to the theatre. You had to talk to the actors and actresses who were dodgy people. You had to be involved in a way that with a novel,

you didn't. You wrote it in private and then it was let loose. And for a woman to be involved in the theatrical life in that way was, I think, in some people's eyes, a difficult thing. But it would have meant also that the plays would have been honed and tested and improved and that she could have become an accomplished playwright. Yes, I was going to pick up on that point that the plays are too long, like the novels are too long. She doesn't have either the discipline or the good advice

to say, cut it short. Nicole, can we talk about an interlude in her life, which was a four-year interview, which was very distressing for her when she was 34, she became assistant keeper of the robes to Queen Charlotte. That's right. Why did she take that job on?

Well, that's a good question. And we were talking about this before the programme, actually. I don't like to hear that. I mean, that's a waste of everybody's time. Let's talk about it now. So she was, through, Mrs. Delaney, who she met as part of the circle, she was introduced to the court circle. But in fact,

the king already met her before at a different venue and addressed her and saying, how goes the muse? So he was clearly aware of her as a novelist. She became the second keep of robes because she was at a point where she didn't know what to do in terms of writing if it was enough to keep her going. she thought she would never get married either. So she got kind of personally stuck in a midlife crisis and this was offered to her. She was very reluctant to, in fact, take the job but was persuaded by, again, her father, her family,

to take it because it would have been a good living, £200 per year, which is roughly, what, 20,000 now. And it's an unusual occupation for her because we know that Fannie Bernie was not, not interested in fashion, not interested in clothes at all, but she helped the queen to dress herself, to go from formal occasions to informal occasions, to be at her side all the time. To look up to her snuff. Exactly.

And the queen, the queen always got it. The queen was very worried about her talents because she said, oh, she always gets the bows wrong, she uses the wrong ribbons, and she doesn't really know what to do. Now, Fanny Bernie didn't work on her own. There was also a sidekick called Juliana Schellenberg, or Schwellie, as she calls it, a German keeper of the robes who Queen Charlotte brought from Germany.

And she made her life hell. Shuelly made her life hell. And if you look at the diaries, because she was mean, she had no manners, and there was a certain competition going on there as well. Because what Fanny Bernie did, in addition to being the keeper of the ropes, although not very well,

was to also talk to Queen Charlotte about literature. She advised him saying, this is a really good novel, this is a really good piece you should read. So there was a bit more going on, and she got on with the princesses really well as well. But what seemed to have happened from what I read from the three of you is that he got her down, her health deteriorated,

she couldn't do any writing. But the crazy was without help, she couldn't get out. She wasn't allowed to resign, so somehow or other, she had to summon forces from outside the court to come and rescue her almost. How did she do that? Well, she got very ill, and that had to do partially with living at Q,

which was originally designed as a summer house. And during the period at Q, and the reason why the Muti Q is because of the episodes of the madness of King George, he deteriorated very quickly. He had quite rough episodes, the Queen, and she describes this very lovely in her diaries, the Queen was terrified, she was chased, as you mentioned at the beginning, by the king through Q Gardens. They went to Weymouth. She just deteriorated in her health.

She approached her father and say, please help me to get out of here. And in the end, she negotiated with Queen Charlotte that she could leave, although Queen Charlotte was not pleased, and she would receive a kind of pension of £100 a year. That set her up to return back to her literary activities.

But more important, excuse me, at least as important, if not more important, Judith Hall, it was very soon after this, she's 34, she's 38. When she's 40, she met and married Alexandra Dablet, a French emigre general. This is in, you'll tell me the date. Ah, 1793. Yeah, so trouble is brewing with the French, and they've come, emigres have come over to England, especially around the dorking area. And very sympathetic, a lot of English people were to them.

because they were fleeing the terror. A lot of people were sympathetic, but there is also a very troubling group of people. This group of emigres who are settled at Juniper Hall, which is still there near Box Hill. It's a Forestry Service Commission or something now. It was a Nature Study Centre. You can visit it.

They included Madame de Stile, a very important French writer and her lover, and they were radical thinkers. They'd been critical of the monarchy, but they're equally critical of the revolution. so they're not wanted in France or really in England. Darblay was also a Catholic and had absolutely no way of earning any money.

