THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

In Desmond (1792) Smith had made a limited attempt to defend the liberal principles of the first stages of the French
Revolution, but her disillusion with its bloody progress emerges in her long poem The Emigrants of 1793. In the
poem, the subject of which derives from her active sympathy with, and support for, French refugees in England, she
mourns ‘with swimming eye’ the desolation of ‘the Temple, which they fondly hoped | Reason would raise to Liberty,
destroyed | By ruffian hands’.
Fanny Burney’s sympathies were never swayed towards the Revolution. As a sometime lady-in-waiting to Queen
Charlotte, and as the future wife of the
[p. 348]
émigré General Alexandre d’Arblay, she noted in her Diary for 1792, for example, that ‘the famous Tom Paine’ was
propagating ‘his pernicious doctrines’ in Suffolk. In her own county of Surrey she frequented ‘a little colony of
unfortunate ... French noblesse’ at Juniper Hall at Mickleham, a colony which contained her future husband and
which gave her the opportunity of observing the complex amatory adventures of Germaine de Staël and her lovers
Narbonne and Talleyrand (though Burney also admitted to being impressed by Mme de Staël’s ‘extraordinary
intellect’). Her first novel Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778), describes an
English society far removed from that of flirtatious Paris and its dangerous liaisons. Its heroine is a girl with ‘a
virtuous mind, a cultivated understanding, and a feeling heart’, one who is initially ignorant of ‘the forms, and
manners, of the world’. What Evelina comes to learn is the value of decorum in fashionable society, but she also
acquires a modest wisdom which transcends the limits of that society. Her letters to her clerical mentor, Mr Villars,
reveal an occasionally witty discrimination as well as a protest against the ways of a world which both elevates and
narrows the scope of women. She finally finds security as the wife of the worthy Lord Orville (a muted reflection of
Richardson’s Grandison).
Burney’s more expansive later novels, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), Camilla; or, a Picture of Youth
(1796), and The Wanderer: or, Female Difficulties (1814) all re-examine the motif of the ingénue entering the
‘world’. Cecilia is a substantial development of the themes of Evelina, whose popular success had established
Burney’s reputation, but its satirical edge is far blunter and its assertion of moral conventions both more emphatic and
more verbose. In Camilla the comedy is yet more subdued, and the critical ebullience, which had marked Evelina’s
observation of society, is more tacit so as to present a firmer defence of social values in the face of revolutionary
questioning. Camilla is obliged to win respect for her innate virtue and for her selfhood, but her unsteady relationship
with her priggish suitor cum mentor, Edgar Mandlebert, consists of a series of misunderstandings, surmountable
obstacles, and tearful reconciliations. It is a sombre novel which hovers close to tragedy and which insistently presses
home its moral message about the importance of good conduct. The fifth chapter consists largely of a ‘Sermon’
addressed to Camilla by her father Mr Tyrold. This sermon puts forward an ideal of female action and provides a
counterblast to Mary Wollstonecraft’s demands for education equality, and independence by insisting on the vaguer
notion that ‘the temporal destiny of woman is enwrapt in still more impenetrable obscurity than that of man’ and that
‘the proper education of a female ... is still to seek, still a problem beyond human solution’. Tyrold’s Christian stress
on patience, self-conquest, and good sense as the means of controlling ‘passion’ evidently received Burney’s own
assent, for she later allowed his sermon to be separately reprinted as part of a conduct book for young ladies. The
distinction between the control of passion and its free expression, between the operation of sense
[p. 349]
and an indulgence in sensibility, provides the shape of The Wanderer, an investigation of the struggles of a
disorientated and nameless refugee in England, a victim of French revolutionary persecution. Although by 1814, the
year of the novel’s belated publication, the Reign of Terror was long past, Burney was at pains to stress in her Preface
that the ‘stupendous iniquity and cruelty’ of the period had left real enough scars. The unhappy wanderer, Juliet
(known through most of the novel by her awkwardly acquired pseudonym ‘Ellis’), is contrasted with an English
enthusiast for revolutionary liberty, Elinor Joddrel, a girl ‘inebriated ... with the revolutionary beverage’ and
enthusiastically convinced that the epoch in which she lives ‘lifts our minds from slavery and from nothingness, into
play and vigour, and leaves us no longer, as heretofore, merely making believe that we are thinking beings’. Such
high-minded confidence is shown to be misplaced; Elinor is both restless and reckless, unhappy in love and incapable
of adjusting to the stodgy stability of upper middle-class English society. Burney’s picture of that society is scarcely
flattering, for it is variously seen as snobbish, selfish, insular, and cruel, but it is Juliet and her practical sense,
cultivated under adversity, who finally triumphs and who profits from the unbroken English barriers of ‘custom and
experience, raised by the wisdom of foresight, and established, after trial, for public utility’. Such traditionalism and
social conservatism is a keynote of the novel. The Wanderer is nevertheless implicitly marked by a genteel feminism
which steadily emerges in Burney’s careful delineation of the fortunes of her struggling, rejected, and often isolated