‘my muse loves a little variety’: writing drama and the creative life of frances burney

‘My Muse loves a little Variety’: Writing Drama and theCreative Life of Frances Burneyjecs_376 197..208

G I L L I A N S K I N N E R

Abstract: This article focuses on Frances Burney’s abortive career as aplaywright and uses her journals and letters to examine three key points: thesuppression of her first comedy, The Witlings; the sole performance of hertragedy Edwy and Elgiva; and the withdrawal from rehearsal of her secondcomedy, Love and Fashion. I argue that close reading of the journals and letterssurrounding these events tells us something about the complexity with whichBurney herself, and those close to her, viewed her creativity, and revealsconflicting discourses of inspiration and labour, always complicated bygender.

Keywords: creativity, genius, inspiration, comedy, imagination, labour,gender

In middle age Frances Burney stressed in a letter to her father that writing acomedy ‘was what I have all my life been urged to, & all my life intended’.1 Thephrasing of this comment, with its reference first to the encouragement ofothers and then to personal intention, situates individual creativity within asocial framework, the latter in this instance helping to validate the former.Early in Burney’s career such a framework seems distinctly to have favouredher development as a playwright rather than a novelist. She had a criticallyacclaimed first novel behind her, a long-held interest in and enthusiasm forthe theatre and much encouragement to write for the stage from influentialfigures on the contemporary literary scene. Individual ambition and socialsanction appeared to coincide, offering the kind of encouraging context forcreativity the comment in her letter seems to suggest. At that moment herliterary career could have taken off in quite a different direction from theone it actually followed.2 At the end of her life, however, one disastrousperformance of one play was the only practical result of such initial promise.3

This article examines what Burney’s letters and journals reveal aboutthree key points in her abortive career as a playwright: the compositionand suppression of her first comedy, The Witlings; the composition andperformance of her tragedy Edwy and Elgiva; and the composition, acceptanceand subsequent withdrawal of her second comedy, Love and Fashion. As well asproviding a narrative of repeated frustration, the letters and journals, I would

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 34 No. 2 (2011)

© 2011 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 GarsingtonRoad, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

argue, tell us something about the complexity of the ways in which Burneyherself and some of those close to her viewed her creativity. The creativeindividual and the social framework within which she exists are in constantnegotiation in the conversations Burney has with others – and indeed withherself – in the letters and journals. Complicated by gender, discourses ofgenius and inspiration come into conflict with perceptions of writing aslabour and as potentially disruptive social intervention.

The Witlings was written in 1779, soon after Burney’s great success withEvelina, but had to wait until 1994 for its premiere and until 1995 for its firstappearance in print.4 Given the facility for dialogue demonstrated in Evelina,it is not surprising that Burney was urged, once her authorship of the novelwas known, to write a comedy. Those encouraging her included such well-known and influential figures as Mrs Thrale, Sheridan, Arthur Murphy, SirJoshua Reynolds and Dr Johnson. Burney’s journal for July 1778, for example,records that Mrs Thrale ‘sent me some very serious advice to write for theTheatre, as she says, I so naturally run into conversations, that Evelinaabsolutely & plainly points out that path to me’.5 Exactly when Burney beganwork on The Witlings is not clear, but it is obvious that the encouragement shereceived, noted time and again in the journals for the latter half of 1778 andthe beginning of 1779, was crucial for her in validating an attempt atcomedy.6 The greater cultural pretension and public exposure involved inwriting drama made it a genre more difficult than fiction to reconcile withcontemporary ideals of propriety for women,7 and Burney’s awareness of thisis clear in a letter to her sister Susanna in January 1779. Her account of anevening at Mrs Cholmondeley’s, at which she met Sheridan for the first time,culminates in a passage that speaks a poignant combination of delight andself-justification:

And now, my dear Susy, – if I should attempt the stage, – I think I may be fairlyacquitted of presumption, & however I may fail, – that I was strongly pressed totry by Mrs. Thrale, – & by Mr. Sheridan, – the most successful & powerful of allDramatic living Authors, – will abundantly excuse my temerity.

