Dying to Self. (the Spirit of Love. Pt.2. 3rd Dialogue). With Notes by A. Murray Book

Anyone who sets up to be a biographer of a Burney had better be a speed reader: the entire Burney clan had a genetic predisposition to logorrhea. The most famous (today) member of the family—Fanny Burney, author of Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer—wrote continuously from her teens till her death in her eighties. Aside from the four novels, each longer than the last, there are plays, memoirs, screeds, and volume after volume of diary and letters.

For this superior biography, Claire Harman has mastered not just Fanny’s own writings but also significant chunks of those of her father, brothers, and other family members, as well as those of friends and associates. Every page is rich in quotation from these voluminous sources, but the quotes aren’t hauled in for show; they are organically integrated into a seamless narrative of Fanny’s life and times. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more accomplished biographical study.

This is all the more remarkable because Fanny Burney is not the first person I’d think of as providing rich fodder for such treatment. She was a literary celebrity in her day and knew many of the public figures of England and France, but she made no history of her own and her works are not widely honored as timeless classics. The novels she wrote later in life, in fact, are downright awful.

Harman does not seek to elevate Burney above her talents or portray her as a sterling character. But in Harman’s portrayal she is a rich and complex person, a mix of conflicting ideas and impulses, embedded in the contradictory social and intellectual movements of her age. I found the person evoked in these pages believable and learned a great deal, both about Burney herself and about the literary and intellectual world of which she was an integral part.

The last third of the biography is sketchier than the rest, but this is in part because Burney herself became a less assiduous journaler and autobiographer between 1800 and 1840, when she died. She also occupied a less central position in the cultural life of the day, being more focused on her role as wife, mother, and daughter, so the relative brevity is understandable. Beyond the facts of her external life, Harman also gives us a convincing take on Burney’s emotional landscape and includes penetrating critiques of the novels and plays.

Reading this biography was enriching and enlightening for me.