Love and Fashion was published for the first time in 1995 in Peter Sabor's admirable edition of The Complete Plays of Frances Burney. Two of Burney's comedies, The Witlings and A Busy Day, had been published separately before Sabor's edition. The Witlings, with its extensive satire on affectation to wit and learning, especially by women, has received the most attention of all her plays. Love and Fashion, on the other hand, has received little critical attention. It is a particularly appropriate addition to the British Women Playwrights Around 1800 project not only because it is one of Burney's lesser known comedies, but because reading Love and Fashion in the context of the other performed plays and closet dramas by women on the site will assist students in the complex interpretive tasks this play presents.

Frances Burney d'Arblay (1752-1840) was born in King's Lynn, Norfolk to the musicologist Dr. Charles Burney and Esther Sleepe Burney. She published four novels, Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782) Camilla (1796), and The Wanderer (1814). She served at court as the Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte from 1786-1791. In 1793, she married the exiled General Alexandre d'Arblay; her only child, Alexander, was born in 1794. The youthful writings that she committed to flames on her fifteenth birthday may have included dramatic pieces; she began to write her first surviving play, The Witlings, in 1778 and wrote four comedies and four tragedies over the course of her life. None were published in her lifetime; only the tragedy Edwy and Elgiva was performed (March 21, 1795, at Drury Lane; withdrawn after one night).

The main plot of Love and Fashion concerns the heroine, Hilaria's, choice between marrying the rich uncle or the less wealthy younger son of her guardian. That guardian, Lord Exbury, is retrenching his expenses in order to pay his elder son's expenses. This retrenchment takes the family to a small house in the country said to be haunted. The possible existence of a ghost occupies the servants for much of the play, as does a Strange Man wandering in the area posing as a fortune-teller. Lord Exbury's foppish elder son, his self-absorbed daughter, a local toad-eater, and a peasant couple are examples of the breadth of the play's dramatis personae.

Love and Fashion occupies a liminal space between performed and closet drama. It was written for performance and was accepted in October, 1799 by Thomas Harris, the manager of the theater at Covent Garden, who offered Burney £400 for the manuscript. (1) The Morning Chronicle and the Times advertised the forthcoming comedy by Burney, though she had not wanted her authorship of the play to be known before the performance (Darby 110 n.2). The projected production date was in March, 1800, but when her sister Susanna died on January 6, 1800, Burney withdrew the play. She did not, it seems, intend this to be a permanent suppression but only a postponement; it is not clear why, after a sufficient mourning period, Harris did not resume plans for the production (Sabor 107).

Throughout her successful career as a novelist, Burney continued to think of herself as a playwright. In a letter in which she argues with her father about withdrawing Love and Fashion, Burney explains playwriting is part of her authorial identity, that she is "doing what I have all my life been urged and all my life intended, writing a Comedy" (Journals and Letters IV, 394). Love and Fashion was the second of the four comic plays Burney wrote. Many readers, including people involved in theater such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Arthur Murphy, had praised the comic dialogue and farce scenes in her first novel, Evelina, and encouraged her to make use of this talent in dramatic writing (Doody 70). Both her father and her mentor, Samuel Crisp, discouraged her from having The Witlings performed; she subsequently incorporated some of its ideas and characters in her third comedy, The Woman Hater (1800-01).

When Love and Fashion was withdrawn, however, she did not recycle it in another form, but, as Sabor and Darby have discussed, returned to it again and again over the next thirty years. Notes written on scraps of paper, used envelopes, and sheets from a memorandum book indicate her continued interest in the play as a performance piece; she did timed readings of the acts, sketched out new speeches and scenes, and considered ways to tighten the action (Sabor 107; Darby 114). Notes such as "Litchburn too long-winded" and "much too much Innis" suggest that at least some of the times when Burney reread the play, she was quite dissatisfied with it as a play for the stage. (2)

Despite Burney's long-lived ambition to have her comedies performed, Love and Fashion never underwent the trials of actual production. I hope that readers of this electronic edition will, beyond simply enjoying the play, help to develop theoretical models for interpreting such a play. How does its status as a play that was almost performed affect the task(s) of interpretation? Which set of revisions should we follow (if any) and how much weight should we give the different opinions Burney herself held at different times of her life about the play's performability and artistic merit? What status do we grant the plays in relation to the novels, and is it worthwhile to make such comparisons across genres?

