When the memorial to Fanny Burney is unveiled in Westminster Abbey in June 2002, to mark the 250th anniversary of her birth, she will join Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontë sisters as the only women to be commemorated in Poets' Corner. But who reads Burney now? Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch and Jane Eyre still sell millions of copies around the world, but who knows of Burney's novels, such as Evelina, Cecilia or The Wanderer? And yet Burney was a sensation in her lifetime.
In 1778, when Burney's first novel, Evelina, was published, everyone wanted to know who had written such a wickedly funny satire on fashionable society. Joshua Reynolds, Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke and Dr Johnson all praised the novel. And when her last book, The Wanderer, was advertised for publication in 1814, Byron rushed to the printers to read it while it was still in proof.
So why has Burney been forgotten? And why is her reputation at last being resurrected? Because Burney was not only a novelist, but also a diarist, ranking alongside Pepys for her insights into the world in which she lived. And, as we have recently discovered, she was also a secret playwright. Burney's comedy A Busy Day, or An Arrival from India is now being given its first-ever full-scale production by the Bristol Old Vic before transferring to the West End.
Burney wrote A Busy Day in 1800 while living in Surrey with her husband, General d'Arblay, a penniless exile from the French Revolution. She was desperate for money and thought that perhaps she could emulate Sheridan, who had made over £15,000 (worth about £750,000 now), from The School for Scandal. Indeed, when Sheridan was running the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, he once asked her to write a play for his next season after reading Evelina.
A Busy Day begins when the young heiress, Eliza, arrives back in London from the British trading post of Calcutta to be confronted by her long-lost family. They have come up in the world, having made lots of money in the City, but they are ill at ease in the circles in which they now move. Further misunderstandings and farcical meetings occur when Eliza's family are introduced to the haughty parents of her husband-to-be.
Burney, however, never saw her play performed. Before she had the chance to finish it, d'Arblay returned to Paris to recover his lost fortunes, taking advantage of the peace that had been declared between France and Britain. Burney and their son Alex followed, and were then trapped on the other side of the Channel when war broke out again. They did not settle back in Britain until after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815.
The experience gave Burney brilliant material for her diaries, and her account of being in Brussels as the troops marched off to Waterloo was used by Thackeray when he came to write Vanity Fair. But it did nothing to advance her ambition to work in the theatre.
D'Arblay died not long after their return to Britain, and although Burney went back to live in London, where she had grown up, she never attempted to have her plays staged. She once wrote that writing plays was what "I have all my life been urged to, & all my life intended - I thought the field more than open". But this was the beginning of the 19th century and the theatre was an unsuitable occupation for ladies of a certain class.
The re-emergence of A Busy Day began in the 50s, when the great Burney scholar Joyce Hemlow discovered the manuscript in the New York Public Library. Hemlow realised that not only had Burney completed her play, she had also prepared it for production, even noting her ideal cast.
Hemlow recognised immediately its quality as an 18th-century comedy to rival anything written by Sheridan, and encouraged its publication. But it was not until 1993 that A Busy Day was given its first public performance, at the Hen and Chicken pub theatre in Bristol. It was a sell-out, and yet, as Alan Coveney, the director of that production recalls, he did little to update the text other than cut it. Reviewers were surprised at the sharpness of Burney's wit, and the success of its satirical take on society, which some compared to Oscar Wilde. As Coveney explains, "Because she does not rely on gags for comic effect, but on the interplay between the characters, her comedy is as relevant today as it was when she wrote it."
This is the same talent that makes Burney's novels and diaries such an entertaining read. As Jonathan Church, the director of the new production, says, "The characters are so well drawn that everyone recognises immediately who they are meant to be." And it is this that still makes us laugh out loud.
• A Busy Day is at the Bristol Old Vic (0117-987 7877) till May 6, then transfers to the West End. Kate Chisholm's biography Fanny Burney: Her Life, 1752-1840 is published by Vintage, price £7.99.
