The Journals and Letters of Susan Burney: Music and Society in Late Eighteenth-Century England

by Susanna Burney

Susan Burney (1755-1800) was the third daughter of the music historian Charles Burney and the younger sister of the novelist Frances (Fanny) Burney. She grew up in London, where she was able to observe at close quarters the musical life of the capital and to meet the many musicians, men of letters, and artists who visited the family home. After her marriage in 1782 to Molesworth Phillips, a Royal Marines officer who served with Captain Cook on his last voyage, she lived in Surrey and later in rural Ireland. Burney was a knowledgeable enthusiast for music, and particularly for opera, with discriminating tastes and the ability to capture vividly musical life and the personalities involved in it. Her extensive journals and letters, a selection from which is presented here, provide a striking portrait of social, domestic and cultural life in London, the Home Counties and in Ireland in the late eighteenth century. They are of the greatest importance and interest to music and theatre historians, and also contain much that will be of significance and interest for Burney scholars, social historians of England and Ireland, women's historians and historians of the family.

356 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2012

Reviews

[Abigail Bok · Rating 4 out of 5]

Susan Burney led a private life in the shadow of her famous father, musicologist Dr. Charles Burney, and her sister Fanny Burney d'Arblay (one of two sisters who published novels). Susan was possibly the child who most closely rivaled her father in terms of musical gifts, though her sex meant those gifts were directed toward supporting her father's career instead of building a career of her own. She married her brother's best friend, a hero of Captain Cook's most disastrous voyage, handsome and charming, who after their marriage devolved into a drunk, adulterer, and abuser. He isolated her from her family and even her eldest son, and kept her living in an unfinished, damp and cold house while she sickened with consumption. He finally released her to return to her family, but she died before reaching them.

This book is a selection from the voluminous journals and letters that have survived from this short and tragic life. She emerges as a kind, loving, unpretentious woman who would do anything for those she loved but who gradually shrank into someone who had shut down all emotions beyond those necessary for the survival of her sense of self, who wrote about her husband only reluctantly and then in code. While he was clearly an imminent threat to her, the irony is that the father she was trying to flee back to was every bit as much the tyrant, albeit one who used the manipulations of affection in place of the fist. Dr. Burney only exerted himself to help her return after the daughter who had been serving him as unpaid secretary left the household--and by then it was too late to rescue her.

The texts are meticulously edited and adorned with helpful annotations. It's probably unfair of me to knock off a star, but I did so because the editor, Philip Olleson, chose (or perhaps was obliged) to offer a selection instead of the complete texts. I'm sure there were good reasons for this choice (the unabridged version would stretch to 650,000 words), but I prefer to make my own selections from primary source material rather than have someone else select for me.