Читать книгу The Lives & Legacy of Extraordinary Women - Kate Dickinson Sweetser - Страница 11

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A girl sat at a desk in a small third-story room of Dr. Charles Burney's house in London, writing as rapidly as her quill-pen could travel over the paper. It was a December afternoon, and the light was not very bright, so that she had to lean far forward until the end of her nose almost touched the tip of her pen. Now and then a smile would cross her lips or she would stop a moment to reread a sentence or two and nod her head, but for the most part she kept steadily on, very much in earnest in what she was doing. On one corner of the desk lay a pile of finished manuscript, showing that she must have been at this work for many days. As a matter of fact she had come up to this small spare room every afternoon for a month and written until it was too dark for her to see.

Presently another girl came tiptoeing up the stairs, paused a moment at the door, and then stole quietly into the room. Without a word she crossed over to an old sofa on the other side of the room, and sat down upon it. The writer went on driving her quill-pen across the paper. Some five minutes later the quill stuck and sent a shower of ink-blots in all directions. "There, my pen's stubbed its toe again," said the writer, sitting up straight. "I'd better let it rest itself a while."

"Oh, Fanny," exclaimed the girl on the sofa, "do tell me what's happening to dear Caroline Evelyn now."

The authoress laid down her pen and tilted back in her chair. "The funniest things have been happening to her lately, Susan. I laughed until I cried. A young man named Lord Farringfield fell in love with her. He was very good-looking, with light curly hair, and she thought she liked him very much. He made her an offer of marriage in her father's garden, when suddenly a wind came up and blew off his wig. He looked so funny without any hair that all she could think of to say was to offer him her handkerchief to cover his head, and that put him out so that he jumped up from his knees and stalked away. Later the gardener found the wig on the bough of an apple tree, but Caroline didn't dare send it to its owner and kept it on a little stand in her room to remind her of her first offer of marriage. Let me read it to you."

"Oh, do, Fanny," urged the younger sister.

The writer delved into the pile of papers and pulled out several. Then, with a preliminary chuckle, she began to read. At first she went smoothly enough, but after a while she began to laugh, and finally she had to stop and dry her eyes with a handkerchief. "He did look so ridiculous," she said. "Can't you see him there, saying, 'Oh, my adorable Caroline, wilt thou——' when whist! he claps his hands to his head, but his beautiful curls have gone?"

"Indeed I can," replied Susan, who was hugging herself and rocking on the sofa with appreciation. "However can you do it, Fanny? It seems to me each person in the story is funnier than the last."

"They don't start out funny," said the writer, "but after they've talked a little or walked about they begin to do funny things. Of course the hero and Caroline herself are quite serious. It's getting to be a big book. Just look." She opened a drawer of the desk and produced another pile of papers and laid them on top of those already on the table. "It's almost a full-sized novel now."

"It's beautiful," said Susan. "I don't know any book that's ever made me laugh and cry so much."

"Do you really think it's good?" Fanny turned about so as to face her sister. "I'll tell you something, Susan. I just had to write it. I couldn't help doing it, no matter how hard I tried."

"It's wonderful," continued the admiring Susan.

"But you mustn't tell. You must never tell," besought Fanny. "I'd be so ashamed of myself, and just think what father might have to say to me about it!" She swung about to the desk and rested her head in her hands as though to contemplate the overwhelming things Dr. Burney might be called upon to say should he discover her offense. Then impulsively she stretched out her hands and clasped the manuscript. "Oh, I love it, I love every line I've written there."

Some one else had been climbing the flight of stairs to the third story, and now came into the room. It was Mrs. Burney, the stepmother of Fanny and Susan. She went over to the desk and looked at the pile of written sheets before Fanny could turn them over or hide them in the drawer. "So this is what you've been about, is it?" said she, not unkindly, but rather in an amused tone. "I've wondered where you went when you stole away from the rest of the family every afternoon. Your father said you wanted to study, but I told him I didn't approve of young ladies creeping out of sight to pore over books. So you've been writing a story surreptitiously? Take my word for it, Fanny, writing books has gone out of fashion."

"I know it," said Fanny, "but I couldn't help it. I'd much rather do this than practice on the harpsichord."

"But music is a polite accomplishment, my dear, whereas scribbling is quite the reverse."

"Fanny's isn't scribbling," protested Susan. "It's wonderful. It really is, mother. It's as good as anything down-stairs in father's library. Let her read some of it to you."

"No, thank you, Susan. I can understand some parents letting their children run wild and become novel-writers, but not Dr. Burney. You must remember you have a position in society to think about, my dears."

