When Fanny Met Sian

One of my oldest and best-loved friends is a novelist. I met her in my mid-twenties, during a ten-year-long spell when, for the first time in my young life, I couldn’t write a word. She wrote like I wanted to – as herself, as a young woman, but she seemed to know so much more than me. Her characters lived — were lived — and she could skewer someone’s pretensions in two lines of dialogue. She wrote diaries and letters like little sparkling stories in their own right, and when she wrote her first novel she helped to change the course of literature. She is one of those friends, upon whom you can always rely to show you the way.

The fact that she lived two hundred years ago has been a slight impediment to reciprocating this friendship; but if literature is one thing, it’s a conversation. And it plays out over the long haul. While Fanny Burney makes her trenchant asides, lampoons party guests — while she fizzes and effervesces, and writes — about her unhappiness at not writing, about the horrors life subjects her to — the conversation goes on as long as someone is reading her. In fact, the conversation continues even while someone is reading the writers who followed her. Because follow her they did: if there’s one public arena in this world where women can take the credit — no matter what someone like Milan Kundera might say — it’s the novel. What Burney did in her twenties was to lay a foundation stone in its edifice.

It turns out Fanny’s been as good a friend to Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre, author of the Radio 4 play, ‘When Fanny Met Germaine’, as she has to me. And Ejiwunmi-Le Berre (or Sian, as we’ll call her, as we’re all friends here; she and I are Facebook friends) has gone one better than me, and reciprocated — in the form of not just writing to Fanny, but really writing her.

As the play opens, Fanny — a privileged enough woman, daughter of the musicologist Charles Burney, and a celebrated writer — described in the play as ‘small, and in the English style’ — has just spent seven years as a lady in waiting to the Queen. Accepting this position was her reluctantly pragmatic solution to being an unmarried 30-something woman (however celebrated by Dr Johnson) with no independent means. She’s just been pensioned off, at her own request, on the grounds of her father’s health, fairly exhausted, aged 41. She has not managed to write a book during her whole time at court.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, or Mme de Staël to you and me, is the daughter of Louis XVI’s reforming director-general of finance, Jacques Necker: ‘a lady of the very highest station’ and considerable independent wealth, a scandalously free-thinking socialite, and a prolific writer. Germaine de Staël is young, bold, and full of highflown notions. She lives according to her ideals, which even though she’s a woman are as uncompromisingly radical as those of, say, Shelley and Byron. She has illegitimate children parked in Switzerland, and lovers dotted all over the place; we meet her just as she’s about to join one of them in England. It’s 1793.

All this would have been more than material enough to get a story going. But this play is not just the story; it’s about the story. And it’s not just about the story, it’s about who owns the story. 1793, the year of turmoil, was a time when women were just beginning to own the story — their stories —and this is the exact spot where the play gets to the fundamental question. Which women? And how? Who owns which story? These questions are particularly relevant in 2019, a time in which we’re also experiencing simultaneous social change and defensive oppression, and discussions rage about appropriation and still-unheard voices.

The story of the encounter between these two important women, Fanny and Germaine, has never been told; the relevant papers, their letters, have not survived, putting it outside the scope of a biographer. Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre frames the story by giving it a narrator — like a Nick Carraway, or a Greek chorus — in the form of Mme de Staël’s servant. The servant is an enslaved woman (at the beginning; she’s freed by the end), trafficked from the Congo and now called Louise-Marie, and thus literally embodies the social group with the least access to literature, to the telling of the story, with the least right to be in the room where the story is even happening, since their story is itself denied. The most radical thing a person with no power can do is be present. And Louise-Marie (‘not my birth name; not what I used to be; but more of that later’) is sharp.

She asks questions: who is ‘a suitable heroine’? She finds Fanny frankly a bit old for the role, a bit sad, too tired, not rich enough, and not headed for London as we meet her. Of course, this is an opening straight out of one of Burney’s novels, and a trick Jane Austen also learned from her: the unpromising heroine, and correspondingly dull location — in this case, Fanny’s sister Susanna’s house in the Home Counties.

As it happens, ‘in novelish style’, Surrey is teeming with French refugees from the French Revolution. One of them is (natch) the newly arrived Mme de Staël.

Germaine is a huge admirer of the older Fanny. They hit it off immediately: two serious and committed writers with one beautifully realised and fundamental misunderstanding between them. Germaine is going to help Fanny find her muse and start writing again: ‘we seek her together, and bring her home, to you’.

There are Frenchmen (of course) on hand to revive Fanny’s flagging spirits, one of whom, D’Arblay, has fought for the dashing Lafayette. There are literary exchanges between the ladies and men, essays to help one another with their English or French. This interaction is a major plot driver, and Louise-Marie’s aside here is crucial to the meta-story: ‘Me? I speak six languages. English now, before that French and German, then Creole, as we speak in Saint Domingue, Arabic from the men who took me, and before that Wolof — at home, as a child , before I — but I not speak Wolof again… and how I learned to speak? Because I must! To do what I told, and not get whipped! To be understood, and not get whipped! It is the quickest way to learn.’

When Dr Burney’s health actually does call Fanny back home there are letters, invitations, and rumours of scandals attaching to Germaine. Fanny is mindful of her position, and the fact that her pension is at the Queen’s pleasure. In short, her father forbids her to pursue the friendship. In the true novelish style, letters bring plot complications.

