6 Indiana University Studies 



she accepted the appointment of second keeper of the robes to Queen 

 Charlotte, and for the next five years (1786-91) consumed all her 

 energies in the menial duties of a lady's maid. When at length this 

 service had undermined her health, the queen reluctantly permitted 

 her to retire on a pension of a hundred pounds a year. With this 

 meager income as her only support, in 1793 she married General 

 D'Arblay, a penniless refugee from France. Three years later, in 

 order to meet her household expenses, which the birth of a son made 

 more pressing, she published Camilla (1796) by subscription. Four 

 thousand copies were sold, and it was rumored that she cleared three 

 thousand guineas.^ After a sojourn in Paris, where for ten years she 

 was cut off from England by the Napoleonic wars (1802-12), she wrote 

 her last novel, The Wanderer (1814), and disposed of 3,600 copies at 

 two guineas each. During the remaining twenty-eight years of her 

 life, her only literary employment was the publication of her father's 

 Memoirs (1832). She died in 1840 at the age of eighty-seven. 



II. Style 



To the scholar the most interesting quality in Madame D'Arblay's 

 works is the style. In all English literature there exists no parallel to 

 the fantastic evolution that it rapidly underwent. It is really in- 

 credible how the author of Evelina, except in her dotage, could have 

 written Camilla or The Wanderer. The first has a style that is natural, 

 simple, and charming; the latter are written, as Macaulay says, in 

 ^^the worst style that has ever been known among men".^ In making 

 this characterization of the later novels, Macaulay thus accounts for 

 their failure: ''When she wrote her letters to Mr. Crisp, her early 

 journals, and her first novel, her style was not indeed brilliant or 

 energetic; but it was easy, clear, and free from all offensive faults. 

 ... In an evil hour the author of Evelina took The Rambler for her 

 model. . . . She had her own style. It was a tolerably good one; 

 and might, without any violent change, have been improved into a 

 very good one. She determined to throw it away, and adopt a style 

 in which she could attain excellence only by achieving an almost 

 miraculous victory over nature and over habit. She could cease to 

 be Fanny Burney; it was not so easy to become Samuel Johnson. 

 In Cecilia the change of manner began to appear. But in Cecilia the 

 imitation of Johnson, though not always in the best taste, is some- 

 times eminently happy; and the passages which are so verbose as to 



1 Cf. Select Essays of Macaulay (ed. Thurber), 163. 



2 lUd., 117. 



