Stewart Cooke with Elaine Bander, eds., The Additional Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, Volume I: 1784-1786. With an introduction by John Abbott. General Editor: Peter Sabor. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 480. £125. ISBN 9780199658114.

This volume is the first of two that will complete the modern editing of Frances Burney's Journals and Letters; the painstaking process begun by Joyce Hemlow in the 1960s of collating, deciphering and restoring what had been suppressed, concealed, and sometimes bowdlerised by Burney's Victorian editors, her heirs, and in many cases, Burney herself. Hemlow's Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, which covers Burney's post-court years (1791-1840) began publication in 1972, and the full extent and significance of the archive has been emerging steadily since that date. Hemlow's edition was followed by Lars Troide's Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (1768-1783), and Peter Sabor's Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney (1786-91) is currently in press. This volume of the Additional Journals and Letters closes the chronological gap between the end of the Early Journals and the beginning of the Court Journals (1784-86); Volume II will comprise all letters, journal entries and diaries written between 1791 and 1840 that were not included in Hemlow's original series.

Although collections of Burney's letters were published by successive editors in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, these were heavily selective editions. Burney herself crossed out, overwrote and sometimes destroyed portions of her journal with an eye to posterity. Her niece and executor, Charlotte Barrett, took a robust attitude to what she felt would interest the public, as did Barrett's publisher. Some of this material has been lost forever, but much has been restored through the meticulous recovery work of the Burney Centre. This edition therefore comprises a significant amount of new material, restoring many bowdlerised or heavily excised letters to completion. Much of this material had been thought unfit for publication - by Barrett or by Burney herself - due to its personal nature, and this is exemplified by the current volume, which covers a period of particular crisis and trauma in Burney's personal life culminating in her reluctant acceptance of a position at court. As far as possible, Burney's original text has been silently restored, but (in line with the practice in previous volumes) provenance is indicated for individual entries; original or copy manuscripts, drafts and posted letters are differentiated, and the archival key and note on the text are comprehensive.

The journal-letter format Burney adopts - somewhere between narrative recital and familiar conversation - conveys both the immediacy of her experience and the reflexive self-awareness and circumspection of a debutante author establishing her professional and social positions. Burney's narrative of these traumatic moments, in its fullness, offers the clearest picture yet of her anxious navigation of those positions, and its sometimes paralysing consequences: what has been until now inferred by biographers - the bitter suddenness of her estrangement from Hester Thrale Piozzi, and the frustration of her almost-romance with George Owen Cambridge - is rendered in full, excruciating detail in Burney's own voice. The very arrangement of the index is a poignant narrative: under 'Mrs Thrale', the entries 'devotes week to', 'loss of', 'never hears from' and 'parts with' (461) chart the demise of their friendship. The correspondence between Burney and her sister Susan is also particularly revealing: the intimacy of the sisters' relationship is textually inscribed here, and the confidence and immediacy that enables is part of what renders this volume so compelling. Burney's frequent disparagement in her letters to Susan of their stepmother Elizabeth Allen Burney underscores the sheer ideological weight of kinship borne by this sisterly sympathy: 'Think of this, my Susan!' Burney apostrophises on one occasion, describing the behaviour of 'the lady' as 'not only pointed and indelicate, but rude and glaring' (211).

Beyond its obvious biographical interest for Burney scholars, this volume, in both primary and editorial material, clearly situates Burney in a connected, lettered community. This sphere is nevertheless penetrated by the realities of contemporary life and urban existence - such as when Charles Burney is robbed by his own servant (226) - and by the mortality of its members, as Burney bears sad witness to the decline of Samuel Johnson, and the increasingly ill health of Mary Delany. Burney corresponds with prominent Bluestockings Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Vesey, and writes frequently from Delaney's house of her encounters with eminent visitors from Horace Walpole to the Royal Family. Burney's own writing is supplemented by the comprehensive and detailed textual notes that establish intertextual connections with contemporary accounts (such as those of Delaney, Piozzi, Mary Hamilton, and Walpole), to the extent that the text operates as much as a key to artistic and fashionable London, as to Burney's own self-fashioning. This rich, rewarding volume will be a significant resource for scholars of the late-Georgian period.

Cassandra Ulph, Bishop Grosseteste University