As Fanny Burney discovered more and more emphatically the uses of fear as a principle of guidance in her life, she found also the way to tell her own story and came to understand the nature of the story she was constructing. “The act of journalizing,” a theorist of autobiography writes, “intensifies the conflict in any autobiographer between life and pattern, movement and stasis, identification and definition, world and self.” The observation applies hardly at all to Miss Burney as journalizer. Writing down her experience, she seems, on the contrary, to resolve potential conflicts between life and pattern and world and self. Discovering the structures of her life, she finds out how to feel about the world. As a result she contradicts also, essentially if not technically, the common generalization that, however highly wrought its individual entries, a “diary or journal as a complete work will never reflect the conscious shaping of a whole life for one informing purpose.” One can speculate about how conscious the diarist’s structuring could have been, but the sense of an informing purpose shaping her existence in the living and in the recording becomes increasingly strong. That purpose—to defend the freedom of the self by asserting fear of wrongdoing and commitment to virtue—involved familial, social, and literary relations, dictated action and restraint, and resolved as well as created conflict.
Often, particularly in Miss Burney’s adolescence, the desire for freedom appeared to clash with the need to avoid offending. The conflict between the two dominates her Early Diaries.
O! how I hate this vile custom which obliges us to make slaves of ourselves!—to sell the most precious property we boast, our time;—and to sacrifice it to every prattling impertinent who chooses to demand it!—Yet those who shall pretend to defy this irksome confinement of our happiness, must stand accused of incivility,—breach of manners—love of originality,—and . . . what not. But, nevertheless . . . they who will nobly dare to be above submitting to chains their reason disapproves, them shall I always honour—if that will be of any service to them! For why should we not be permitted to be masters of our time?—Why may we not venture to love, and to dislike—and why, if we do, may we not give to those we love the richest jewel we own, our time?
Miss Burney’s sequences of reflection, in those early years, repeatedly duplicate the structure of this passage. The strong impulse to reject custom’s slavery wavers in the face of anticipated charges of incivility.