herself to venture on publicity, and her first novel, Evelina, did not appear until 1778, and then anonymously, and with every circumstance of secrecy. When the book was traced to her pen, she received an ovation from her father's friends and from the public; in 1782 she was persuaded to make a second essay, with Cecilia, although still anonymously. She was now a celebrity, and was introduced by Mrs. Delany to the King and Queen, both of whom were strongly attracted to her. She was in 1786 offered the appointment of Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, with a salary of £200 a year, a footman, lodgings in the palace, and half the use of a coach. She was averse to accepting the post, which involved. tedium and an appalling stiffness of prolonged etiquette, but her friends were dazzled, and they prevailed. Her duties centred around the Queen's snuff-box and her lap-dog, and her relaxation was to preside over the tea-equipage of the gentlemen-in-waiting. After Hannah More After the Portrait by John Opie five years of this paralysing bondage, her health broke down under the strain of ennui, and she retired on a smail pension. In July 1793 she married General D'Arblay, an emigré artillery officer, then living with Mme. de Staël at Juniper Hall, Dorking. A son was born to her in 1794, and in 1796 she published her third novel, Camilla. From 1802 until the death of General D'Arblay in 1818, they lived principally in France and afterwards at Bath. In 1814 she brought out her fourth and last novel, The Wanderer. Madame D'Arblay lived into her eighty-eighth year, and having removed from Bath to London, died there on the 6th of January 1840. Her Diary, full of gossip of the most amusing kind, and covering a space of more than seventy years, was published in seven volumes between 1842 and 1846. Fanny Burney was not remarkable for beauty, being rather small, shrewd, and prim, but "with a pleasing expression of countenance and apparently quick feelings," as Sir Walter Scott observed. FROM MADAME D'ARBLAY'S "DIARY." The King went up to the table, and looked at a book of prints, from Claude Lorraine, which had been brought down for Miss Dewes; but Mrs. Delany, by mistake, told him they were for me. He turned over a leaf or two, and then said : Frances Burney After the Portrait by F. Burney "But your publishing-your printing-how was that?" גג "Pray, does Miss Burney draw too?" The too was pronounced very civilly. "I believe not, sir," answered Mrs. Delany; "at least she does not tell." "Oh," cried he, laughing, "that's nothing; she is not apt to tell; she never does tell, you know. Her father told me that himself. Не told me the whole history of her Evelina. And I shall never forget his face when he spoke of his feelings at first taking up the book; he looked quite frightened, just as if he was doing it that moment. I never can forget his face while I live." Then coming up close to me he said: "But what! what! how was it?" "Sir," cried I, not well understanding him. "How came you-how happened it-what-what?" "I-I only wrote, sir, for my own amusement-only in some idle hours." I hesitated most abominably, not knowing how to tell him a long story, and growing terribly confused at these questions; besides, to say the truth, his own "what! what!" so reminded me of those vile Probationary Odes, that, in the midst of all my flutter, I was really hardly able to keep my countenance. The what! was then repeated with so earnest a look that, forced to say something, I stammeringly answered: "I thought, sir, it would look very well in print." I do really flatter myself this is the silliest speech I ever made. I am quite provoked with myself for it: but a fear of laughing made me eager to utter anything, and by no means conscious till I had spoken of what I was saying. He laughed very heartily himself-well he might-and walked away to enjoy it, crying out: "Very fair indeed; that's being very fair and honest." In 1800 MARIA EDGEWORTH opened, with Castle Rackrent, the long series. of her popular, moral, and fashionable tales. Their local colouring and dis tinctively Irish character made them noticeable; but even the warm praise of Scott and the more durable value of her stories for children have not prevented Miss Edgeworth from becoming obsolete. She prepares the way for the one prose-writer of this period whose genius has proved absolutely perdurable, who holds no lower a place in her own class than is held in theirs by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott-for that impeccable JANE AUSTEN, whose fame becomes every day more inaccessible to the devastating forces of time and shifting fashion. It has long been seen, it was noted even by Macaulay, that the only