Clarentine (1796) & Geraldine Facuonberg (1808)
It seems that Sarah Burney's father was unenthusiastic about her first work, Clarentine, a novel of manners. It appeared anonymously about the same time as Frances Burney's third novel, Camilla, which by contrast he "ardently promoted."[26] The character of the charming Chevalier de Valcour is said to have been modelled closely on D'Arblay.[27] Jane Austen disliked Clarentine, wrting: "We [the Austen family] are reading 'Clarentine,' & are surprised to find how foolish it is. I remember liking it much less on a 2d reading than at the 1st & it does not bear a 3d at all. It is full of unnatural conduct & forced difficulties, without striking merit of any kind."[28]
Geraldine Fauconberg, an epistolary novel, was also published anonymously, as was common among women writers at that time.
Traits of Nature (1812)
Burney's third novel, Traits of Nature, was a popular success, with the first edition selling out in four months.[29] Its publisher, Henry Colburn, paid her £50 for each of the five volumes of Traits of Nature, which appeared under her own name, although he was concerned that they should not be confused with works by a probably pseudonymous Caroline Burney, which had appeared in 1809 and 1810.[30] Traits of Nature was reprinted at least once in the same year (in four volumes).[31] and was still available in 1820.[32] It is a large-scale treatment of family and inter-family relationships in the capital and the countryside, with strong emphasis on morality.
The novel incidentally comments on many aspects of life in the 1810s. One example is a shift in upper-class education and children's story-telling from fantasy to didacticism. She has the 14-year-old Christina Cleveland remark to the heroine, Adela, "Well, then; you know fairy-tales are forbidden pleasures in all modern school-rooms. Mrs. Barbauld, and Mrs. Trimmer, and Miss Edgeworth, and a hundred others, have written good books for children, which have thrown poor Mother Goose, and the Arabian Nights, quite out of favour;—at least, with papas and mamas."[33]
The black maid Amy, who accompanies the seven-year-old Adela to her foster parents, leaves a household where Adela's brother Julius can ridicule her and heap her with racial slurs, into one where she is treated kindly, if somewhat condescendingly by modern standards. Amy continues to play an intermittent, positive role to the end of the story. There is implied criticism of the bluestocking aspirations of some women in that period, noted by the anonymous reviewer in The Critical Review,[34] who quoted a passage in which the heroine Adela's wayward brother Julius twits his cousin Barbara for learning obscure foreign languages but remaining "shamefully ignorant of good plain English." The reviewer saw most of the characters as "old acquaintances only in new situations", rather than originals, and noted some similarities with Fanny Burney's Cecilia (1792) and even between the heroine and Evelina, the eponymous heroine of Fanny Burney's 1778 novel. Nonetheless, he called the novel accomplished and singled out the character of Adela's wayward brother Julius as original and well-drawn. Modern readers may notice that the plot relies on a number of coincidences and its ends are tied up somewhat abruptly. The book was also reviewed in the prestigious Quarterly Review[35] and elsewhere.
Tales of Fancy (1816-1820) & The Romance of Private Life (1839)
The Shipwreck (1816) earned her £100, and Country Neighbours (1820), apart from other things, a congratulatory sonnet from Charles Lamb, who was a personal friend.[36] There were American editions and French translations of some of Sarah Burney's works, but they do not appear to have been reprinted in English after their author's death. The pair of novels that make up The Romance of Private Life were sparsely reviewed, although there was an American edition in 1840.
Interest in Sarah Burney's work began to revive as part of a general, in some cases feminist interest in all women writers of that period. This was supported by some print-on-demand editions in the early years of the millennium, and more importantly by a meticulous critical edition of The Romance of Private Life, which appeared in 2008.[37] Her letters have also been collected.[38]
Renunciation & The Hermitage
Both Renunciation and The Hermitage are mystery stories with beauteous, virtuous heroines, but the plots are otherwise unrelated. The elderly protector whom the heroine meets on her flight from Paris may have resembled H. Crabb Robertson. The denouement is delightfully complicated. Much the same can be said of The Hermitage, but here the marrying of an earlier story and an ending composed later seems more visible, so that some of the momentum of the story is lost after the murder, partly due to the introduction of a distractingly comic character, a spinster-companion, who has been compared with the prolix Miss Bates in Jane Austen's Emma (1815). Several aspects of the story recur in Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868), a seminal work in the development of the murder mystery: the return of a childhood companion, the sexual symbolism of defloration implied in the crime, and the almost catatonic reactions of the heroine to her discovery of it.[39] Nonetheless, it seems to show some decline in terms of plot and characterisation since the more plausible and human Country Neighbours.
Sarah Burney's positive, but modest reputation as a novelist in her day was summed up in a memoir of her father: "A still younger sister followed the track of Madame D['Arblay]., with considerable, though not equal success."[40]
