Fanny Burney: a Biography
Claire Harman
HarperCollins £19.99, pp394
Buy it at BOL

Who reads Fanny Burney now? The occasional lover of eighteenth-century novels who wants to go a little further; academic feminist enthusiasts of her late, rambling, political work The Wanderer, and precious few others. These days, she appears mostly on the edge of the photograph - the shy, watchful young woman with Dr Johnson at the Thraleses'; the journalistic observer of Napoleon; the unwilling courtier who was present throughout George III's 'mad business'.

Many readers know her best for a single, uncharacteristic and horribly vivid description of having a cancerous breast removed without anaesthetic, a piece of icy, yet clear writing infinitely more terrifying than anything written by the entire school of gothic horror novelists.

This relative obscurity would astound her contemporaries. Burney's first novel, Evelina, is a brilliant work still, a sharp, hard epistolary novel which is better than anything by Richardson and compares well with Fielding or Smollett. Her second and third, Cecilia and Camilla, are too long but still readable, while her comedies, which never found an audience at the time, are currently being rediscovered. Then, of course, there are her massive diaries and letters, an essential source for anyone interested in the turn from the eighteenth-century mind towards the age of Victoria.

She was a superstar of literary London who, in her heyday, enthralled the reading public, was admired by such formidable intelligences as Johnson and Burke and whose influence on Jane Austen, Thackeray and even Dickens is indisputable.

Beyond that, she lived an extraordinary life, growing up amid talented siblings (one sister was a musical child prodigy only outshone by a pint-sized Mozart and a brother sailed with Cook on his fatal voyage to Hawaii) before her literary glory, her incarceration at court, her late marriage to a refugee French soldier and her long exile in Paris, until she returned home, living until 1840, a curiosity for Sir Walter Scott to visit and Macaulay to revile.

Her story is gripping but it is melancholy. The slaughter of siblings, cousins, children, friends that was the lot of so many eighteenth-century families is part of it. The Burneys had their share of family humiliations and reverses, black sheep and missed opportunities. But the core problem for a biographer is that Fanny herself went off. She almost wilfully destroyed her early promise and emerges, in old age, as a pretty unattractive character.

This really, is the nub of the Burney problem and has a lot to do with her gender. Born into the coarse, robustly male world of the Enlightenment, into a family poor enough to struggle for its status, she was constantly and anxiously torn between feeding her genius and finding a place which would please her father and secure her position in 'society'.

This was too early for the heroic unconventionalism of a George Eliot; Burney had no female predecessors to refer to and lived in the anxious middle ground between wealth and poverty, a place many unattached male writers could inhabit happily enough, but a much harder terrain for a single woman of modest means.

Novel writing, she felt, was not quite respectable and she felt unable to turn down Queen Charlotte's offer to join the royal household at Windsor, a hideous life of exhausting routine idleness and gossip; there is a sad description of her last walk from outside life to the palace, almost unable to breathe. But after five years she did escape and before long, in one of the gayest passages in her life, unexpectedly married a penniless French émigré and officer, Alexandre d'Arblay, who emerges from this book as an engaging, kind, feckless man and a hilariously unbellicose soldier, like someone out of Tristram Shandy. He undoubtedly gave her her happiest years but when he died, Fanny's descent into a quavering mummifier of reputations and preserver of decency began.

This tough, observant and vastly talented woman decayed into a prudish, fluffy, prolix moralist, a censorious bore, an obsessive rewriter of her family's dubious history. The hard-edged observer of eighteenth-century life becomes a nineteenth-century prig.

Oh yes, and she lied. Claire Harman reviews the evidence on Burney's reshaping of the truth about her father, whose second marriage badly wounded his children and who never quite managed the literary status he craved, and incidents from her own life, including a semi-farcical near drowning (or not). Peeling back the layers of polite deceit is not easy, but has been done expertly and the result is not pretty. She was a comprehensive sanitiser, a Bowdler of her own life.

This particular problem of unpeeling and exposing has been well dealt with by Harman - quite quickly, the reader trusts her fairness and judgment on genuinely tricky questions - but it leads to a second problem. Fanny was admirable in many ways, tough and brave, resourceful and hugely intelligent... but by late middle age, at least, she was not likeable, certainly not if one has had to wade through her interminable late prose.

The sadness of her life, and this book, is that the young Fanny, cool and observant though she was, obsessed with her father's good opinion though she was, is nevertheless genuinely attractive in a Jane Austenish way, the miss who misses nothing, though without the greater writer's towering intelligence and merciless eye. In a sense, Jane Austen was Fanny Burney's final answer to her world. You wish not only that things had turned out better for her, after the fairy-tale success of Evelina, but also that she had turned out better, or at least more interesting, herself.

The biographer, from her increasingly cool tone, clearly does not much like her subject by the end and, inevitably, some energy drains away from the narrative as a result. Still, for the recovery of a life that ought to be as well known as that of any romantic poet or later novelist, this is a great achievement.

It is rare for a reviewer these days to complain that a biography is too short, but for once, I could have done with a couple of hundred pages more.