ABSTRACT
Frances Burney’s Diary and Letters and contemporary responses to its publication raised complex issues relating to the public appearance of women’s lives in print through the medium of letters. Chapter 2 begins the examination of women’s lives emerging from letters by exploring the collection and trajectory of Burney’s letters and the credo set out by her Memoirs of Dr Burney (1832). The seven volumes of Burney’s correspondence (1842–46) were targeted at both memorialisation and the exploitation of celebrity contacts in her own circle and at Court. At the same time, the presentation of women’s letters as life writing was brought into question, and the chapter uses examples from the published Diary and Letters to explore five specific elements impacting on women’s letter collections and letter-written biographies. The chapter suggests that the factors identified – trading, withholding, self-narration, fictionalisation and prior intent to publish – will inform and inflect women’s letters as life writing in the later nineteenth century.
