Frances Burney - Journal-diaries and The History of Caroline Evelyn

Journal-diaries and The History of Caroline Evelyn

The first entry in her journal was made on 27 March 1768, addressed to "Miss Nobody," and it extended over seventy-two years. A talented storyteller with a strong sense of character, Burney often wrote these “journal-diaries” as a form of correspondence with family and friends, recounting to them events from her life and her observations upon them. Her diary contains the record of her extensive reading out of her father’s library, as well the visits and behaviour of the various important artists who paid visits to their home. Frances and her sister Susanna were particularly close, and it was to this sister that Frances would correspond throughout her adult life, in the form of these journal-letters.

Burney was fifteen by the time her father remarried, in 1767. Entries in her diaries suggest that she was beginning to feel pressured to give up her writing, which was “unladylike” and “might vex Mrs. Allen”. Feeling that she had transgressed what was proper, she set fire that same year to her first manuscript, The History of Caroline Evelyn, which she had written in secrecy. Despite this repudiation of writing, however, Frances did maintain her diaries and she wrote an account of the emotions that led to her dramatic act. She eventually recouped some of the effort that went into the first manuscript by using it as a foundation for her first novel, Evelina, which follows the life of the fictional Caroline Evelyn’s daughter.

In keeping with this sense of impropriety that Burney felt towards her own writing, she savagely edited earlier parts of her diaries in later life. Burney destroyed much of her own diary material in revising the manuscripts. Editors Lars Troide and Joyce Hemlow recovered some of this obscured material while researching their late twentieth-century editions of the journals and letters.