In short, – this Evening seems to have been decisive, my many & encreasingscruples all give way to encouragement so warm from so experienced a Judge,who is himself interested in not making such a request [i.e., that Burney shouldwrite a comedy] par pure complaisance.8

However, once the play was written, the combined disapproval of Burney’sfather, Dr Charles Burney, and their close family friend Samuel Crisp (whomBurney referred to as her other ‘daddy’) suddenly stopped the process in itstracks. The reaction of the ‘daddies’ seems to have been based both on thepredictable anxiety surrounding the propriety or otherwise of a womanwriting for the stage and on more specific worries that the characters of thepretentious but woefully ill-informed learned ladies in the play, Lady Smatterand Mrs Sapient, would be taken as personal references to bluestockingwomen (particularly the influential figure of Elizabeth Montagu) and could

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© 2011 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

thus potentially jeopardise Dr Burney’s own career, not to mention that of hisdaughter. Since their response to a reading of a draft of the play seems to havegiven Burney no indication of the extent of their disapproval,9 she wasdismayed by the sudden vehemence of her father and Mr Crisp, referring in adisconsolate letter to Crisp to the ‘Hissing, groaning, catcalling Epistle’ inwhich they condemned the play.10 (That letter itself, unfortunately, is lost.)

The chief blame for the suppression of The Witlings has generally been laidat the door of Burney’s father, finding his the principal influence, with Crispbeing ‘used’ by him to bolster his objections.11 Margaret Doody, for example,describes Charles Burney’s reaction to The Witlings as ‘intense’ and ‘absolute’,and she detects in this ‘more than a rational prudence about offending Mrs.Montagu’, continuing, ‘Charles evidently had not imagined that his Fanny’scomedy would be satiric. He disliked anything in her that seemed self-opinionated, too robust and bold.’12 Yet it is perhaps strange to argue thatanyone who had read Evelina would be surprised at finding The Witlingssatirical. And the assertion that Dr Burney’s reaction was ‘absolute’ is notborne out by further reading in the letters and journals. The situation wasmore complex than simply blaming Charles Burney as an unreasonable andauthoritarian father suggests. A letter from Burney to Samuel Crisp written inJanuary 1780 is revealing. In it, she explains how she asked her father to tellSheridan that she would not now be sending him a play for his consideration.When Charles Burney spoke to the playwright, however,

Mr. Sheridan was pleased to express great concern, – nay more, to protest hewould not accept my refusal, – he beg’d my Father to tell me that he could takeno denial to seeing what I had done, – that I could be no fair Judge for myself, –that he doubted not but it would please; – but was glad I was not satisfied, as hehad much rather see pieces before their Authors were contented with themthan afterwards, [...] In short, he said so much that my Father, ever easy to beworked upon, began to waver, & told me he wished I would shew the play toSheridan at once.13

As Lars Troide agrees,14 the description of her father as ‘ever easy to beworked upon’, in a letter to Crisp, suggests that Burney herself may well havehad a sense of the importance of Crisp’s influence over Dr Burney, andcertainly from this account Dr Burney’s ‘absolute’ position against TheWitlings seems to have faded pretty rapidly in the face of Sheridan’spersuasion. When Sheridan subsequently asks Burney’s father if he can callupon her to discuss the play, she writes:

This could not be refused.Well, – I was now violently fidgetted, – & began to think of alterations, – &,

setting my Head to Work, I have actually new written the 4th Act from

beginning to End except one scene: – Mr. Sheridan, however, has not yet called,– & I have so little Heart in the affair, that I have now again quite dropt it.15

Notwithstanding that last assertion, the letter then goes on to list furtheremendations she has in mind.

‘My Muse loves a little Variety’ 199


Thus, while the importance of the disapproval of her ‘daddies’ indisheartening Burney should not be discounted, this letter indicates that thequestion of The Witlings’ appearance on stage did not simply die as soon astheir letter was received, and suggests far more vacillation in Charles Burney,more influence on the part of Crisp, and a more general contingency on allsides, than analysis of the situation has generally allowed for. It also raisesquestions about how Burney and those close to her understood the nature ofher talent. Burney’s own figuring of her ‘Head’ and ‘Heart’ in the abovequotation is worth considering: the agitation that led to ‘setting my Head toWork’ clearly links cerebral effort with emotional stress, while her stated lossof heart is belied by the continuing process of revision clearly going on in herthoughts. This sense of writing as a combination of something produced bycircumstance, as labour, and as needing ‘Heart’, can be compared withSamuel Crisp’s interpretation of what was involved in creativity, both ingeneral and in her case in particular. Crisp wrote to Burney some time in lateAugust or early September 1779 in response to her suggestion in a letter to herfather that, after their condemnation of The Witlings, she might try to write anew play for that winter. Charles Burney had at once discouraged the idea,citing the American War and the fear of French–Spanish invasion as likely tokeep people away from the theatre (not a possibility that seemed to worry himwhen Sheridan urged him to make Burney show him The Witlings a fewmonths later!). Crisp then wrote to Burney:

