Editing Frances Burney (section)

==The royal court==
[[File:Madame D'Arblay, by E. Burney.jpg|thumb|left|Print of Burney, 1782]]

In 1775 Burney turned down a marriage proposal from one Thomas Barlow, a man whom she had met only once.<ref name="Commire, Klezmer 230">Commire, Klezmer 230.</ref> Her side of the Barlow courtship is amusingly told in her journal.<ref>''The Early Diary of Frances Burney 1768–1778''..., Vol. II, pp. 48 ff.</ref> During 1782–1785 she enjoyed the rewards of her successes as a novelist; she was received at fashionable literary gatherings throughout London. In 1781 Samuel Crisp died. In 1784 Dr Johnson died, and that year also brought her failure in a romance with a clergyman, [[George Owen Cambridge]]. She was 33 years old.

In 1785, an association with [[Mary Delany|Mary Granville Delany]], a woman known in both literary and royal circles, allowed Burney to travel to the court of King [[George III]] and [[Queen Charlotte]], where the Queen offered her the post of "[[Mistress of the Robes|Keeper of the Robes]]", with a salary of £200 per annum. Burney hesitated to accept, not wishing to be separated from her family, and especially resistant to employment that would restrict free use of her time in writing.<ref name="Encyclopædia Britannica 451"/> However, unmarried at 34, she felt pressure to accept and thought that improved social status and income might allow her greater freedom to write.<ref>Literature Online 2.</ref> Having accepted the post in 1786, she developed a warm relationship with the queen and princesses that lasted into her later years, yet her doubts proved accurate: the position exhausted her and left her little time for writing. Her sorrow was intensified by poor relations with her colleague [[Juliane von Schwellenberg|Juliane Elisabeth von Schwellenburg]], co-Keeper of the Robes, who has been described as "a peevish old person of uncertain temper and impaired health, swaddled in the [[buckram]] of backstairs etiquette."<ref>Austin Dobson, ''Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay)'' (London: Macmillan, 1903), pp. 149–150.</ref>

Burney's continued to write journals during her years in the court. To her friends and to her sister Susanna, she recounted her life in court, along with major political events, including the [[Impeachment of Warren Hastings|public trial]] of [[Warren Hastings]] for "official misconduct in India". She recorded the speeches of [[Edmund Burke]] at the trial.<ref name="Commire, Klezmer 230"/>

Burney was courted by an official of the royal household, Colonel [[Stephen Digby]], but he eventually married another woman of greater wealth.<ref name="Commire, Klezmer 230" /> The disappointment, combined with the other frustrations of office, may have contributed to her health failing at this time. In 1790 she prevailed on her father (whose own career had taken a new turn when he was appointed organist at Chelsea Hospital in 1783) to request that she be released from the post, which she was. She returned to her father's house in Chelsea, but continued to receive a yearly pension of £100. She kept up a friendship with the royal family and received letters from the princesses from 1818 until 1840.<ref name="Encyclopædia Britannica 451" />

=== The court plays ===
[[File:Bodleian_Libraries,_Playbill_of_Drury_Lane_Theatre,_Tuesday,_March_10,_1795,_announcing_The_merchant_of_Venice_&c..jpg|thumb|Bodleian Libraries, Playbill of Drury Lane Theatre, Tuesday, 10 March 1795, announcing The merchant of Venice &c.]]

From 1788, Burney's diaries record the composition of a small number of playtexts which were neither performed nor published in the author's lifetime, remaining in manuscript until 1995. These are the dramatic fragment conventionally known as ''Elberta'' and three completed plays copied out in handwriting in ordered booklets, suitable for private circulation, if not publication. These are ''[[Edwy and Elgiva]]'', ''Hubert de Vere'', and ''The Siege of Pevensey''. ''Edwy and Elgiva'' was the only one to be staged, although for one night only, on 21 March 1795, garnering unanimous negative reviews from the public and critics. The long-delayed publication of these plays has largely kept critics.<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=RGSxlDWXry8C Joyce Hemlow, ''The History of Fanny Burney'' (Clarendon Press, 1958)]; Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (Rutgers UP, 1988); Barbara Darby, ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=5iV87xRmcgEC Frances Burney Dramatist: Gender, Performance, and the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage]'' (UP Kentucky, 1997); Jacqueline Pearson, "'Crushing the Convent and the Dread Bastille': Anglo-Saxons, Revolution, and Gender in Women's Plays of the 1790s," in D. Scragg and C. Weinberg (eds), ''[https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/literary-appropriations-of-the-anglosaxons-from-the-thirteenth-to-the-twentieth-century/3AA6EA8B3DEDE450EC136D560D233D79 Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century]'' (CUP, 2000), 122--27.</ref> Even for the handful of scholars who have dealt with them, these texts remain devoid of particular dramatic qualities, indeed 'wretched', as they are often called: in the form in which they have come to us they seem too long to be staged; characterizations are stereotyped; the endings are weak, and the plots convoluted and inconsistent. The style, rhetorical and emphatic, makes them sound clumsy and heavy to the modern ear. However, when properly contextualized and studied as theatrical texts, rather than as unfortunate second-order productions within the works of a successful novelist as Burney, the four Court plays suggest a distinct thematic-stylistic-discursive alignment, more in line with the dramatic production of the late 18th century than has been recognized thus far.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Saggini |first=Francesca |title=Opening Romanticism: Reimagining Romantic Drama for New Audiences |url=https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/892230 |access-date=29 April 2022 |website=CORDIS}}</ref>