Meantime Dr. Burney had started to prepare his great History of Music, and asked the help of his daughters to copy it for him. Fanny wrote the best hand and was the most reliable, so her father made her his chief secretary, and day after day she worked with him, having to postpone her own book from week to week. But each time she came back to it more ardently and each time her pen flew faster as she sat at her table in the little summer-house. At last she told Susan about it, and Susan was delighted, and when Fanny read some of it to her she declared that it was a thousand times better than the story of Caroline had been.
When her father's History of Music appeared in print it made a great success, and this stirred the youthful Fanny with the desire to see what London would think of "Evelina." She was determined, however, to keep its authorship unknown, and so she carefully recopied the manuscript in an assumed handwriting in order that no publisher or printer who had seen her handwriting in any of the manuscripts she had copied for her father should recognize the same hand in this. But "Evelina" had grown to be a very long novel, and by the time she had copied out two volumes of it she grew tired, and so she wrote a letter, without any signature, to a publisher, offering to send him the completed part of her novel at once, and the rest of it during the next year. This publisher replied that he would not consider the book unless he were told the author's name. Fanny showed the letter to Susan, and they talked it over, but decided that she ought not to send her name. She then wrote to another publisher, making the same offer as she had made to the first. He said he would like to see the manuscript. Thereupon Fanny decided to take her brother Charles into the secret and have him carry the work to the publisher. Charles agreed, and Fanny and Susan muffled him up in a greatcoat so that he looked much older than he was, and sent him off. He was not recognized, and when he called later for an answer he was told that the publisher was pleased with the book, but could not agree to print it until he should receive the whole story. That discouraged Fanny, and she let the book lie by for some time, but finally plucked up courage, and copied out the third volume.
In the meantime Fanny began to wonder if it would be fair for her to publish a novel without telling her father, and she decided she ought to go to him. She caught him just as he was leaving home on a trip, and said, with many blushes and much confusion, that she had written a little story and wanted to have it printed without giving her name. She added that she would not bother him with the manuscript in any way and begged that he wouldn't ask to see it. The Doctor was very much amused as well as surprised, and he told her to go ahead and see what would come of the story.
Better satisfied now that she had her father's consent Fanny sent the third volume to the publisher, who accepted the book and paid her twenty pounds for it.
g
Fanny Burney
At length "Evelina" was published. The first Fanny knew of it was when her stepmother opened a paper one morning at the breakfast table and read aloud an advertisement announcing the appearance of a new novel entitled "Evelina; or, A Young Lady's Entrance into the World." Susan smiled across the table at Fanny, and Charles winked at her, but she sat very still, her cheeks a fiery red. They did not give her secret away to the rest of the family, nor mention who the author was to any of their friends. Shortly afterward Fanny was ill and went out to Chesington to recuperate. She took the three volumes of "Evelina" with her, and read them aloud to Mr. Crisp, who pretended that he had no idea who the author might be and listened with the most flattering interest to chapter after chapter. "It reminds me of something," he said one day.
"And what may that be, dear Daddy?" she asked.
"I can't think, but it's prodigiously finer than what I'm trying to recall," he answered.