Frances Burney's Private Professionalism

Abstract

Frances Burney's experiences of conversational culture at Streatham and St Martin's Street are crucial to an understanding of her early artistic identity. While the influence of the Streatham coterie on Burney's professional development is well established, and often seen as an antidote to the private circulation models of the bluestocking circle, the vibrant artistic and intellectual network of her father's household is formative. Her experiences of all of these coteries would ultimately enable Burney to synthesise a hybrid blend of domestic privacy and artistic professionalism that she would valorise in her later work, and idealise in Memoirs of Doctor Burney.

Authoring the “Author of My Being” in Memoirs of Doctor Burney

“…Burney's claim to authority for Memoirs was that she was the subject's daughter, and had access to that true familial privacy that I have argued elsewhere is valorised in her journals, her letters and particularly her final novel; yet in Memoirs, this promise of access to the privatised environment of the Burney household is disingenuous. 2 Instead, Burney foregrounds her professional identity in order to present a narrative that is in many ways detached from the private reality of family life. She reconstructs her father's public persona, and, to an even greater extent, her own.…”