I Observe what You say, that the pursuing this project is the only Chance You haveof bringing out any thing this Year – & that with hard fagging perhaps You might dothat. I agree with You, that for this Year, You say true – but, my dear Fanny, forGod’s sake, dont talk of hard Fagging! It was not hard Fagging, that produced sucha Work as Evelina! – it was the Ebullition of true Sterling Genius! you wrote it,because you could not help it! – it came, & so You put it down on Paper! – leaveFagging, & Labour, to him

---------- who high in Drury Lane,Lull’d by soft Zephyrs thro the broken pane,Rhymes ere he wakes, & prints before Term Ends,Compell’d by Hunger & request of Friends.

Tis not sitting down to a Desk with Pen, Ink & Paper, that will commandInspiration.16

Crisp’s model of writing as fervid literary creativity, ‘the Ebullition of trueSterling Genius’, is set against Burney’s implication that it primarily involveswork. Crisp’s quotation from Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot places Evelina –which, he says, Burney ‘wrote [...] because [she] could not help it’ – within thesame privileged camp as Pope’s representation of his early development as apoet as having been natural and easy: ‘As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, /I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came’.17 Working at writing, on the otherhand, belongs firmly in Grub Street, for Crisp as for Pope, and is almostshocking: ‘my dear Fanny, for God’s sake, dont talk of hard Fagging!’

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Crisp clearly wants Burney, like her character Dabler in The Witlings, togo along with the idea that creative writing takes no deliberate effort, nounbecoming labour. In the opening scene of the play Mrs Voluble explains toMiss Jenny that Dabler ‘can make Verses as fast as I can talk’, while in Act II, inresponse to Mrs Sapient’s comment that he produces so much that he ‘mustWrite Night and Day’, he himself modestly admits that he ‘compose[s] with afacility that is really surprising’.18 Later on in the play Dabler’s completeinability to produce extempore verses (and his desire to keep this shameful factsecret at all costs) is the lever by which Censor is able to enforce his support forthe marriage of Beaufort and Cecilia.19 Dabler, one of the ‘witlings’ of the play’stitle, has been read both as Burney’s self-mocking double and as the kind ofincompetent amateur against whom ‘the newly minted professional’, as BettySchellenberg calls Burney at this period, ‘must define herself ’.20 Dabler andCrisp both promote the concept of original genius that had gatheredmomentum and influence in the second half of the eighteenth century, an ideathat provides much of the comedy in The Witlings.21 Dabler, indeed, composesan epigram that might have summed up many an eighteenth-century poet’sanxieties (not to mention those of twenty-first-century academics):

Ye gentle Gods, O hear me plead,And Kindly grant this little loan;Make me forget whate’er I readThat what I write may be my own.22

Dabler’s landlady, Mrs Voluble, explains that ‘he talks so loud when he’s byhimself, that we can hear him quite down Stairs: [...] but he told me I must notmind him, for it was only the Fit was on him’.23 For him, writing is not a choicebut a compulsion: ‘he says he has a kind of Fury, I think he calls it, upon him,that makes him write whether he will or not. [...] and he has such a collectionof Miniscrips! Lord, I question whether a pastry Cook or a Cheesemongercould use them in a Year! for he says he never destroyed a Line he ever wrotein his life.’24

Burney herself had experience of an urge to write that could not besuppressed, and writing as compulsion is a well-explored aspect of her owncareer.25 Dabler’s hoarding of every line he’s ever written, however, providesan obvious contrast to the bonfire the fifteen-year-old Burney famously madeof her writings. Dabler does not have to wrestle with questions of writing andpropriety, and his indulgence of ‘fits’ and ‘furies’ in the creative process werehardly behaviours Burney could echo or emulate when composing sections ofEvelina at Crisp’s Chessington home while surrounded by friends who believedher to be writing to her sister Susanna.26 Evelina’s composition was certainlymore complicated than Crisp’s blithe description implies: the magical ease ofhis exclamation ‘it came, & so You put it down on Paper!’ hardly does justiceto the difficulties Burney faced in finding opportunities to write. Making a faircopy of the manuscript of the second volume, Burney explained in herjournal, involved snatching ‘odd moments’ during the day and sitting up ‘the



greatest part of many Nights’. When the publisher, Thomas Lowndes, wantedto wait for the third volume to be completed and delivered before publication,she commented:

