The Spinster Diaries

by Gina Fattore

  It’s been a long time since we checked in with Fanny, hasn’t it? Don’t despair. This is why the Previously On was invented. That’s one of my jobs around here. In fact, right now it’s kind of my only job. I never got another script assignment, and the story room has stopped convening every day from 10 to 7, so basically my only job right now is to help the assistant editors make the Previously On. For each episode, I start them out with a list of key story points and clips that might work. Then when they have a first pass edited together, I walk over to the post-production trailer and watch it with them and give them notes in what I hope is a kind and encouraging manner. I really like this job. I’m thinking of asking Arnie Greenblatt if there’s any way I can turn it into some sort of niche—you know, hire myself out as someone who specializes in the past and just does the Previously On. I’ve done five of them so far, and they all went over pretty well, so now the Previously On has become like my own personal, private little fiefdom.

  I’m sort of like the showrunner of the Previously On.

  That’s right. As we speak, there are approximately thirty to sixty seconds of network television airtime that I am personally responsible for, and to be honest, I think that’s about all I can handle. Just those sixty seconds. It’s exhausting being responsible for things—TV shows, small children, whatever—and the vim and vigor with which most of the population is running around all the time pursuing these sorts of responsibilities is astonishing to me. Like just the other night I had dinner with an old college friend who is doing what most overeducated, non-brain-tumor-ridden women in their late thirties are doing. She’s injecting herself with lots of drugs and hormones and embryos and stuff in the hopes of getting pregnant, which must be something she really wants because the process itself doesn’t look like very much fun. It seems to make her feel shitty and bloated and forces her to tell lots of really graphic stories about her female parts, and, obviously, you wouldn’t put yourself through that kind of thing unless you were super psyched about the outcome.

  You know, the part when you have a small child you have to look after for the next twenty years.

  Most people seem to be way into that kind of thing. It’s very important to them to have things of their own, and they’re totally willing to go through a lot of annoying shit to get the stuff that is specifically their own. Like right now, all the stressed-out, overworked TV writers who are simultaneously working on shows and rebreaking their pilot stories for the sixteenth time—well, those people are doing that because their goal is to have shows of their own. They’re willing to adopt, if they have to. In a pinch, they’d jump in and run someone else’s show and love it and take care of it and try super hard to get it renewed for the next season, but ideally, they would like to have shows of their own—just like all these women injecting themselves with stuff want to have babies of their own, and presumably all this stuff of their own will make them happy, or they wouldn’t be going to so much trouble and inconvenience to get it.

  I guess my theory about this is that all these people don’t understand how nice it is to just sit on the front porch and watch the studio tour go by. Or maybe they don’t have an ill-fated, six-part miniseries they are thinking of sending in to the BBC? I just discovered on their website that they accept unsolicited submissions—which no one in contemporary, twenty-first-century LA would ever even think about doing. They probably have to over there because it’s a publicly funded company. So what the hell, right? What do I have to lose? It’s been at least three months since my rom-com got kicked to the curb. Maybe it’s time for me to put myself out there again, risk another rejection? Sure, I’ll have to write up an entire proposal, episode summaries, etc., etc., &c. But that can’t be that hard, and what’s the worst that can happen? Either the BBC will reject my proposal for a lavishly produced, six-part miniseries about Frances Burney, Mother of English Fiction, her creative struggles, her financial woes, and her romantic difficulties, or worse, they will accept it, and then the ill-fated miniseries I have been obsessing on and working out in my head for the past six and a half years will become just another day job that annoys the shit out of me.

  So where to begin? How to summarize the fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Miss Burney? How to make them sound glossy and interesting and sell them for a general audience? Actually, this is going to be hard. History often faults her for being weak and prissy and anxious—that’s the obvious disadvantage of leaving behind all your Journaling for Anxiety™. If you do, you can’t pretend, centuries later, to be one of those bold, confident Angelina Jolie–style heroines the industry loves so much: the ones with pouty lips who make action movies. Fanny wasn’t like that—she wasn’t the sort of “empowered” heroine we seem to like so much here in the twenty-first century. She didn’t act all sassy and rude to people. She didn’t use her beauty to manipulate men. Because guess what…Fanny didn’t have any beauty. But all the normal-looking girls who are meek and timid and respectful of the feelings of others? Don’t they deserve a heroine? Who will represent the anxious? The studious? The shy? Who will tell their stories? That’s my goal with my six-part mini series. To give all the normal-looking girls who don’t care about shoes someone they can look up to.