"I know," agreed Fanny guiltily.

"What would the world say," continued Mrs. Burney, "if it should learn that Dr. Burney's daughter Frances had composed a novel!"

"Father writes books," suggested Susan.

"Yes, but on the subject of music. It's quite another thing to compose a treatise showing learning. Fanny's writings, if I mistake not, are merely idle inventions, the stories of events that never happened to people who never lived."

"Yes, they are," agreed the ashamed Fanny. "I make them up out of my head as I go along."

"But they're quite as interesting as the things that do happen to real people," argued the devoted Susan. "More interesting, I think. I don't know any real person who interests me as much as Caroline in Fanny's story."

Mrs. Burney smiled. She had no wish to be harsh, but she had very decided ideas as to what was and what was not proper for young ladies to do. She was a bustling, sociable person, and she considered that Fanny was altogether too shy and reserved. She wanted to make her more like her other sisters, Esther and Charlotte, both of whom were very popular with the many visitors who came to see the celebrated Dr. Burney.

"It's for your own good," she said finally. "I shan't tell your father, but I know he wouldn't approve of your spending your time in this way."

"I know," said Fanny slowly. "I know what people think of a young woman who writes. I oughtn't to do it, but the temptation was too strong for me. I'll give it up, mother, and not steal off here by myself. I'll try to be more the way you and father want me."

"That's the right spirit, Fanny. You know we're all very proud of you anyway." Stooping down Mrs. Burney kissed her stepdaughter, and then left the sisters alone.

For some time there was silence while Fanny stared at the big pile of closely written sheets which lay in front of her and Susan looked at her sister. Then with a sigh the older girl rose and gathered the papers in her arms. "Mother is right. It is wrong of me," said she. "Would you mind, Susan, coming down into the yard with me?"

"What are you going to do, Fanny?" asked her sister in alarm.

"I've made up my mind what's best to be done, and I'm going to do it. Come down-stairs, please."

Fanny led the way with the papers, and Susan came after her. They went down the three flights, through a hall, and out into a paved court at the rear of the house.

"Will you watch them a minute, please?" said Fanny, as she laid the papers on the bricks.

She went indoors and soon was back again, with some sticks of wood, some straw, and a lighted taper in her hand. She laid the sticks together, stuffed some straw in among them, and then placed the pile of papers on top.

"Oh, Fanny," cried her sister, "you're not going to burn up all the story? Oh, poor Caroline! Don't do it, Fanny; think how long it took to write it and how good it is!"

"I must," said Fanny, very decidedly.

"Oh, please, please don't! It's almost like murder. It's a shame, Fanny, it is, it's a terrible shame!"

"It hurts me most," said Fanny, "but it's the only way to settle Caroline once for all." With a very grim face she held the taper to the straw until it caught fire. In a moment a page of the manuscript was curling up in flames.

"Oh, Fanny, Fanny!" cried Susan, tears coming to her eyes. She looked beseechingly at her sister, but the latter's purpose was inflexible. A few minutes more and the papers were all burning brightly.

The two girls stood there until the fire had burnt itself out, and then turned to each other. Tears stood in Fanny's eyes and also in those of the sympathetic Susan. "Poor Caroline Evelyn," sighed Fanny, "I'm going to be ever and ever so lonely without her."

Susan slipped her arm about her sister's waist, and they went indoors to get ready for supper. The young authoress was very quiet when the family met at table a little later, and had very little appetite, but the family were quite used to Fanny's reserve, and none of them thought anything about it except the faithful Susan, who threw tender reproachful glances across the table at Fanny from time to time.

The father of these girls, Dr. Charles Burney, was the fashionable music-master of the day in London. He had made a great success, and had so many pupils that he had to begin his round of lessons as early as seven o'clock in the morning, and often was not through with them until eleven at night. Many a time he dined in a hackney coach on sandwiches and a glass of sherry and water as he drove from one house to another. Among his friends were all sorts of people, musicians, actors, scholars, famous beaux and belles, and as he was most hospitable his children grew up familiar with many different types of men and women of the great world of London. The other girls and the boys were like their father in taking part in all the entertainments that went on, but Fanny, the second daughter, although she was admitted to be very bright, was unusually quiet and retiring. Her teacher called her "the silent, observant Miss Fanny," and that described her well, because she was always watching the people about her, and remembering their peculiar tricks of manner and speech.

