Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Sarah Harriet Burney
-
Standard Name: Burney, Sarah Harriet
Birth Name: Sarah Harriotte Burney
Nickname: Sally
Used Form: the Author of Clarentine
SHB
was an early nineteenth-century novelist and letter-writer (though she began to publish before the end of the eighteenth century). Her achievements in both these genres have been obscured by those of her sister Frances. She wrote from financial necessity—I must scribble, or I cannot live
Burney, Sarah Harriet. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney. Editor Clark, Lorna J., University of Georgia Press.
197
—but her later works especially rank high for quality and interest.
This novel too was a success, if not quite so resoundingly as Marriage (to whose reputation more than one reviewer referred).
Cullinan, Mary. Susan Ferrier. Twayne.
68-9
The author's sister Helen (Mrs Kinloch
), an early reader, approached it...
Literary responses
Maria Edgeworth
But Sarah Harriet Burney
wrote: Nobody more thoroughly venerates the admirable author than I do—And in this last work, she has really excelled herself. Every young man ought to study it . . ....
Literary responses
Mary Charlton
Sarah Harriet Burney
was clearly more impressed by what she regarded as a popular, even a trashy novel, than she was willing to admit. She called it (in implicit contrast with Walter Scott
) a...
Leisure and Society
Lady Eleanor Butler
The Ladies and the rural ideal they embodied became famous in literary circles, an object of pilgrimage alike to the lesbian Anne Lister
and to more conventional figures like William Wordsworth
and the Irish poet...
death
Frances Burney
She had outlived her husband, her son, and all her siblings but Sarah Harriet
, to whom she left an annuity of two hundred pounds a year. She was buried at Wolcot Church in Bath...
Literary responses
Frances Burney
Burney's family were delighted. Her young half-sister Sarah Harriet
(who was about to publish her own first novel) sent her a perfect rhapsody of praise.
Burney, Sarah Harriet. The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney. Editor Clark, Lorna J., University of Georgia Press.
17-18
A long review in the Analytical Review, probably...
Family and Intimate relationships
Frances Burney
Youngest of the family was FB
's fellow-novelist Sarah Harriet Burney
, the daughter of the second marriage, who also worked as a governess.
Literary responses
Mary Brunton
Brunton's English publisher, Longman
, registered in the year of publication that the book was in great demand and very much admired on the whole, though some complain of the later part of the work...
Friends, Associates
Caroline Bowles
CB
's dealings with Blackwood's led to a positive working relationship with editor John Wilson
. She also maintained a long correspondence with Anna Eliza Bray
and (in later years) a shorter one with poet...
Several novels were attributed to AMB
which are probably not hers. Titles that have been ascribed to her include Henry Bennett et Julie Johnson, 1794 (a French translation, bearing her name, of John Raithby
Literary responses
Jane Austen
But of readers whose responses survive, most were delighted. These included Sarah Harriet Burney
—who, however, thought (apparently along with plenty of others) that Catherine Ann Dorset
, sister of Charlotte Smith
, might be...