This is a story about friendship, that excitement of discovering kindred in the wild, when one meets a sympathetic equal. And an equal as an artist! It’s like a romance. But unlike the ‘bromance’ model, when it’s two female artists this friendship of intellects must founder on the rocks. A woman without private wealth must ‘live on the thin soup of opinion’ — whether she’s the slave who speaks whatever language others require, or daughter of Dr Burney and pet of Sam Johnson.

What Germaine wants with Fanny is something that would have hugely enriched our literary culture and the standing of women, had it happened: an open and intellectual correspondence between herself and Fanny Burney. Something to rival all the famous correspondences between male thinkers and writers — ‘a book such as the world has never seen!’ These are two important writers at a critical moment in history, both well placed to know important people and hear about important events. But they are women. And one of them must live with her parent and rely on a goodwill pension for her living.

It never happens; Fanny is a writer, it turns out, but she’s quite an ordinary woman. She’s only a revolutionary by existing. When Germaine protests that one must write only from the heart, she speaks — as we’d say now — from a position of privilege of which she literally can’t conceive. There are inconveniences, there are children in Switzerland, but there is no other imperative. The free spirit Germaine, who thinks she is the real revolutionary, has no idea.

It’s money and social position, as much as her ideals, that have rendered Germaine free. In the inevitable confrontation she is completely unable to understand what is happening. ‘Nothing between the soul and the page: we promised, oui?’ She implores Fanny: ‘What kind of woman, what kind of writer, flees the only other of her kind?’

‘I am not author of my own existence’, protests Fanny, ‘how could I hope to conjure a novel into life?’ She says, ‘You say you live to write, but I must write to live.’

‘Is that all?’

‘It is an ocean! Your name connected to mine, even upon a frontispiece, would silence me forever.’

‘Spoke like a proper novelish heroine’, says Louise-Marie admiringly — like a proper novelish writer, both privy to everything and yet invisible, while seeing all.

Of course she is given her eye by Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre, and her voice in performance (wonderfully) by Lorna Gayle. The ostensible protagonists are the two white women, but it’s Louise-Marie who owns the story here: because she’s the one telling it. She frames it, she interjects throughout — ‘what she do now!’ — and in the end, she’s the conscience. ‘The answer lies in your hand, Fanny Burney’, she says. ‘That’s it — write, Fanny Burney!’ Suddenly, it’s apparent that Fanny Burney, who’s been a lady in waiting to the Queen, has this and other forms of servitude in common with Marie-Louise. Even she can’t, in the story, realise this. But Louise-Marie (the true heroine, of course) is unsparing in her observations.

In fact, Louise-Marie’s asides resemble nothing quite so much as those diary entries by Fanny Burney herself. She also comments on both the demands of the narrative and her own proficiency in meeting them. It’s hard to think when I’ve seen, heard, or read a work like this. It sounds simple — the story is simple enough, after all, and the device of the narrator is hardly new. But these are very finely realised voices and the situation encompasses so many kinds of invisible history of women and writing that it’s hard to unpick them all: black women, women in service, women without a private income, deliberately uneducated women. Who owns the language? We’re asking this question today. Imagine if Marie-Louise, the enslaved woman of 1793, had written her diaries, or conducted a correspondence with Miss Burney.

Time is elastic: all this ground is with essentially three characters, in 44 minutes. But, ‘It took some fifty year for those lady novelists to sit and talk ’bout this novelish style’, says Louise-Marie. Even Miss Austen, after all — a spinster who lived under her father’s roof all her life (and had servants) — perforce wrote at a little table in the parlour and hid her papers under her needlework when visitors arrived.

There’s a very beautiful dialogue near the finish. The play left me in tears when I first listened to it, and again the second time, and yet again when I listened to it to write this. I mentioned this to Sian, and she said, ‘from what little I know of your situation, I imagine it would resonate quite a bit’. I’m writing this — imposing my own narrative now, like Marie-Louise — after a period of homelessness and displacement, though admittedly not enslavement and not in a new language — but on benefits, in a town I’d never been in before, and starting life over, yet again.

Life in any branch of creative endeavour is getting harder and harder under the current austerity, which is now, post-election, looking set to get worse, not better. As Sian pointed out in our conversation about her play, before about 1940 it was ‘a very rare woman writer who had to depend on her writing to survive’. Nowadays, when the average annual income from writing of a professional novelist is £8,000, you can’t even do that.

Fanny wrote one more novel, the less well received Camilla, and she wrote it for money. But it was her last. She paid the price for being a writer, and for being a woman, and a woman who publicly needed the money, at that. She may have been celebrated for her youthful first novel, Evelina, and Dr Johnson himself may have told all the society ladies to read her second, Cecilia, saying the whole world was contained in it — and her novels may have encouraged other young women to write and influenced their work — but her journals and her letters are where Fanny poured the writing Germaine de Staël wanted to pull out of her, the heart unmediated, about being that woman revolutionary who isn’t a revolutionary. Just read her unsparing account of undergoing a mastectomy without anaesthetic, aged 59.

Listening on my laptop at the kitchen table I’m now lucky enough to have, it was as if Fanny, my old friend, had materialised from 25 years ago when we were both young, but miraculously in a mirroring middle age; at my age she was Mme D’Arblay, because yes, this story like all good novels ends with a wedding . And (because it also ends with a guillotine) it was as if Mme D’Arblay had leaned over and said to me: ‘Just write, Kate. Just write’.

Well, in fact, Marie-Louise said it. And she should know.

Listen to the play here: When Fanny Met Germaine, by Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre