This reunion features in a letter from Frances Burney to the dramatist Samuel Crisp: "Now for family.... Little Sally is come home, and is one of the most innocent, artless, queer little things you ever saw, and altogether she is very sweet, and a very engaging child.
[4] As an adult Burney alternated between nursing elderly parents in Chelsea (her mother up to 1796, her father from 1807 to 1814) and periods as a governess and companion, as she was not wealthy.
So there was family consternation when Sarah and James absconded together and spent the years 1798–1803 living in some penury in Bristol and then London.
It is unclear why Sarah Burney's relations with her niece cooled for some years after that period, but it may have been felt she had not to have given the Barretts all the practical help that they expected in Italy.
[16] Writing to their father about the visit, Frances added, "Sarah's French has been of great use to [Lancourt], in explanations with Mr. and Mrs.
[18] There is a glimpse of Sarah as a young woman in a report of a conversation between Fanny, her two-year-old son Alexander, and Queen Charlotte in March 1798.
The Queen asked a few questions about her then, as if willing to know what kind of character she had; – 'very clever', I answered; a little excentric [sic], but good in principles, & lively & agreeable.
Sarah eventually paid a morning call on her father in April 1799 and correspondence with her sister Fanny was resumed in May.
[22] Sarah Burney's life as a whole can be seen as one of recurrent loneliness and of relationships with relatives and friends that fade or dissolve in discord after a few months or years.
It appeared anonymously about the same time as Frances Burney's third novel, Camilla, which by contrast he "ardently promoted.
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.
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."
Nonetheless, he called the novel accomplished and singled out the character of Adela's wayward brother Julius as original and well-drawn.
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.
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.
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.