But she had a mind of her own and could speak up on occasion. When she was ten years old her father lived in a house on Poland Street, next door to a wig-maker, who supplied perukes to the judges and lawyers of London. The children of the wig-maker and the Burney children played together in a little garden behind the former's house, and one day they went into the wig-maker's house, and each put on one of the fine wigs he had for sale. Then they began to play in the garden until one of the perukes, which was very fine and worth over ten guineas, fell into a tub of water and lost all its curl. The wig-maker came out, fished out the peruke, and declared it was entirely ruined. With that he spoke very angrily to his children, when suddenly the quiet Fanny stepped forth, and with the manner of an old lady said, "What is the use of talking so much about an accident? The wig is wet, to be sure, and it was a very good wig, but words will do no good, because, sir, what's done can't be undone." The wig-maker listened in great surprise, and then made Fanny a little bow. "Miss Burney speaks with the wisdom of ages," he said, and without another word went into the house.

Among all their father's friends the Burney children thought there was no one quite so amusing as the great actor David Garrick. He would drop in at all hours of the day, and always playing some new part. Sometimes he would sit still and listen to Dr. Burney talk on the history of music, and gradually his face and manner would change until the children could scarcely believe he was the same man who had entered the room a short time before. He would seem to become an old crafty man before their very eyes, or a villain from the slums of London, or a Spanish grandee for the first time in England. Sometimes he would appear at the house in disguise and give a new name to the maid and appear in the dining-room as a stranger to the family. Once he arrived at the door in an old, ill-fitting wig and shabby clothes and the servant refused to admit him, taking him for a beggar. "Egad, child," he said to the maid, "you don't guess whom you have the happiness to see! Do you know that I am one of the first geniuses of the age? You would faint away upon the spot if you could only imagine who I am!" The maid, very much startled, let him pass, and he shambled into the house, again pretending to be a beggar. The children were always delighted to have him come, and Fanny in particular, because she had a talent for mimicking people herself, and she liked to study him. He often sent them tickets to see him act at Drury Lane Theatre, and there they saw their friend play the greatest rôles of the English stage as no actor had ever played them before.

Fanny's particular friend was a Mr. Samuel Crisp, a curious man who had once been very popular in London, but had retired to a lonely life in the country at a place called Chesington Hall. He was very fond of the Burneys and often had them visit him at his country home. Fanny called him "her dearest daddy," and loved to walk across the meadows with him, and tell him of the curious people she had met at her father's house in town. He understood her better than any one else, and it was to him that she confided the story of how she had burned the manuscript of her novel. "It was very hard, Daddy," she said. "I know I oughtn't to want to keep on scribbling, but somehow I can't help it. I think of so many things, and I want to make them real, and the only way is to put them down on paper. People tell me young ladies shouldn't be writing stories, that it's not genteel, but how can I help myself?"

"You can tell them to me, Fanny, and no one shall ever know you made them up."

So she unburdened her heart to him, told him of her friend Caroline Evelyn, the dear child of her brain, of the suitors that young lady had, and how she treated them, and of her elopement to Gretna Green, and of the funny people she was continually meeting. Mr. Crisp listened and smiled, surprised at the girl's powers of description and humor. Finally he said to her, "It seems to me, Fanny, that young lady's career is more interesting to you than your own."

"So it is," she answered. "I think more about her than about any one else."

"Then," said Mr. Crisp, "in spite of your mother's good advice and your own judgment I predict that Caroline rises in time from the flames."

"Do you think so, Daddy? Oh, if she only might! It's well there's no paper and ink here or I'd begin her over again right on the spot."

Mr. Crisp was right in his prediction. That summer the Burneys went to the little town of King's Lynn, where Fanny had been born. There Fanny shut herself up in a summer-house which was called "The Cabin," and began to rewrite her book. She seized upon every scrap of white paper that she could find and bore it off with her. She worked secretly, inventing numberless excuses for the hours she spent by herself. Gradually the story took shape again, changed in many ways from its first telling, and with the heroine rechristened Evelina.

Meantime Dr. Burney had started to prepare his great History of Music, and asked the help of his daughters to copy it for him. Fanny wrote the best hand and was the most reliable, so her father made her his chief secretary, and day after day she worked with him, having to postpone her own book from week to week. But each time she came back to it more ardently and each time her pen flew faster as she sat at her table in the little summer-house. At last she told Susan about it, and Susan was delighted, and when Fanny read some of it to her she declared that it was a thousand times better than the story of Caroline had been.

