# Sarah Burney

Sarah Harriet Burney (29 August 1772 – 8 February 1844) was an English novelist. She was the daughter of the musicologist and composer Charles Burney and half-sister of the novelist and diarist Frances Burney (Madame d'Arblay). She had some intermittent success with her novels.

## Life

Sarah Burney was born at Lynn Regis, now King's Lynn, and baptised there on 29 September 1772. Her mother, Elizabeth Allen, was the second wife of Charles Burney, and relations within the family were often strained. Sarah was brought up in Norfolk by relations of her mother until 1775, when she joined the Burney household in London. This reunion features in a letter from Frances Burney to the dramatist Samuel Crisp: "Now for family.... Little Sally is come home, and is one of the most innocent, artless, queer little things you ever saw, and altogether she is very sweet, and a very engaging child." In 1781 she was sent with her brother Richard (1768–1808) to Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland, to complete her education and probably returned in 1783. She gained an excellent knowledge of French and Italian, and acted as an interpreter for French refugee nobles on several occasions.
As an adult Burney alternated between nursing elderly parents in Chelsea (her mother up to 1796, her father from 1807 to 1814) and periods as a governess and companion, as she was not wealthy. Life with an ill-tempered father suited Burney even less after her mother died. Her half-brother Rear Admiral James Burney (1750–1821), having separated from his wife, wished to move back in with his father and sister, but his father forbade it. So there was family consternation when Sarah and James absconded together and spent the years 1798–1803 living in some penury in Bristol and then London. It has even been suggested that their relations were incestuous. The assumption has been challenged in detail in a more recent, closely researched account of Burney's life and personality. Sarah's surviving bank statements show that her small wealth was much depleted over this period.
In 1807, Sarah Burney moved back again to nurse Charles Burney, but her relations with her father remained poor and she inherited very little when he died in 1814, though she had served as his housekeeper and amanuensis. She lived in Italy from 1829 to 1833, mainly in Florence. There is an appreciative description of her in the diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, who met her in Rome in 1829. She coincided in Italy with her niece and favourite correspondent, Charlotte Barrett (1786–1870), who was nursing her two daughters through tuberculosis. One died, but the other, Julia Maitland, later made a full recovery. It is unclear why Sarah Burney's relations with her niece cooled for some years after that period, but it may have been felt she had not to have given the Barretts all the practical help that they expected in Italy.
Life in Italy was cheaper, but Burney felt increasingly lonely there. She returned in 1833 to live in Bath. Despite financial help from Frances Burney, who also left her £1,000 in her will, she was short of money. This prompted her to revise and publish a pair of short novels she had begun earlier. Sarah Burney moved to Cheltenham in 1841, where she died three years later, aged 71.

## Relationship with Fanny Burney

Sarah Burney's relations with her sister Frances or Fanny seem to have been good, although they became more distant as time went on. The references to Sarah in Frances Burney's journals and letters before her marriage to Gen. Alexandre d'Arblay are few, unsurprising as there were twenty years between them, but they are kind and affectionate: "Sarah is well, & a great comfort to me," she wrote around 19 December 1791. On several days in 1792 Sarah accompanied her to hearings of the Impeachment of Warren Hastings. The two half-sisters seem to have shared a room at their father's house in Chelsea. On 2 June 1792 "I returned late to Chelsea [from her friend Mrs. Orde's house], fetched by Sarah, very good humouredly, for the sake of the ride Tête à Tête."
One thing that Sarah had in common with Frances was sympathy and enthusiasm for refugees of the French Revolution. Staying at Bradfield Hall, Suffolk, in August 1792 Sarah was said to be "living upon French politics & with French fugitives at Bradfield [home of her uncle by marriage, Arthur Young, where she seems perfectly satisfied with foreign forage." Frances joined her there in October. Among those the sisters were pleased to meet was the prominent social reformer Duc de Liancourt, although at one point he inveighed against femmes de lettres. Writing to their father about the visit, Frances added, "Sarah's French has been of great use to [Lancourt], in explanations with Mr. and Mrs. Young." In the following year Sarah is said to have been "enchanted" by D'Arblay, and usefully positive about him in front of her father, who initially had not taken to him at all.
There is a glimpse of Sarah as a young woman in a report of a conversation between Fanny, her two-year-old son Alexander, and Queen Charlotte in March 1798. (Fanny had been "second keeper of the robes" to the Queen in 1788–90.) "'And what a pretty Frock you've got on!'" said the Queen to Alexander. "'Who made it you? Mama? – or little Aunty [Sarah]?' It was Mama; – poor little Aunty has not the most distant idea of such an exertion; nor, here, was it either necessary, or to be expected. The Queen asked a few questions about her then, as if willing to know what kind of character she had; – 'very clever', I answered; a little excentric [sic], but good in principles, & lively & agreeable.'"
Fanny tried to play a conciliatory role when Sarah and James abruptly left their father's house, although she was aware of the immoral construction put upon it by James's wife and to some extent by Mary Rushton, their stepsister, who was staying with Charles Burney at the time. Later Fanny was annoyed by what she saw as a rebuff from James when she tried to reopen family relations. However, this was the third family crisis precipitated by her father: both Fanny and her sister Charlotte had been out of favour for a while after their marriages. Sarah eventually paid a morning call on her father in April 1799 and correspondence with her sister Fanny was resumed in May.
Sarah Burney's life as a whole can be seen as one of recurrent loneliness and of relationships with relatives and friends that fade or dissolve in discord after a few months or years. Her fiction certainly contributed to a meagre income, but it may also have helped to make up for a meagre social life.