Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (10 page)

Despite the poem at its head,
Evelina
was published without her father’s knowledge or permission. The author’s own susceptibility as a ‘Young Lady’ in a man’s world is confirmed by her parting with the manuscript of what would be her most popular work for a measly £20. Evelina made a fortune for everyone but her creator. The novel opens with a fighting Preface, in which Burney masquerades as a male author, defending ‘the humble Novelist’. Like all her fiction,
Evelina
is a courtship novel which assumes, as its starting point, that women have just one area of freedom in their lives – the right to decide, by acceptance or rejection, who they will marry.

The success of her first novel inspired a successor,
Cecilia: Or the Memoirs of an Heiress
(1782). The plot pivots on the plight of an orphaned heiress whose marriage chances are complicated by the requirement that her husband, whoever he may be, must sacrifice his manly privileges by taking on her surname. Although no heiress by this time Frances had herself turned down at least one offer of marriage. Her wilful spinsterdom was becoming something of an embarrassment. In 1786 family connections acquired for her a position at the royal court as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte (wife to the mad George III). She loathed the work and wilted in it. She contrived to retire, on health grounds, in 1791, with a lifelong £100 pension.

Burney saw her literary future, at this point, as a dramatist. Her guardians disapproved of women being associated with the delinquencies of Drury Lane and it was a generally unsettled period of her life. It was not made any more settled when, at the age of forty-one, in 1793, she married irregularly, after a secret courtship. Her husband was a penniless French aristocrat, Alexandre d’Arblay, a ‘constitutionalist’ – a radical conservative in a complicated relationship with the Revolution but ultimately obliged to flee for his life. The marriage was serially solemnised by both Protestant and Catholic ritual. Neither ceremony had the Burney family’s approval. One child, Alexander, was born in 1794. D’Arblay, an artillery officer, was unable to pursue his profession in England (an Aliens Act was passed in January 1794, prohibiting refugees like him from joining the British army), so Frances buckled to with another novel, with which to make a home for them.

She began serious work on her
grand ouvrage
in August 1794, while still the newest of mothers. The book which emerged was
Camilla, or A Picture of Youth
, published in 1796. Burney was resolved that this time she would not be cheated by publishers and
Camilla
went on to be the occasion of the most successful literary marketing operation in fiction of the decade. At a period when the routine payment to author for a circulating library romance could be as low as £10, Burney
would make from this one work the fabulous sum of £2,000. It helped that it was dedicated, by royal permission, to Queen Charlotte. That was not the only big name helping the novel on its way. Together with her husband, Fanny set up a public ‘subscription’ for the new work. Jane Austen and Edmund Burke were listed among the signatories. Her brother, the light-fingered Charles, sold the copyright (women and Frenchmen had no legal standing) after tendering for bids in March 1796 to a syndicate of publishers, headed by Thomas Payne and Cadell and Davies. They paid an upfront £1,000.

The five-volume, duodecimo sets were marketed (principally for circulating libraries) at a guinea apiece. After only three months, Burney reported to a friend that ‘The sale has been one of the most rapid ever known for a Guinea book … Of the First edition containing the immense quantity of 4000, 500 only remain.’ She built a home, Camilla Cottage, on the earnings. A fictionalised biography of the Burney family,
Camilla
chronicles the group story of the Tyrolds, covering twenty years during which the children grow to moral maturity, exhibiting their latent qualities and the effect of the moral instruction of their excellent parent, the Revd Augustus Tyrold. The family resides in Hampshire and there is a charming opening section in which the Tyrolds are taken up by their eccentric and wealthy uncle, Sir Hugh. Playing high-spirited games with little Eugenia Tyrold, this gentleman accidentally lames his niece for life. In an agony of remorse, Sir Hugh makes Eugenia his principal heiress, thus blighting Camilla’s marriage prospects. The plot gets very complicated thereafter.

