"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
First edition — author Sarah Harriet Burney's copy, with her signature on the title-page of each volume.
The English novelist Sarah Harriet Burney was the youngest child of the second marriage of the musician Dr. Charles Burney, and the half-sister of Fanny Burney (Mrs. d'Arblay), who was the author Evelina (1778), amongst many other works. Fanny Burney is now regarded as an important precursor to Austen. As she blended the satirical comedy of Henry Fielding with the sent.mes ntal heroine of Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney created a novel that was just that: a new articulation of the form, which prized the themes of women's education and moral reform as viewed by female authors themselves. It would be difficult to overstate just how significant Fanny Burney's contributions to British literature proved to be. Indeed, Austen herself declared her the very best of English novelists, and Austen's indebtedness to Burney's Cecilia (1782) in her drafting of Pride and Prejudice is well known.
Fanny's work has garnered an increasing amount of attention over the intervening centuries, though that of Sarah has inarguably been overshadowed by her contemporaries—namely her sister and Austen. The the events of Sarah Burney's early life, however, are the stuff Fanny and Austen's heroines are made of. From the moment of her birth, inter-family relations were strained in the Burney household, and Sarah was raised by her mother's relatives in Norfolk until 1775, when she was sent to London to rejoin her parents and half-siblings. This reunion was mentioned in a letter by Fanny (who was 20 years Sarah's senior), to the dramatist Samuel Crisp: "Now for family.... Little Sally is come home, and is one of the most innocent, artless, queer little things you ever saw, and altogether she is very sweet, and a very engaging child" (Burney I:241n).
“Yes, I have read the book you speak of, ‘Pride & Prejudice’, and I could quite rave about it! How well you define one of its characteristics when you say of it, that it breathes a spirit of ‘careless originality.’”
While Sarah Burney was just as affected by economic circumstances as Jane Austen, the former chose not so explicitly address these issues through her fiction. As a result, it is Burney's letters that most clearly reveal "the heroic struggle of a single woman for independence and self-respect" (Clark 22). Austen was instead left to convey for an entire generation the societal factors that threatened to leave her gender voiceless. Through a seemingly—and deceptively—quiet realism, Austen was able to give the experience of womanhood in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century tangible form. And as Austen enchanted the society she sought to satirize and expose, her "domestic" novels have perhaps proven to be the most subversive of all.
Austen's wit and powers of observation have rendered her prose just as relevant and engaging to modern readers as they were to Burney over two-hundred years ago. Thus, the present copy of Pride and Prejudice doesn't simply evince ownership; it bears witness to the rise of female literary professionalism, and the evolution of the English novel.
An extraordinary association copy of one one of the best-loved novels in all of literature.
REFERENCE:
Burney, Sarah Harriet (Clark, Lorna J., ed.), The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney Vol. I, p. 214n; Clark, Lorna J., "Jane Austen and Sarah Harriet Burney," in Journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America, 1994, No. 17, pp. 16-25; Gilson Ae; Grolier/English 138; Halsey, Katie, Jane Austen and Her Readers (2013); Sadleir 62b; Tinker 204
PROVENANCE:
Sarah Harriet Burney (signatures) — Replica Shoes
's London, 30-31 October 1961, lot 156 — Replica Shoes
's New York, 18 June 2004, lot 332