FANNY BURNEY

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22443, 2 July 1938, Page 18

FANNY BURNEY

Be Loved No More. The Life and Environment of Fanny Burney. By Arthur Bemon Tourtellot. Allen and Unwin. 381 pp. (10/6 net.)

Fanny Burney died in 1840 at the age of 87. Her intercourse with men like Johnson, Reynolds, Garrick, Warren Hastings, and Talleyrand, her strange, tiresome life at Court, her great contemporary fame as a novelist, her happy, if belated, marriage, and the oblivion in which she spent her last days—all these things, au well as the fascination of eighteenth century England, may well tempt the enthusiast to write her life. Mr Touttellot is such an enthusiast, primed with the social and literary history of this long and intricate period; he has been tempted and fallen. Two years ago Macaulay's “Essay” and a literary sketch by Austin Dobson were all that existed in the way of a biography of Fanny Burney. But then Mr Christopher Lloyd published his excellent “Life,” a work which “Be Loved No More” will not supersede. Mr Tourtellot’s account of the ancestry of Miss Burney is fuller and better than Mr Lloyd’s; but there the superiority ends. In penetration, original scholarship, and judgment of character, Mr Lloyd is unapproached by his successor, and, as if to handicap himself still further, Mr Tourtellot adopts an" incessantly and ponderously facetious manner. Thus, “Kit” Smart is a “blithesome bard,” Johnson is an “old moralist,” and, elsewhere, “a great mind housed in a mighty lump of flesh.” This language will not do. Again, Mr Tourtellot declares in his sub-title his intention of writing about the environment of Fanny Burney; this he does with that painstaking description of the familiar and the obvious which m.ikes the reader feel slighted. The

last years of Fanny Burney’s life, admittedly the least eventful but also the least studied, are covered with cursory haste. Mr Tourtellot has collected much material. He has been too swift to make a book of it, too swift often to permit sound judgments.