I will start this review by admitting that I was, heretofore, unfamiliar with ‘In Our Time’ and its format, agreeing to write on it because I am a fan of Frances Burney more than I am of Melvyn Bragg. In the program, I found the relative lack of quotations from Burney’s work jarring, especially in a program about a writer whose prose style was commented upon throughout. I was also uncomfortable with the focus on ‘Fanny Burney’ rather than Frances. As I occasionally berate my students, for as long as we don’t refer to Willy Shakespeare, we should refer respectfully to authors by their full names, irrespective of how they were addressed in private at the time. I also found the coughing, which interrupted proceedings sporadically, disconcerting, and wondered whether this couldn’t have been edited out before broadcast.

These complaints aside, this was an informative and engaging presentation on a long-lived writer, playwright and diarist. Judith Hawley, John Mullan and Nicole Pohl provided detailed background information on Burney’s upbringing; the plot, publication and reception of Evelina; Burney’s abortive career as a dramatist; briefer descriptions of Cecilia and Camilla; an engaging account of Burney’s difficult time as Assistant Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte at Kew; her marriage to M. d’Arblay, celebrated as one of the great romances of the age by Hawley, an example of a happy, supportive and equal relationship; and a short account of The Wanderer and its reception as a sort of anachronism: a gothic, revolutionary, feminist account of the British response to the French Revolution, published twenty years after the events it explores.

The panel ably resisted Bragg’s deliberately provocative attempts to question Burney’s status as a great writer on account of her gender, answering questions about social pressures on eighteenth-century women to conform, gendered expectations of success in the literary public sphere, and Burney’s inexperience as a playwright in ways which presented a complex picture of the challenges which Burney faced and overcame throughout her life and writing. More interesting was the panellists’ shared account of Burney’s self-conscious self-fashioning: her elaborate shyness, as in the games played around the anonymous publication of her first novel, and continued anonymity following its success, disguising an incisive social satirist.

I particularly appreciated the contributions of Nicole Pohl, who provided the few quotations from or about Burney, such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s deliciously backhanded compliment, that the youthful writer of Evelina was ‘as famous as the hot air balloon’, and snippets from Burney’s own painful account of her own mastectomy, described as unbearable by Bragg. Indeed, the concluding account of Burney as a diarist and memoirist – from her experience of the Battle of Waterloo to the candid account of breast cancer and her surgery – made an argument for considering her as an experimental writer, caught in a productive, if increasingly difficult, struggle between the demands of truth-telling and propriety.

In Our Time: Fanny Burney was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on April 23rd. It is currently available on BBC iPlayer.