He couldn't earn any money in France or in England. So he's a very, very unsuitable match as a husband. They fell head over heels in love. And it was one of the great romances, I think, a very, very happy, supportive relationship, full of romantic gestures. One day he walked all the way from Box Hill to Chelsea to leave her a rose bush.

was out. He left the rose bush and also some French homework he'd done for her and he walked back again. They married against her father's advice and in fact he didn't attend the wedding. You wanted to say so when you told. I think that the episode

of Juniper Hall and Judith just mentioned Madame de Stahl as well is really important not only because of this lovely romance and her marriage and how her life changed but also the group of people she met and how she again interacted in quite a clever way

with machinations of her father as well because at the beginning she was very close to Madame de Stahl Madame de Stahl knew her work admired her as a fellow sister writer but then when she kind of caught on that Madame de Salle in fact had an affair and illegitimate child she ditched her because she didn't want to lose her pension from the queen and she did the same with her

with Hester Threyer Piazzi so she was very clever in maneuvering this with her father support of course and encouragement that she would not lose social standing. Her husband was penniless. He lost all this property and everything in France, John Mullen. So she, did she sit down and write Camilla to make enough money to get? I think that's right. I think she built a house called Camilla Cotting. Yeah, she did on the proceeds. And she made lots of money from Camilla. I mean, she made a couple of thousand pounds pretty much straight off from Camilla, from very cleverly doing what other writers

had done earlier in the 18th century, not just selling the copyright for a thousand. thousand pound but then publishing it by subscription which meant you paid up in advance for a copy and you got your name printed at the beginning of the book as a sign of your sort of literary acumen taste of subscribers as well so yes it's got Jane Austen it's got Mariah Edgeworth

on it the leading who was to become the other leading novelist of the early 19th century so quite a list and quite a coup and she made quite a lot of money and she built yes she built Camilla Cottage on it And he worked, a husband worked as a secretaries. He did, he did.

I mean, as, you know, as Judith was saying, it was a relationship, not just a loving relationship, but a kind of relationship of equals. I mean, a marriage, you know, which is, it's quite sort of salutary to kind of read, it's not the only example, read of these examples from the 18th century and see that actually sometimes people had what we would recognize

as equal relationships within marriages. And Fannie Bernie certainly did. And you mentioned earlier her sort of journals, and her journals, which are in some ways, I mean, are best writing, I think, which are full of these satirical portraits of wonderful dialogue, which she had a great ear for, but also these fascinating people. This circle of French emigres earlier, the circle of Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrail and Sheridan and Garrick,

and there they all are, and there they all are brought to life in her journals. and so she turns what was a fascinating life into her writing. I know in her 40s, which was then been considered to be quite old, she had her only child, they had a child also called Alexandra, and they went to France in 1802 at the peace settlement, and she was stuck there for the next 10 years, Judith Haldick. Can I tell us something about how difficult it was for her then? Yes, it was incredibly difficult.

Darbillet went there to try to find some way of either getting his fortune back or earning some money, and he volunteered to fight for Napoleon. and Napoleon said, well, okay, you can fight for me, you can restore your reputation if you're prepared to get a wound for the country. Take a blessure. And he said, well, I'll do that. But I won't fight against England. And Napoleon said, well, I would expect nothing less from Le Marie de Cecilia.

But no can do. So Napoleon wouldn't strike this deal with him. Darbley ended up with a very mediocre clerical job, utterly bored, utterly bored. English people in France from 1803, when the war resumed, were treated as political prisoners. They were not allowed to send or receive mail. So Bernie was completely cut off from her family and also from her income. She couldn't get her pension or any rent from Camilla Cottage.

So she lived a very retired life, afraid of attracting attention that would get him in trouble in France or would get her in trouble in England. So how did they make out, then, Nicole? What are they doing to keep going? Well, what Judith just mentioned is that Alexander Dablet, he had this clerical position and he went off every morning to Paris because they lived a bit outside of Paris in Pasi to go to work and that's what he did. And her son was quite ill so they kind of lived that retired life.

After a while, though, what happened is that Alexandre D'Abley agreed to take the pension of the military, but he had to agree to fight in the war. He was not allowed not to fight, and of course, unfortunately, this came true quicker than he thought, then he had to go to war, and we have the famous Waterloo episodes in Fannie Bernie's Diaries, because they were there at the time, and she reported them as well. That brings to the diary about which you are very enthusiastic, John Mullen. So can you just pick up that Nicolry's reference and then say a little bit more about the journals. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, the journals are, they're called journals. A lot of them are actually

written in the manner of letters, letters to particular people, especially up until 1800 to her sister, Susan. And the fact that they're written in letters is very important because it gives a kind of chatty, gossipy, confidential animation to them. And clearly Bernie is writing these with some eye to posterity. And two of the people, Susan and Samuel Crisp, to whom she writes these journal letters, actually keep them in bound volumes, and then she gets them back after their deaths. And one of the Waterloo episode that Nicole was referring to, one of the really frightening things about Waterloo for Fannie Bernie is that she leaves in a hurry.