Now this man, knowing nothing of my situation, supposed, in all probability,that I could seat myself quietly at my Bureau, & write on with all expedition &ease, till the work was finished: but so different was the case, that I had hardlyTime to write half a page in a Day; & niether [sic] my Health, nor inclination,would allow me to continue my Nocturnal scribling for so long a Time as to writefirst, & then Copy, a whole volume. I was, therefore, obliged to give the attempt& affair entirely over for the present.27

Even if inspiration strikes, then, the process of writing involves muchdedicated labour. After Evelina’s success Burney wrote in her journal: ‘I hadwritten my little Book simply for my amusement; I printed it [...] merely for afrolic, to see how a production of my own would figure in that Author likeform.’28 The modest trivialising of the undertaking in the words ‘amusement’and ‘frolic’ may be consistent with proper feminine reticence and lack ofunfeminine professional ambition, but they hardly reflect the effort involvedin the composition and delivery of Evelina for publication.

In her letters and journals, at least as they have come down to us after theheavy editing before her death, Burney does not tend very often to analyse hercreative life explicitly. Early on in her journal she emphasises the function ofjournal-writing as an aide-memoire, commenting that ‘there is somethingto me very Unsatisfactory in passing year after year without even amemorandum of what you did, &c. And then, all the happy Hours I spendwith particular Friends and Favourites, would fade from my recollection.’29

Long sections of the letters and journals are devoted to recording in vividdetail conversations that took place in social gatherings; ‘characteristically’,as John Wiltshire has said, her journals ‘take the form of dramatic action,with extensive dialogue and the representation of “characters” through theirspeech’.30 After one particularly lengthy account of a joking conversationbetween Burney and her cousin Richard, she ends:

[?both] of us laughed till we were quite fatigued. Would to Heaven, I was butoftener so fatigued! –

Well – I have no Time for Comments, so will proceed with facts, which I amobliged to keep minutes of, they multiply so fast.31

Introspection, when it appears, is thus not the characteristic mode of her‘journalising’, as she calls it, nor the primary purpose of the journals; rather,it seems to break into Burney’s accounts of people and places as a result ofgreat pressure. One of the key points in Burney’s life at which we see thishappening most strikingly is during the period of her service at court from1786 until 1791, as Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte.

The court journals are punctuated by descriptions of her dejected state ofmind, hating as she did the confinement, tedious routine and loneliness of

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court life. For much of the time she wrote nothing but her journal-letters, butin 1790 these letters record the completion of her first tragedy in a tone bothserious and gently self-mocking: ‘Know then, fair ladies’, she writes to hersister Susanna and friend Frederica Locke, ‘about the middle of this August,1790, the author finished the rough first draft and copy of her first tragedy.’And she continues:

What species of a composition it [Edwy and Elgiva] may prove [the author] isvery unable to tell; she only knows it was an almost spontaneous work, andsoothed the melancholy of imagination for a while, though afterwards itimpressed it with a secret sensation of horror, so like real woe, that she believesit contributed to the injury her sleep received about this period.

Nevertheless, whether well or ill, she is pleased to have done something atlast, she had so long lived in all ways as nothing.

You will smile, however, at my next trust; but scarce was this completed, – asto design and scenery I mean, for the whole is in its rough state, and legible onlyto herself, – scarce, however, had this done with imagination, to be consignedover to correction, when imagination seized upon another subject for anothertragedy.