So did life get complicated. With Napoleon’s accession, the d’Arblays returned to France, but the family were then stranded on the outbreak of war with England. In September 1811, still stranded in Paris, Frances, aged fifty-nine, underwent a mastectomy without anaesthetic. She recorded the operation in a letter to her sister Esther. It has become (thanks to circulation on the web) her best-known piece of writing for modern readers and has a violent accuracy found nowhere in her fiction.

I then felt the Knife tackling against the breast bone – scraping it! – This performed, while I yet remained in utterly speechless torture, I heard the Voice of Mr Larry, – (all others guarded a dead silence) in a tone nearly tragic, desire everyone present to pronounce if anything more remained to be done; The general voice was Yes, – but the finger of Mr Dubois – which I literally felt elevated over the wound, though I saw nothing, & though he touched nothing, so indescribably sensitive was the spot – pointed to some further requisition – & again began the scraping! – and, after this, Dr Moreau thought he discerned a peccant attom – and still, & still, M. Dubois demanded attom after attom.

The d’Arblays finally managed to return to England in 1812. The next few years were a time of upheaval with the never-ending war, and the constant fear that their son Alexander would be conscripted into it – on which side was not entirely clear. Prudently he was shuttled into the Anglican Church.

Burney’s career as a novelist effectively ended with the all too aptly entitled
The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties
in 1814. The taste was now for the national tales of Scott, Edgeworth and Maturin. Her last years were passed in Bath in retirement, supported by a queen who was long dead. Her last serious publication was the life of her father, who had died in 1814. Her husband died in 1818 and their son (now a clergyman) predeceased her, from influenza, in 1837. She, now a forgotten and lonely author, lived on until her eighty-eighth year, her old age a testament to the skilled surgeons of Paris.

Instructress to the young and thoughtless of the fair sex.

The woman bearing the title of America’s first novelist was born in Portsmouth, England, where her father worked for the British Navy. Her mother died on Susanna’s birth, and her father promptly remarried. In 1767 Lieutenant Haswell was assigned to custom duties in Massachusetts. It was a hot time on the Eastern Seaboard for those with any connection with the hated British ‘taxes’. During the American Revolution Haswell was taken prisoner, but allowed to return with his family, on grounds of ill-health, to London in 1778. In all this upheaval Susanna received little schooling – but read widely and saw more of the world than most young women. She showed early talent for singing, and performed publicly from her teenage years. She also earned an honest penny as a governess in her late teens – writing all the while.

Susanna’s first novel,
Victoria
, was published in 1786. The heroine of the title is the daughter of a deceased naval officer who is tricked into a sham marriage only to die mad, pregnant and abandoned. Like her later fiction it shows the strong influence of Richardson’s
Clarissa
. The bitter theme of abused womanhood recurs through Haswell’s fiction. There followed
The Inquisitor
(1788), a bundle of tales
displaying the Laurence Sterne-like ‘sentimentalism’ which was to be her later stock-in-trade. In the same year Miss Haswell married William Rowson. One knows nothing about him other than that he ran a hardware shop (unsuccessfully), played the trumpet (well – thanks to having being trained in the Horse Guards military band), and drank (excessively). Rowson proved to be dissolute and improvident and the responsibility for earning bread for the family table was thrown on his novelist wife. Her career was helped by the fact that the Rowsons had no children to burden her.

Mary, or, The Test of Honour
(1789) features a Crusoeish heroine who is cast adrift with her lover en route to Jamaica. They conduct themselves with impeccable virtue on the desert island where they are cast up.
Mentoria, or, The Young Ladies’ Friend
was published in 1791 and, in the same year, there took place the unspectacular first publication of
Charlotte [Temple]: A Tale of Truth
, in London.
Rebecca, or, The Fille de Chambre
came out a year later in 1792. In 1793 William’s hardware business failed and the Rowsons, man and wife, took to the stage – she as an actress and singer; he as an instrumentalist. While on the boards, Susanna wrote plays with provocative titles, such as:
Americans in England
(1796). Their company toured in America in the early 1790s and the couple stayed on in the country. Susanna, despite her girlhood persecutions, became an enthusiastic ‘Patriot’. It was in Philadelphia that she arranged, momentously, for the republication of
Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth
in 1794. The novel was taken on by Matthew Carey, laying the first foundations of what would be one of America’s dominant publishing houses, Carey & Lea.