and all, you know, sort of box of all her journals is left behind. And for a while she thinks it's going to go and posterity would have lost a wonderful document. So in a way, I think her journals, she's where she tests things out for her novels and her would-be plays. A lot of the journals are sort of dialogue, incredibly vivid and wonderfully recorded,

but no doubt also slightly fictional, because she has to remember it in retrospect, dialogue. Can you, Nicole, can we pick up the Waterloo her husband was wounded? Yes. And she went and looked for him and eventually she found him. That's right. That's right. But can we just get to the business of this mastectomy? Which is fascinating, isn't it? Four hours, no anaesthetic, a little wine now and then, and successful, no infection. And on she lived

late 17, it's extraordinary. It is quite extraordinary. And again, we have a separate journal for this. And as John mentioned, we have, in fact, these kind of packages of the journals that relate to all these different kinds of episodes. So this one was then was written up in 1820. So what she does is she writes notes more or less at the same time, but then later on compiles them as these kind of journals and letters. So you absolutely write John in saying that they're partially fictionalized and composed for posterity. But in the In 1811, she was diagnosed with breast cancer

and it's interesting because in France a breast cancer treatment already started in the 1740s where in England only in 92 and the idea was that you had to remove the whole breast the pectoral muscles and the glands as well so the whole thing had to go. No anaesthetics as you said

she was given a bit of wine cordial here and there and her... I don't know how much more of this I can take right now. I mean, I think one of the details... It is. I mean, John said in his note, she just sets it all down, but it becomes almost unbearable. It becomes, and she talks about this.

She talks about the glitter of polished steel plunge into her breasts and the knife rattling against, no, I'm not. Knife rattling against a breastbone. I mean, she does talk about it, and we're all sitting here and are holding our bodies, aren't me? But what's really, really important is that she wrote it down

because there had been always the silence around breast cancer. we've got the example of Anna of Austria, the wife of the Louis I said. But she wrote it down here, and one of the many things she wrote down here. She did, but because the other ones, like the Anne of Austria or Mary Astel, kept it hidden.

And we have Lady Delacour in Mariah Edgirous, Belinda, as well as a sufferer of cancer. And again, there was a certain silence around this. So what was really important is that she talked about the pain, she talked about the operation and shared it. Judith Hawick, did she have an attitude? Did she have an attitude towards her? writing. It seems that it changed

according to circumstances. One was she wanted very much, I think John says it, to be very successful earlier on, and she was. She wanted to write plays, and she did, but it didn't work out like that. And then she wanted money, so then she wanted this. Is it, did these things all roll in together, or is she

changing tack? I think there's a consistent attitude and also the developing attitudes. The consistent attitude is that she always has an air of secrecy about her writing. of her novels are published anonymously. So Evolina has no name on the title

page, Cecilia, by the author of Elina. Camilla by the author of Evelyna and Cecilia, the Wander by the author of of, etc., etc., etc. So she's not, so she's playing with this idea of who she is. But increasingly, well, I suppose two things happen increasingly.

One is that her writing becomes more, more formal. And sometimes ponderous, and I would even say pompous, her style changes as she becomes more morally serious, perhaps also. takes on the flavour of the court and becomes the sentence structure becomes really convoluted and she becomes less and less popular but even as she's becoming less popular she becomes more a false right and determined to write so she has

this strong determination that I think becomes stronger over her life that she will commit things both to paper and also to publish them can you tell us John Mellon can you give us some idea she's let's say she's in her 40s she's married she's in France and then she comes back to England, one of the war finishes with her husband who's been wounded, the only last friend-in-law of the two or three years. What was he thought of at the time? Where was she in the general

pool of artists, writers, persons, whom she'd met when she was a child? Well, I think that Camilla, which was published in the early 1790s, the mid-1790s, had made her really respected figure. I mean,

I think, as I was trying to say early, the tricky thing for us is some the things that Judith was just saying about her, about a novel like Camilla, it's sententiousness, its great long Johnsonian sentences, actually made it rather admired at the time. People thought, oh, here, a novel can do a serious job. It can be moral. It can be written in this kind of literary way. That's good, and that's one of the reasons it was so successful. And I think that if she, you know, if she had capitalised on that, if she'd wanted to write more novels if she'd stayed in England, she would have had, you know, would have become a leading literary lady, but she didn't.