Questions to consider include:

• How does the farce plot involving the supposed ghost relate to the main conflict of the play, Hilaria's wish to unite Love and Fashion in marriage? Darby points out that in Act IV, Scene i, Valentine and Sir Archy's battle transposes in farce their competing efforts elsewhere in the play to influence Hilaria's marital choice. But this scene also features some unintentional transvestism when Davis misrecognizes Valentine's disguised voice as that of the lady who died in the house and is supposed to haunt it.
• Does Hilaria possess the freedom to choose between Love and Fashion, or is her choice circumscribed and manipulated by Sir Archy and Valentine?
• Does Lord Exbury's patriotic description of the efficacy of work in Britain (Act V, Scene iv) accurately sum up what the action of the play represents, considering that it is by Lord Ardville's capricious pride that Hilaria and Valentine are rewarded with monetary competence rather than by their hard work?
• How should we read the pastoral scenes in the play with the Haymaker and the Woodcutter? Are they, as Darby contends, "deliberately artificial at best and overwrought at worst" (125)?
• How do the thematics of fortune-telling that propel the Innis-Dawson-Davis subplot affect our interpretation of the play?
• Is the amount of stage-time granted to the servants and hangers-on in the Ardville and Exbury households significant? As Doody has discussed, Burney devotes unusual attention to women's work in The Witlings' opening scene in a milliner's shop; later her novel The Wanderer returns to the milliner's shop as one of the few professions by which a genteel woman could earn money independently, rather than as a governess or "humble companion" (Doody 78). In Love and Fashion, she represents, to some degree, occupations separate from service on the noble estates, such as the Bailiff, the Haymaker, and the Woodcutter.

Jessica Richard
Princeton University

Jessica Richard is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Princeton. Her dissertation is entitled "A Passion for Play: Gambling in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture." She has an essay, "'Games of Chance': Belinda, Education, and Empire" in An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts, edited by C. Fauske and H. Kaufman (forthcoming).

Textual Note:

The only surviving copy of Love and Fashion (on which this electronic edition is based) is held in the Berg Collection of English and American Literature in the New York Public Library. It is a clean copy in Burney's hand and presents few difficulties for transcription. I have tried, as much as this medium allows, to preserve the characteristic features of the manuscript. I have retained abbreviations that Sabor has written out in full, replacing the ampersand with 'and,' for example. Further, though it is common practice to print the direction 'aside' before the speech to which it refers, I have followed Burney's practice; she usually, though not always, places this direction after the passage to be spoken aside.

Notes:

1. This high sum probably reflected Harris' estimate of Burney's popularity as well as her play's merit. An author commonly received between £100 and £200 for a five-act play (Nicholson 46. See also Collins). (back)
2. Further notes from memo book: "Miss Ex & Innis - more Much ado abt Nothing[.] Innis & Valentine Torpid & Manqué tout à fait" (Berg Collection). See Textual Note for further discussion of revisions made to the MS. (back)
3. A transcription by a skilled paleographer of the much more difficult to read notes toward revision that Burney jotted on scraps and in a memo book (in Berg Collection) would be a valuable addition to this electronic edition. (back)

Works Cited:

• Collins, A.S. The Profession of Letters. London: 1928.
• Darby, Barbara. Frances Burney, Dramatist: Gender, Performance, and the Late-Eighteenth-Century Stage. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
• Doody, Margaret Anne. Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988.
• Nicholson, Watson. The Struggle for a Free Stage. London: 1906.
• Pool, Daniel. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
• Sabor, Peter, ed. The Complete Plays of Frances Burney, Volume 1. London: William Pickering, 1995.