Observations on literature
As England swelters in World Cup fever and even those who can't understand the offside rule are totting up their chances in the office sweepstake, it is good to know that others continue to pursue more esoteric pleasures. And pleasures don't come more esoteric than the annual gathering of the Burney Society, held in honour of the 18th-century novelist and diarist in a decaying country house at the foot of Box Hill.
The meeting is discreetly, but definitely, dotty. We're so far from the mainstream here, for example, that the 20 members look blank when the guest speaker, who is visiting from Germany, presents them with a souvenir football shirt.
Some of the oddness springs from the society's heroine and her circle, who cultivated habits far more bizarre than a mere penchant for class A drugs or vibrating mobile phones. Fanny records, for example, that her despised patroness, Mrs Juliana Schwellenberg, carried about a case full of pet frogs, which "croaked obligingly whenever she rapped her snuffbox".
But it can't all be blamed on the madness of the court of George III. The proceedings, for one thing, are conducted under the stare of a desiccated fish head perched atop a cupboard labelled "The Sutton Collection of British Lepidoptery". And for another, the participants have curious tastes. There was a definite growl of male appreciation - almost a "phwoarrrrrr" - when the lecturer flashed up a slide of George's consort, Queen Charlotte, a noise that so startled a dachshund someone had left in a picnic bag under a side table that the meeting slid into temporary disarray.
Beneath the quirkiness, however, a serious battle is raging, a battle that can be summed up in a simple choice: Fanny or Frances? Burney studies have been rocked by the schism between our bufferish enthusiasts - the "Fanny" brigade - and a new wave of North American feminist critics - the "Frances" camp - to whom Burney is a courageous crusader against patriarchal hegemony who should never be demeaned by a diminutive, especially this one. "Of course," the member next to me whispers, blushing, "to them 'fanny' means - you know."
The North Americans are better funded and organised - most of Burney's papers have been snapped up by Montreal's McGill University for, gallingly, the "Frances Burney Archive". But the English are fighting back: splitting away from the parent Burney Society of North America (for, intriguingly, "tax reasons") and mounting a rearguard action against all this foreign "Frances" nonsense.
"If 'Fanny' is good enough for Jane Austen, it's good enough for us," a woman at the back pipes up, to general agreement. "Thank you," a Burney biographer replies, choked with emotion. "Thank you for supporting our Fanny." It's a patriotic sentiment as true, and as fervent, as any whipped up by Owen or Rooney.
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