writer with whom Jane Austen can fairly be compared is Shakespeare. It is obvious that she has nothing of his width of range or sublimity of imagination; she keeps herself to that twoinch square of ivory of which she spoke in her proud and simple way. But there is no other English writer who possesses SO much of Shakespeare's inevitability, or who produces such evidence of a like omniscience. Like Balzac, like Tourgenieff at his best, Jane Austen gives the reader an impression of knowing everything there was to know about Jane Austen as a Girl her creations, of being incapable of error as to their acts, thoughts, or emotions. She presents an absolute illusion of reality; she exhibits an art so consummate that we mistake it for nature. She never mixes her own temperament with those of her characters, she is never swayed by them, she never loses for a moment her perfect, serene control of them. Among the creators of the world, Jane Austen takes a place that is with the highest and that is purely her own. The dates of publication of Miss Austen's novels are misleading if we wish to discover her exact place in the evolution of English literature. Astounding as it appears to-day, these incomparable books were refused by publishers from whose shops deciduous trash was pouring week by week. The vulgar novelists of the Minerva Press, the unspeakable Musgraves and Roches and Rosa Matildas, sold their incredible romances in thousands, while Pride and Prejudice went a-begging in MS. for nearly twenty years. In point of fact the six immortal books were written between 1796 and 1810, although their Norcrtione but comply to execute my.com. Which is to offer it to goons much money twillbing and this I pray you – and to report the result to me He is a ve clever you and man- not yet one and Derest Come under cover to W Gregory Engel and behever. mydiar Yours sincerely& Extract from a Letter from Maria Edgeworth to Mrs. Hoffland dates of issue range from 1811 to 1818. In her time of composition, then, she is found to be exactly the contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge in their reform of poetry, instead of impinging on the career of Sir Walter Scott as a romance-writer. Her methods, however, in no degree resemble those of the poets, and she has no conscious lesson of renaissance to teach. She does not share their interest in landscape; with her the scenery is a mere accessory. If she is with them at all, it is in her minute adherence to truth, in her instinctive abhorrence of anything approaching rhetoric, in her minute observation and literary employment of the detail of daily life. It is difficult to say that she was influenced by any predecessor, and, most unfortunately, of the history of her mind we know almost nothing. Her reserve was great, and she died before she had become an object of curiosity even to her friends. But we see that she is of the race of Richardson and Marivaux although she leaves their clumsy construction far behind. She was a satirist, however, not a sentimentalist. One of the few anecdotes preserved about her relates that she refused to meet Madame de Staël, and the Germanic spirit was evidently as foreign to her taste as the lyricism born of Rousseau. She was the exact opposite of all which the cosmopolitan critics of Europe were deciding that English prose fiction was and always would be. Lucid, gay, penetrating, exquisite, Jane Austen possessed precisely the qualities that English fiction needed to drag it out of the Slough of Despond and start it wholesomely on a new and vigorous career. Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) was the daughter of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, an eccentric Irish gentleman of good family, and of the second of his five wives (if we recognise the freak of his boyish matrimony). She was born at Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, in the house of her mother's father, a German, on the 1st of January 1767. She was put to school at Derby in 1775- It was noticed quite early that she had an extraordinary gift for story-telling, and at the age of thirteen she was urged by her father to begin the composition of tales. During an illness, she came much under the influence of the humanitarian, Thomas Day (1748-1789), the author of the didactic novel, Sandford and Merton (1783-9); but in 1782 Mr. Edgeworth, now already, at thirty-eight, the husband of a fourth wife, took his complex family over to Ireland, and settled on his estates at Edgeworthstown in County Maria Edgeworth From a Drawing by Joseph Slater Longford. This was Maria's home during the remainder of her long life. After publishing Letters to Literary Ladies in 1795, her real work began with her |