When her father's History of Music appeared in print it made a great success, and this stirred the youthful Fanny with the desire to see what London would think of "Evelina." She was determined, however, to keep its authorship unknown, and so she carefully recopied the manuscript in an assumed handwriting in order that no publisher or printer who had seen her handwriting in any of the manuscripts she had copied for her father should recognize the same hand in this. But "Evelina" had grown to be a very long novel, and by the time she had copied out two volumes of it she grew tired, and so she wrote a letter, without any signature, to a publisher, offering to send him the completed part of her novel at once, and the rest of it during the next year. This publisher replied that he would not consider the book unless he were told the author's name. Fanny showed the letter to Susan, and they talked it over, but decided that she ought not to send her name. She then wrote to another publisher, making the same offer as she had made to the first. He said he would like to see the manuscript. Thereupon Fanny decided to take her brother Charles into the secret and have him carry the work to the publisher. Charles agreed, and Fanny and Susan muffled him up in a greatcoat so that he looked much older than he was, and sent him off. He was not recognized, and when he called later for an answer he was told that the publisher was pleased with the book, but could not agree to print it until he should receive the whole story. That discouraged Fanny, and she let the book lie by for some time, but finally plucked up courage, and copied out the third volume.

In the meantime Fanny began to wonder if it would be fair for her to publish a novel without telling her father, and she decided she ought to go to him. She caught him just as he was leaving home on a trip, and said, with many blushes and much confusion, that she had written a little story and wanted to have it printed without giving her name. She added that she would not bother him with the manuscript in any way and begged that he wouldn't ask to see it. The Doctor was very much amused as well as surprised, and he told her to go ahead and see what would come of the story.

Better satisfied now that she had her father's consent Fanny sent the third volume to the publisher, who accepted the book and paid her twenty pounds for it.

Fanny Burney

At length "Evelina" was published. The first Fanny knew of it was when her stepmother opened a paper one morning at the breakfast table and read aloud an advertisement announcing the appearance of a new novel entitled "Evelina; or, A Young Lady's Entrance into the World." Susan smiled across the table at Fanny, and Charles winked at her, but she sat very still, her cheeks a fiery red. They did not give her secret away to the rest of the family, nor mention who the author was to any of their friends. Shortly afterward Fanny was ill and went out to Chesington to recuperate. She took the three volumes of "Evelina" with her, and read them aloud to Mr. Crisp, who pretended that he had no idea who the author might be and listened with the most flattering interest to chapter after chapter. "It reminds me of something," he said one day.

"And what may that be, dear Daddy?" she asked.

"I can't think, but it's prodigiously finer than what I'm trying to recall," he answered.

By the time she returned home all London was talking about the new novel and wondering as to the author. Wherever Dr. Burney went he found people discussing the same subject. The great Dr. Samuel Johnson declared that it was uncommonly fine, and the Doctor was the accepted judge of all literary matters. Like all the others he was sure that the writer was a man, and made many guesses as to which of the lights of London it might be, but although one man after another was credited with the honor of having written it each had to decline the satisfaction. Sir Joshua Reynolds declared he would give fifty pounds to know the author and meant to find him, and Sheridan vowed he must get the clever man, whoever he was, to write him a play.

In the meantime Fanny and Susan were enjoying the mystery tremendously. It was very delightful to hear all the visitors at their house talking of "Evelina" without the faintest notion that the author was sitting there listening to all they had to say. But the time came when Dr. Burney learned the secret, and his pride in Fanny's accomplishment could not keep him silent. He told the story to several of his friends and they, very much amazed, passed it on to others. Then Mrs. Thrale, a friend of the Burneys, gave a dinner, and told her guests that they should have the pleasure of meeting the author of "Evelina" there. When they came they were presented to the shy, quiet young woman whom they had often seen at Dr. Burney's house. She was overwhelmed with congratulations, and when the party came to an end Sir Joshua Reynolds, with a most courtly bow, bent over her hand, and hoped that he might shortly have the pleasure of entertaining her at his home in Leicester Square. When she went home Fanny said to Susan, "The joke of it is that the people spoke as if they were afraid of me, instead of my being very much afraid of them."

"Evelina" made Fanny Burney famous. She became a well-known figure in London life, and wrote other novels, "Cecilia, "Camilla," and "The Wanderer." She wrote a life of Dr. Burney, and she kept many diaries, all of which were filled with witty and humorous descriptions of the people of her age. In time she was appointed a Lady in Waiting to Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, and took a prominent part at court. Later she married the French Chevalier D'Arblay, and went with him to France, where she had many exciting adventures during the Reign of Terror. She afterward described these adventures in her diary and it gives a most interesting account of those thrilling times.

So it was that "the silent, observant Miss Fanny" became one of the great figures of England at the close of the eighteenth century, and it was the fact that she could not give up her love of writing and had to tell the story of her heroine Evelina that first brought her to the notice of the world and made her famous.