The subsequent ‘Charlotte cult’ was slow in taking off. The novel had been still-born in England and made no immediate impression in America. There were only three editions by Carey before 1800. But, at the turn of the century the novel had established itself as a year-in year-out seller, particularly when cheap editions became available. By 1815, the publisher had cleared some 50,000 copies and in its first hundred years, under various imprints,
Charlotte Temple
went through 200 editions. Charlotte’s popularity with American readers was unchallenged until Uncle Tom swept her out of the way in 1852.

The novel’s ‘true tale’ subtitle persuaded many readers that there was an original ‘Charlotte’. A grave in New York was fancifully located and became a place of feminine pilgrimage. There were innumerable stage dramatisations and, later, silent film versions. Tens of thousands of baby girls were named ‘Charlotte’, in honour of Rowson’s saintly heroine. What was it about the novel that made it so manically popular in America? Its suitability for women readers – the new, post-Revolution, mass audience for fiction – was partly responsible. The opening sentence roundly declares that the book is intended ‘for the perusal of the young and thoughtless of
the fair sex’. You must, of course, buy before you can peruse. Dollars for Mr Carey, cents for Mrs Rowson.

The heroine (the granddaughter of a nobleman) is first encountered as a fifteen-year-old at boarding school in England. Young Charlotte is led astray by her French teacher, Mlle La Rue – a Catholic and (largely for that reason) a loose woman. At La Rue’s corrupt persuasion, Charlotte allows herself to fall in love with an English army lieutenant, Montraville. She elopes with him (he promises her, falsely, that ‘Hymen shall sanctify our love’). They take up residence in New York. There, misled by a brother officer, Belcour, who secretly wants to make Charlotte his mistress – Montraville redirects his affections to a wealthy heiress, Julia Franklin. Pregnant, unmarried, abandoned, crazed and wandering the snowy streets of New York, Charlotte is spurned by the former Mlle La Rue who, fortuitously, is also in America, and now the wealthy and haughty Mrs Crayton. Charlotte is found, dying, by her father, who arrives just in time to give her his forgiveness on her deathbed. Mr Temple adopts the surviving baby (the ‘innocent witness to her guilt’), but resolutely declines to forgive Montraville, who makes amends by killing Belcour in a duel. La Rue/Crayton dies in richly-deserved destitution. Montraville is left to the ceaseless torments of his own guilty conscience.

In 1796, buoyed up by Susanna’s literary earnings, the Rowsons settled in Boston. She retired from the stage and opened her ‘Young Ladies’ Academy’ in 1797, writing instructive books for the juvenile female reader until her death. Those later years were rendered wretched by William’s incorrigible drinking, wastefulness and infidelities (nobly, the childless Susanna took on maternal care of her husband’s bastard child). She wrote a sequel to her great hit,
Charlotte’s Daughter, or, The Three Orphans
, usually known by the heroine’s name,
Lucy Temple
(in the narrative Charlotte’s illegitimate daughter is actually named ‘Lucy Blakeney’). A tale of incest narrowly avoided, it was published, posthumously, in 1828. In a remarkably active lifetime Susanna wrote ten novels, six works for the theatre, two volumes of poetry and six instructional books for young ladies. And, of course, America’s first bestseller, a hundred years before the term was invented.

Ah, woe is me that the glory of novels should ever decay; that dust should gather round them on the shelves; that the annual cheques from Messieurs the publishers should dwinde, dwindle! Inquire at Mudie’s, or the London Library, who asks for the
Mysteries of Udolpho
now?
Thackeray, writing in 1862