She didn't write another novel, another novel. She disappeared to France, and when she came back, she had another novel with her. But, you know, it was almost 20 years later. And she had sort of gone from the literary scene. And her final novel, the fourth novel, The Wanderer, which is a very different, very weird novel, I think. and which is kind of quite gothic and it's full of revolutionary politics and people arguing about what we might call feminism actually

sort of died a death she got quite a lot of money for it on the strength of her previous reputation but nobody much seems to have read it and I think it just took her out to the swim of fiction and it's very noticeable that when Austin mentions Bernie

it's particularly Camilla and Cecilia she refers to and the wander actually appears the same year as Mansfield Park, but it seems like the novel of somebody who is, who was once at the centre of literary life and isn't anymore. You have to remember, she was born in 1752. Her first novel was published during the age of of Johnson. 1814 is the date of her last novel. It's the age of Wordsworth. It's reviewed by Hazlett. It has a really scathing review from John Wilson Croker, who makes fun of her,

not just for being a woman, but for being an old woman. So she's lived beyond her period. in a way. She doesn't die to 1840. She lives through to the era of Victoria. She's extraordinary. Nicole. When we talk about how she saw herself in that period, the wanderer's really interesting because of her introduction. In the introduction to the wanderer,

she talks about how she struggles with writing. So that gives us also an indication of why maybe the wanderer is so uneven. And she has all these different kind of scenarios and plots which John say are Gothic in a way and remind us in some ways also of someone like Mary Woodscraft, for instance.

It becomes a very different kind of writing, but it is one that struggles with the writing itself, which is important to... And in the last years of her life, she lives this extraordinary long life. Her sadness is she outlives everybody, she outlives her son, she outlives her husband, she outlives all her siblings.

And what does she spend her last years doing? Daddy's still there, isn't he? Charles Bernie, who I think was an... I have to say, I think he was an inspiration as well as a limit on her. I don't think he's a villain. But she spends the last years, decades of her life, life preparing this hagiography of her dad, the memoirs of Charles Bernie, which is really designed

to glorify him and to preserve his reputation. And still, you've got him sort of presiding over what we might think of as her career. And I understand from what I've read from what you've all written that you would cut out of his letters, thing that might put him in a bad life. Propriety, propriety in decorum. And that struggle between truth-telling and proper. which in Evelyn, I think, is sort of the motor of it. I mean, it animates it, has become a kind of crushing duty for her. An awful lot is cut out in her novels, but an awful lot is kept in. It's not just the length, but her novels are incredibly inclusive.

There's a lot of violence in her novels. There are no guns in Jane Austen, but in Cecilia we have two duels and a suicide. There's a suicide or a suicide attempt in every single novels. There's a secret marriages. There are arranged marriages. So these are secrets you were talking about at the beginning of the program, but the family kept...

Yeah, the family secrets included two elopements, or three elopements. Her brother James left his wife and set up a household with his step-sister. Her brother Charles was expelled from Cambridge for stealing books. There are these things that were painful, really, deeply painful to her.

Well, that's a slap, isn't it? We have to end now, unfortunately. just as we were getting into all the dark side. Dark matter was coming up and off we go. Right, back into the light. Thank you all very much. Nicole Pohl, Judith Hawley, John Mullen.

Next week, here we're talking about the Earth's score. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Well, that fled, yes. Thank you all very much. I think I agree with Dr. Johnson. She was a toadling.

Yes, I wish that. Why didn't you say that? I was sort of fishing for it. That's why I was kind of... I think that's what she was. You think she was a tumbling? It is a withholding of a very strong, often angry sense of self-worth.

And you mentioned... You both mentioned the satire. She says some horrible things about people of all classes. But she does it from behind this demure screen. Dr. Johnson, I mean, he loved her, but he had a right, definitely. He had a right about lots of it. And he was always saying to her, wasn't he?

you are a sly thing. You're watching us all the time, aren't you? And she was. She was. She was. What did he say? You're a character manga, he said. You know, and you're watching and, you know, just like... It's just like Philip Roth, you know, don't... If you want to be friends with him, fine, but you'll be in a novel.

Yeah, yeah. And he didn't believe her a bit. He saw right through that facade of, you know, being polite and always about decor room. I wish we'd like... We'd get to know, because this is being recorded. You must know that, of course. This is the PS, which is now proved to prove the programme.

But the problem with Fanny Barney is you have so much and so many episodes and crazy descriptions of episodes like the King chases her in queue and kisses her on the cheek and, you know, crazy stuff. But I could fill four programmes probably with her. But there are some bits. I almost wanted to come in and correct a tiny little detail about Darblay's war wound. It wasn't a war wound. He was in the Royal Guard for Louis the 18th by this point.

He was kicked by his horse. So I had this impression at first that she rushed across the battlefield at Waterloo, searching among the corpses. But no, she took a series of boats and post chases down to Prussia to find him in and in where he'd been kicked by a horse. The poor man, I mean, he was a bit ineffectual, lovely and great husband in lots of ways, but he wasn't the hero.

of the war. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.ukuk slash Radio 4.