The first therefore I have deposited in my strong-box, in all its imperfections,to attend to the other; I well know correction may always be summoned,imagination will never come but by choice. I received her, therefore, a welcomeguest, – the best adapted for softening weary solitude, where only coveted toavoid irksome exertion.32

Here Burney clearly distinguishes between what she sees as the laboriousand the inspired aspects of the creative process: ‘correction may alwaysbe summoned, imagination will never come but by choice.’ Equally clearly,imagination is bound up with personal and psychological experience andcircumstance: the writing of Edwy and Elgiva takes on a recognisablytherapeutic quality, ‘and soothe[s] the melancholy of imagination’, whileimagination, when it seizes ‘upon another subject for another tragedy’ (whichwas to be Hubert De Vere), is welcome ‘for softening weary solitude’. Bothaspects, imagination and correction, are necessary to the final production ofa successful piece: Burney sees what her imagination has prompted as ‘almostspontaneous’ but also as ‘rough’. The tragedy of Burney’s tragedy, whichreceived one wholly disastrous performance in 1795, is that it was nevercorrected in such a way as to give it a real chance of succeeding on the stage.

Ellen Donkin has written persuasively of the importance of the dramatist’spresence at rehearsals, which enabled many often crucial amendments to bemade in the light of practical considerations of acting and staging that wereonly properly apparent in the process of rehearsal and were an aspect of thecraft that needed, especially for a novice playwright such as Burney, to belearned from experience.33 Both attendance at rehearsals and the assumptionof authority if one did so, however, were more problematic for womenplaywrights, as Donkin has shown. In Burney’s case, the situation wasfurther complicated by the peculiarly female experience of serious illness



following childbirth, from which she was only slowly recovering at the timewhen Edwy and Elgiva was in rehearsal. Writing about the play’s productionlater the same year, Burney confessed to a friend: ‘absorbed, however, by mynew charge, & then growing ill, I had a sort of indifference about the matter,which, in fact, has lasted ever since.’34 A particularly poignant combination ofgender and contingency, then, contributed to the failure of Burney’s only playperformed in her lifetime. Thus the ‘correction’ Burney had seen as easilysummoned, as opposed to the less governable imagination, had in the endproved fatally absent.

The only other of Burney’s plays to come close to production was hersecond comedy, Love and Fashion. The experience of The Witlings and Edwyand Elgiva made Burney understandably cautious. In January 1798 she wasprobably referring to Love and Fashion when she told her father that she was

just now immersing once more deeply into a scribbling business that fills all myscribbling ideas, & takes me up all I can exist from my little occupying Alec[Burney’s son, then just over three years old]. The fear of raising expectation, &the uncertainty of the time I may require, make me extremely unwilling toexpand upon this subject.35

When, in the autumn of 1799, the play was offered to Thomas Harris ofCovent Garden, Burney reverted to the secretive methods she had pursuedwhen seeking to publish Evelina twenty years earlier. Her brother Charles wasemployed as her agent and a code adopted in her letters to her sisters in whichthe play was referred to as ‘the Furniture’ and Harris as ‘the Upholsterer’. Theplay was accepted and went into rehearsal, but once again events conspiredagainst Burney. The death of her sister Susanna in January 1800 was for DrBurney, already anxious about the idea of his daughter once more attemptingto have a play performed, an emotionally unanswerable objection to thestaging of Love and Fashion, and the play was withdrawn. This train of eventsprompted Burney to write perhaps her most powerful statement about herown creativity, in a letter to her father dated 10 February 1800. Beforeexamining this in detail, however, I want to quote more briefly from a lettershe wrote the following day to her sister Esther:

My kindest Esther will I know be glad to hear my mind is at rest on one subjectwhich has disturbed it – though not, indeed, deeply, – what, of a mere worldlynature, just now can? But Mr. H[arris] has listened at length to my earnestsolicitation, & returned my MS. & suffers it total postponement to another year.This has somewhat helped my harrassed repose, for the idea of bringing out aComedy at this period – though its whole materials & business had been allarranged so long before it, was always dreadful to me. The aid it is possible itmight have brought to other matters I relinquish without murmuring, to bespared so jarring a shake to all within.36

Here Burney attributes solely to herself, rather than to her father, the distresscaused by the unseemliness ‘of bringing out a Comedy at this period’. Thepotential financial benefits that might have resulted, had the play succeeded,

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are evoked only to be given up ‘without murmuring’. The relief Burneysuggests she feels at the play’s withdrawal contrasts strongly and evenintriguingly with the reaction depicted in the impassioned and playful letterthat Burney had written to her father the day before, the letter with which thisarticle opened.37

Informing him that the play has been withdrawn, she writes:

