![]() The second Burney read Barlow’s “passionate Declaration of Attachment, hinting at hopes of a return, & so forth,” she knew exactly where her heart stood. That’s not my 21st t century spin on its stilted prose and funky capitalization it’s Burney’s contemporaneous judgment of the letter, which she found to be “high flown.” She already fancied herself a writer, and what’s true today was probably doubly true in 1775: god help anyone attempting to communicate via the written word with an aspiring-writer type. Or, as we might say in the 21st century… thumbs-down emoji.įour days later, Burney received a letter from Barlow-a really bad letter. ![]() He has Read more than he has Conversed, & seems to know but little of the World his Language is stiff & uncommon, he has a great desire to please, but no elegance of manners neither, though he may be very worthy, is he at all agreeable. ![]() Burney herself was 22 at the time, and here’s how she described Barlow in her diary-a diary she kept in various ways, shapes, and forms from the time she was 16 to her death at the ripe old age of 87. In May of 1775, the English novelist and diarist Frances Burney was having tea at her older sister’s house when she met-or more accurately was set up with-a short, sensible, 24-year-old man named Thomas Barlow. ![]()
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