In the journals and letters of her later years she describes some meetings with former friends, most notably Hester Piozzi in letters of December 1815 and November 1816, and the Duke of Clarence (later William IV) in a letter of November 1817. There are many anxious letters to her beloved son Alex, who becomes a clergyman but much prefers playing chess to his clerical duties and whose unwillingness to keep his mother informed of his whereabouts and well-being drives her to distraction. Engaged to be married and apparently settling down at last, he dies of influenza in 1837. This is one of many deaths that Burney is compelled to record, including her husband, two brothers and two sisters. The ‘Narrative of the Last Illness and Death of General d’Arblay’, written in 1820, is another of Burney’s retrospective journals, as is the story of her narrow escape from drowning at Ifracombe, describing events of September 1817. She composed this superbly dramatic account in French in 1823 at the behest of her late husband for the benefit of two of their closest friends, before she produced an English version.

In some of the later letters, Burney describes the problems posed by her stewardship of her father’s papers: a letter to Esther of November 1820 provides a detailed account of her disappointment as she discovers that his memoirs and correspondence are (she thinks) far less significant than she had supposed them to be. In her final years Burney’s own papers, her ‘myriads of hoards of MSS.’, cause her similar distress: half laughing, half crying she writes a letter in 1838 to her sister Charlotte and her niece Charlotte Barrett asking ‘what I had best do with the killing mass… My Eyes will work at them no more!’ (selection 242). Fifteen months later, in July 1839, she writes her last surviving letter, again to her niece Charlotte. As she had been fifty years earlier, Burney is preoccupied with events at Court. She has outlived George III and Queen Charlotte, as well as George IV and William IV, and is now concerned with a scandal casting a shadow over the recently crowned Queen Victoria, whom she defends from common gossip: ‘There is some mystery in the terrible calumny, to which the poor young innocent and inexperienced Queen is doubtless a Dupe’ (selection 243). A few lines later, Burney is quoting Ecclesiastes and Pope: her style remains strong, clear and engaging to the end.

NOTES

1.  EJL, i. xv and n. 2.

2.  See EJL, i. 328.

3.  JL, xi. 286.

Further Reading

EDITIONS

Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Los Angeles, 1990).

Camilla: or, A Picture of Youth, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford, 1972).

Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford, 1988).

The Complete Plays of Frances Burney, ed. Peter Sabor, Stewart Cooke and Geoffrey Sill, 2 vols. (London, 1995).

The Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, ed. Charlotte Barrett, 7 vols. (London, 1842–6); rev. Austin Dobson, 6 vols. (London, 1904–5).

The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Lars E. Troide et al. (Oxford, 1988–).

Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed.