Lockdown with Linda

‘Now would be a great time to read Linda Kelly.’ The suggestion came from a member of my reading group; the March 2020 lock down had started, and with the group’s discussions banished to Zoom and feelings of isolation setting in, she and I had taken to calling each other regularly for literary chat and book recommendations. In lock down the outside world had become echoingly quiet. Books were needed more than ever to people the inner one and, as my friend had predicted, Linda Kelly’s turned out to be perfect for the task.

The first one I ordered, Juniper Hall (1991), was soon followed by others – all the others, in fact (she wrote ten). At a time of social distancing, they provided me with a social life. Kelly (1936‒2019) is best known for her group biographies of interwoven lives, chiefly literary ones. Fanny Burney and Madame de Staël; Sheridan and the Kembles (stage legends John Kemble and his sister, Mrs Siddons); the French Romantics . . . She introduces us to writers, actors, political figures and the society hostesses whose salons brought them together in Georgian England and Revolutionary and post- Revolutionary France. Immersion in a Kelly book is like finding yourself at a party, and one of the pleasures of her parties is that in any given book there are often faces familiar from another one. These overlaps were particularly noticeable because I read all the books in one go. The first three she wrote illustrate the process by which one subject led her on to another. The Marvellous Boy (1971), a study of the life and afterlife of Thomas Chatterton, includes an account of the French Romanticist Alfred de Vigny’s Chatterton, a play whose depiction of the teenage poet as a symbol of neglected genius sparked an alarming vogue for suicide among pale young Romantics across the Channel. Kelly’s next work was The Young Romantics (1976), which introduces us to the writings and tempestuous love lives of de Vigny, Victor Hugo and the mutually destructive couple formed by Alfred de Musset and George Sand. The new, freer kind of French drama exemplified by de Vigny’s Chatterton took inspiration from the Shakespeare performances that a member of the Kemble family brought to Paris in 1827 – famously, it was at one of these that Berlioz fell hopelessly in love with the actress Harriet Smithson – and Kelly’s third book, The Kemble Era (1980), returns to England for a lively look at life in Drury Lane in Sheridan’s time. Linda Kelly’s slim, compact volumes, which interconnect so satisfyingly, have been described as ‘non-fiction novellas’. If I had to pick just one as company on a desert island, it would be the first one I read, Juniper Hall. It’s a subject asking to be written about by Kelly, and with me its name struck a personal chord. While undertaking research for my life of the biographer Winifred Gérin I came across a play by Gérin called Juniper Hall in a box of her papers, written before she became known for her biographies – a play long forgotten now, but televised in its day (in 1956). The subject of both Gérin’s and Kelly’s works is the romance between the novelist Fanny Burney and Alexandre d’Arblay. General d’Arblay was one of the little band of liberal French aristocrats who leased Juniper Hall, a country house near the village of Mickleham in Surrey, as a refuge from revolutionary Paris. Kelly presents Fanny Burney’s love story as just one strand of several intertwined lives and loves. Thus we follow the amours not just of Burney and d’Arblay but of the exuberant Madame de Staël and her lover of the moment, Comte Louis de Narbonne, thought to be an illegitimate son of Louis XV. Two of Kelly’s non-fiction novellas are set across the Channel in France; in this one, France crosses the Channel and comes to England. The group of émigrés who formed a French colony in the Surrey downs in 1792‒3 raised eyebrows among Tory squires for their progressive political and matrimonial views, but they found a warm welcome in two cultured, liberal households in the neighbourhood. Within walking distance of Juniper Hall were Norbury Park, residence of the arts patron William Lock, and the cottage of Susanna Phillips, née Burney, sister of the novelist. The Locks and the Burneys were friends, and these two families were soon on almost daily visiting terms with the French visitors. That the impoverished refugees could afford to stay in Juniper Hall and return their neighbours’ hospitality was due to the generous financial support of one of their number, Madame de Staël. Indeed some of them owed their very lives to her efforts on their behalf. At the start of the September Massacres in 1792 she had secured the safety of many in her circle of friends thanks to her position as wife of the Swedish ambassador to France. Given that the friends in question included several of her lovers or supposed lovers past and present, it was fortunate for all concerned that the Baron de Staël was a remarkably complaisant husband. Louis de Narbonne had fled to England with a false passport while Madame de Staël, pregnant with their second child, made her way to Switzerland to give birth before joining him. By the time she arrived in Surrey, Narbonne, who had been bombarded with letters from her during the months of separation, was growing a little weary of the intensity of her passion. He was grateful to Madame de Staël for saving his life but for all her admirable qualities she tended to wear her lovers out with her devotion. Meanwhile another very different kind of love affair was unfolding at Juniper Hall. Fanny Burney, though already a celebrated novelist, was retiring and rather prudish, while General d’Arblay, an army officer and close friend of Narbonne’s, was gentle and bookish and a writer of poetry. Unlike the reactionary royalists who fled France in 1789, both these nobles were ‘constitutionalists’: loyal to the King but advocates of a constitutional monarchy, supporters of the principles of the Revolution but horrified by its excesses. Now, with Louis XVI imprisoned and France declared a republic, they were wanted men in France and found themselves in an awkward position in England. As reformers held partly responsible for their country’s descent into bloodshed, they were distrusted by the Tory government, and they were loathed by the ultra-royalist émigrés of 1789. Although a Tory herself, 40-year-old Fanny Burney, who was staying with her friends the Locks, could not help but be charmed by the Juniperians and in particular by the open, spontaneous d’Arblay, then aged 39. To improve their knowledge of one another’s language they exchanged compositions, hers written in French and his in bro ken English. He called her ‘my dear master in gown’; she found in him ‘a Mind formed to meet mine’ and an unworldliness that contrasted with the sophistication of the other émigrés. Their courtship proceeded discreetly but steadily during what Fanny later remembered as a ‘sprightly period’ of ‘wit, gaiety and eloquence’. The French refugees’ desperate situation ‒ d’Arblay had escaped with no more than his clothes and some ready money ‒ did not diminish their zest for sparkling intellectual conversation. Madame de Staël was one of the most brilliant contributors to the entertainment, but her presence posed a problem for Fanny whose sole source of income was a pension from George III, a reward for a position she had held at his court. Her fear that this support might be withdrawn through royal disapproval should her name be linked with that of the scandalous French novelist cast a shadow over her courtship with the penniless d’Arblay. Amusingly, Madame de Staël, an admirer of Burney’s novels and eager to make friends with her, was slow to comprehend that Fanny was trying to avoid her. Despite the obstacles in their way, Fanny married her émigré in 1793 in Mickleham church in the presence of Narbonne, the Locks and the Phillipses. The couple’s Surrey village wedding might almost have been the concluding scene of an Austen novel (Box Hill, the setting for a key scene in Emma, is close to Mickleham). Less Austen like were the subsequent experiences of the d’Arblays and their émigré friends. The latter soon found themselves heading to new places of exile now that France was at war with England. They took away fond memories of the Juniper Hall interlude, recalled by Madame de Staël as ‘four months of happiness snatched from the shipwreck of my life’. Fanny and d’Arblay’s years together were overshadowed by financial problems and the vicissitudes of the war between their two countries. Like a discreet and kindly hostess, Linda Kelly keeps herself in the background as she introduces us to her biographical subjects. Wanting us to admire their brilliance, non-judgemental about their private lives, she is an empathetic but unobtrusive presence. By the end of lockdown, my head was pleasantly crowded with the clever and charming habitués of her salon. In a later book, Holland House (2013), she relays an anecdote told by the writer Theodore Wilson Harris about his first visit to Holland Park in London. Holland House is no longer standing but the park has a statue of the third Lord Holland, convivial Whig society host. Entering the park with no knowledge of its history or past owner, Harris seemed to hear a man’s voice saying, ‘Come in. Come in. You’re very welcome.’ Linda Kelly extended a similar welcome to me, her books filling my lockdown with both company and conversation.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 89 © Helen MacEwan 2025