This release gives me present repose which indeed I much wanted – for to combatyour – to me – unaccountable but most afflicting displeasure, in the midst of myown panics & disturbance, would have been ample punishment to me, had I beenguilty of a crime in doing what I have all my life been urged to, & all my lifeintended, writing a Comedy.38

Her frustration is palpable. The twin imperatives of social encouragement andpersonal desire construct a sense of creativity as doubled, as strengthened bythe mutual interaction of outward and inward forces, just as in practice it is adoubled process of imagination and correction, of inspiration and labour.Here Dr Burney’s fears and anxieties do indeed seem to represent the mostsignificant barrier to the realisation of a long-held ambition. But contingencyalso has its part: the implication is that, were it not for Susanna’s death andher resulting ‘panics and disturbance’, she would have the energy necessaryto ‘combat’ her father’s ‘unaccountable’ displeasure. The death, genuinelydevastating to both correspondents, symbolically gives Dr Burney leverage atthe same time as it lowers Burney’s own resistance.

The letter continues:

Your goodness, your kindness, your regard for my fame, I know have causedboth your trepidation, which doomed me to certain failure; & your displeasurethat I ran, what you thought, a wanton risk. But it is not wanton, my dearestFather. My imagination is not at my own controll, or I would always havecontinued in the walk you approuved. The combinations for another long workdid not occur to me. Incidents & effects for a Dramma did. I thought the fieldmore than open – inviting to me. The chance held out golden dreams.39

Here again is Burney’s construction of imagination as something thatcannot be ‘summoned’ at will. Interestingly, this allows her to disclaimrebelliousness: she is not wilfully – wantonly – pursuing playwriting from aperverse desire to upset her father. She is simply following her imagination’slead. The discourse of imagination as independent of will offers Burney a wayto disclaim responsibility for her own disobedience: if imagination couldbe controlled, of course she ‘would always have continued in the walk[her father] approuved’. Yet Burney’s eagerness to write comedy at a timewhen ‘golden dreams’ were prompted by the high earnings of successfulplaywrights at the end of the eighteenth century indicates once again themixture of factors that contribute to the production of creative writing.

The sixteen-year-old Burney had written in her journal that ‘Reading &writing’ were her ‘Hobby Horse’; and while she kept it ‘within due bounds &



limits, Nobody, I flatter myself, would wish to deprive me of the poor Animal:to be sure, he is not form’d for labour, & is rather lame & weak, ... tho’ hesometimes prances’.40 More than thirty years later, the woman of forty-eightreturned to the same equine image in making an appeal to her father. Thedramatic soliloquy she writes for him here is as lively as any dialogue she everwrote: ‘[S]ay to yourself with an internal smile’, she directs him:

After all – ’tis but like Father like Child – for to what walk do I confine myself? –She took my example in writing – She takes it in ranging – Why, then, after all,should I lock her up in one paddock, well as she has fed there, if she says shefinds nothing more to nibble – while I find all the Earth unequal to my ambition,& mount the skies to content it? Come on then, poor Fan – The World hasacknowledged you my offspring – & I will disencourage you no more. Leap thepales of your paddock – let us pursue our career – & while you frisk from novelto Comedy, I, quitting Music & Prose, will try a race with Poetry & the Stars.41

In this imagined speech, rather than being lame and weak, the horse leapsand frisks; instead of being kept within ‘due bounds & limits’, the animalbreaks free from her enclosure and is, perhaps, ‘form’d for labour’ of thecreative variety. In the two years after this letter was written, Burney went onto write her two best comedies, A Busy Day and The Woman-Hater. The dearthof references to these plays in her journals and letters makes commentaryabout her attitudes to them difficult, but it seems likely that she saw them verymuch in the light of the ‘golden dreams’ referred to in her letter to her father.It is only by the last of the series of mischances that make up Burney’splaywriting career that shortly after this, in April 1802, she left England tojoin her husband in France and was unable, owing to the Napoleonic wars, toreturn for ten years. All thought of putting on her plays seems to havedisappeared by this point, although she continued to revise them, and to timereadings of them, for years to come.

The place of Burney’s dramatic writing in her creative life reveals more thananything the ‘embedded’ nature of her creativity – and perhaps of creativitymore widely. The process for Burney is both deeply personal and unavoidablysocial; it embraces moments of inspiration and hours of slog; it is endlesslysubject to time and chance; it is something people do because they have aninexplicable urge and something motivated by, as Burney herself put it, ‘goldendreams’. More than that, and despite the opinion of Samuel Crisp, there is noguarantee that inspiration produces better work than does conscious effort:42

the ‘almost spontaneous’ Edwy and Elgiva is generally agreed to be less goodthan the late comedies A Busy Day and The Woman-Hater, both written mostprobably with commercial success firmly in view. Reading her letters andjournals, what comes across is the way Burney remains tentative about thenature of her own creativity, as she writes between the languages of genius andlabour, spontaneity and contingency, and negotiates her complex awareness ofpersonal ambition and social imperatives, natural ease and practical difficulty.

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NOTES1. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Joyce Hemlow, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1972-84), vol. IV.394-5.2. As Barbara Darby speculates, ‘Had Burney’s comedies been produced, she might have

redirected her career entirely toward the stage, as she perfected her craft and enjoyed themonetary rewards that accrued to dramatists’ (Frances Burney, Dramatist: Gender, Performanceand the Late-Eighteenth-Century Stage (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1997),p.3).

3. Two of her comedies, A Busy Day and The Woman-Hater (both c.1801), have in recentyears been produced successfully for the modern commercial stage. A Busy Day was firstproduced in Bristol in 1993 and then in London in 1994 and 2000; The Woman-Hater had itsworld premiere at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in December 2007. Michael Billington,in an enthusiastic review in The Guardian (8 January 2008), felt that it suggested that ‘Burney,in theatrical terms, was the missing link between Sheridan and Wilde’.

4. The Witlings was performed at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, in November 1994 andappeared in print the following year, edited by Clayton Delery (East Lansing, MI: ColleaguesPress, 1995). The first of Burney’s plays to be published was A Busy Day, ed. Tara Goshal Wallace(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984).

5. The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Lars E. Troide (Montreal and Kingston:McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988-), vol. III.64.

6. For possible indications that Burney had begun work on the play as early as August 1778,see Early Journals and Letters, vol. III.110, n.5, and vol. III.250, n.82. For accounts of theencouragement she received to write a comedy, see, for example, vol. III.60, 94, 109-11, 118 and245-6.

7. It was not necessarily impossible to reconcile propriety and playwriting, however, asdemonstrated by Elizabeth Griffith, who exploited her literary persona ‘Frances’ (from thehugely successful A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances, 1757) to maintain areputation as meek and ladylike while writing for the stage. The cultural status of theatre in theperiod is emphasised by Gillian Russell when she writes: ‘It is only comparatively recently [...]that the centrality of the theatre in Georgian culture and society has been properly recognized.As the pre-eminent forum of entertainment, art and instruction, the status of which wasaffirmed by royal authority in the form of patents or licences to perform, and by parliamentaryscrutiny in the form of censorship, the stage loomed large in the Georgian cultural landscape,often literally so’ (’Theatrical Culture’, in Thomas Keymer and John Mee (eds), The CambridgeCompanion to English Literature, 1740-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),p.100).

8. Early Journals and Letters, vol. III.236.9. See Early Journals and Letters, vol. III.344, n. 67. An audience including Samuel Crisp and

Burney’s sister Susanna (but not Burney herself) listened to Charles Burney read The Witlings atCrisp’s Chessington home on 2 August 1779. See also vol. III.346, n.74, in which Lars Troidewrites: ‘Despite the Chessington audience’s generally favourable reception of the play, CB and SCjointly decided to veto any staging of “The Witlings”. [...] As CB wrote to FB on 29 August: “theobjections all fall on the Stocking-Club-Party – as my chief & almost only quarrel was with itsMembers. As it is, not only the Whole Piece, but the plot had best be kept secret, from every body.” ’

10. Early Journals and Letters, vol. III.350.11. This is the view taken, for example, by Ellen Donkin. In Getting into the Act: Women

Playwrights in London, 1776-1829 (London: Routledge, 1995), she writes that Dr Burney‘ruthlessly suppressed’ the play, while Crisp ‘brought up the rear’ (p.140-1).

12. M. A. Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UniversityPress, 1988), p.96.

13. The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, vol. IV, ed. Betty Rizzo (Montreal andKingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), p.8.

14. Early Journals and Letters, vol. III.xii-xiii. Troide feels that Crisp’s ‘inclination to paranoia[...] convinced CB of the dangers of allowing it to be staged’ (III.346, n. 74).

15. Early Journals and Letters, vol. IV.8.16. Early Journals and Letters, vol. III.352. The emphasis given to the last line of the quotation

is Crisp’s own.17. Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, l.128-9.



18. Frances Burney, The Witlings, in The Complete Plays of Frances Burney, ed. Peter Sabor, 2

vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1995), Act I.53 and Act II.296-8. References here and beloware to act and line.

19. The Witlings, V.671-88.20. Betty A. Schellenberg, ‘From Propensity to Profession: Female Authorship and the Early

Career of Frances Burney’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 14 (2002), p.363.21. Paulina Kewes writes of the way in which most playwrights of the period ‘felt compelled

outwardly to endorse the doctrine of original genius that was rapidly gaining the status ofcritical orthodoxy and to reproduce the rhetoric that came with it. “By the 1750s,” WalterJackson Bate remarks, “some of the least original minds of the time were beginning to prateconstantly of ‘originality’.” ’ See ‘ “[A] Play, which I presume to call original”: Appropriation,Creative Genius, and Eighteenth-Century Playwriting’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 34

(2001), p.17. Not surprisingly, William Duff, in his Essay on Original Genius (1767), quotes Pope’slines from Arbuthnot on his childhood facility for verse in evidence for his contention ‘that onewho is born with a Genius for Poetry, will discover a peculiar relish and love for it in his earliestyears’ (Essay, ed. John L. Mahoney (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1978), p.37).

22. The Witlings, II.196-9.23. The Witlings, I.60-1 and II.65-6.24. The Witlings, I.270-1 and II.273-6.25. See, for example: Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s

Writing (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), Chapter 1, ‘Compulsive Writing’;and Doody, Frances Burney, especially p.35-7 and 148-9.

26. Burney at sixteen was only too aware of the conflicts between proper feminineoccupations and writing. Realising that the latter was viewed as an indulgence, she explainsseriously in her journal that she has made it ‘a kind of rule never to indulge myself in my twomost favourite persuits, [r]eading & writing, in the morning – No, like a good Girl I give that upwholly, Accidental occasions & preventions excepted, to [needle] work, by which means myReading & writing in the afternoon is a pleasure I am not blamed for, & does me no harm, as itdoes not take up the Time I ought to spend otherwise’ (The Early Journals and Letters of FannyBurney, ed. Troide, vol. I.14-15).

27. Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Troide, vol. II.232.28. Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Troide, vol. III.32.29. Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Troide, vol. I.14.30. John Wiltshire, ‘Journals and Letters’, in Peter Sabor (ed.),The Cambridge Companion to

Frances Burney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.80-1.31. Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Troide, vol. I.214.32. Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, ed. Charlotte Barrett, 7 vols (London and New York:

Swan Sonnenschein & Co. and Macmillan & Co., 1893), vol. III.284-5.33. See Donkin, p.150-55.34. Journals and Letters, ed. Hemlow, vol. III.98.35. Journals and Letters, ed. Hemlow, vol. IV.65-6.36. Journals and Letters, ed. Hemlow, vol. IV.396-7.37. These ‘somewhat contradictory reasons for withdrawing the script’ are noted by Tara

Goshal Wallace in her chapter ‘Burney as Dramatist’, in Sabor (ed.), Cambridge Companion toFrances Burney, p.59.

38. Journals and Letters, ed. Hemlow, vol. IV.394-5.39. Journals and Letters, ed. Hemlow, vol. IV.395.40. Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Troide, vol. I.15.41. Journals and Letters, ed. Hemlow, vol. IV.395.42. In The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-

Romantic Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) Timothy Clark remarks that‘the association of inspiration with an enhanced fluency, with a dictating voice, and with adispossession that is also, paradoxically, a sense of empowerment – these are real properties ofcomposition. However, contrary to the traditional dream of inspiration, no psychological statein itself guarantees the worth of its products to others’ (p.16).

gillian skinner is a Lecturer in the Department of English Studies, Durham University. She is theauthor of Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740-1800: The Price of a Tear (Macmillan, 1999).Her interests lie mainly in sentimental fiction and women’s writing of the eighteenth century.

208 GILLIAN SKINNER


‘my muse loves a little variety’: writing drama and the creative life of frances burney

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