  And, in her own small way, Fanny was a revolutionary. In her early twenties, you may recall, she blew off Thomas Barlow in order to stay home and work on her novel. Or as she put it at the time…

  I must again repeat what I have so often had the hardiesse to say, that I have no idea why a single Life may not be happy. Liberty is not without its value—with women as well as with men, though it has not equal recommendations for both,—& I hope never without prospect brighter to myself to lose mine.

  Did you catch that? That part about “without prospect brighter to myself”? Basically what she was saying was that her single life at twenty-two was pretty good. She had a day job she really liked as her father’s amanuensis—aka secretary or, if we want to be all twenty-first century about it, his assistant. Her hours were not particularly arduous. Her commute was nothing. Her boss was cool. And, unlike a lot of your more lazy, unmotivated twenty-first-century twentysomethings, Fanny didn’t seem to mind staying up all night in an ice-cold garret writing and rewriting her chick-lit novel by dim candlelight. So her feeling circa 1775 was that unless some guy came along who totally rocked her world, she didn’t particularly care if she ever got married.

  If it happened, it happened. If not, eh.

  She made an exception in the case of true love, of course. Everyone does. I’m sure I would too if I ever actually encountered some. But if there was any true love in the case of the Thomas Barlow Affair, it was all on Thomas Barlow’s side. And after Fanny turned him down, she never looked back, never regretted that decision.

  Not when she was twenty-five and still a virgin.

  Or even when she was thirty-five and still a virgin.

  Indeed, after the Thomas Barlow Affair, Fanny’s Journaling for Anxiety™ goes on in excruciating, blog-like detail for six additional decades—sixty-five more years—and never once in all that time does she ever waste a single second angsting or obsessing on Thomas Barlow, dreaming of the other, shadow life she might have led as Mrs. Thomas Barlow, or bullshitting on the front porch with her spinster boss about how Thomas Barlow barely even said hello today when he delivered the copier paper.

  So clearly he wasn’t the guy for her.

  But there were other contenders.

  Jeremiah Crutchley makes his first appearance in Part Two of my six-part miniseries, which is where I’m currently stuck—unable to move forward due to medical scanning appointments, career indecision, Journaling for Anxiety™, fear of not having a day job, etc., etc., &c. Plus, my ill-fated attempt to write a traditional, by-the-numbers Hollywood romantic comedy gobbled up three solid months of writing time that might have been more wisely spent writing an eighteenth-century romantic comedy about Fanny Burney and Jeremiah Crutchley. Fanny was twenty-nine the summer she spent han
ging out with him at Mrs. Thrale’s country house, and twenty-nine is always a dangerous age in GirlWorld. He was thirty-six, loved to hunt, was incredibly lacking in self-confidence, and totally shared Fanny’s conviction that Johnson’s Life of Pope was the best of the Lives—tons better than, say, his Life of Dryden or his Life of Swift. He sounds nice, right? And he wasn’t just nice; he also had this other characteristic that has historically played super well in romantic comedies: he was rich. I’m not sure how rich, but he had an estate. You know, like Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Of course, looks-wise, he was no Colin Firth. We know this because Fanny’s BFF Mrs. Thrale once described Jeremiah Crutchley in her diaries—which you can also get your hands on if you are that obsessed—as “ugly & aukward.” Fanny, for her part, never described what Jeremiah Crutchley looked like. But then again, Fanny never described what anybody looked like. Not even the characters in her very own novels. This could be a sign of how totally not-shallow she was. How poorly she would have fit in here in contemporary, twenty-first-century LA, because in the end, she cared more about what people were like—the content of their characters, their thoughts, their feelings—than about what they looked like.

  Or it could just be a sign that she was totally fucking nearsighted.

  None of the impoverished academics who study Fanny seem to linger too long on this question, but her diaries are actually filled with moments where she’s squinting across a crowded room at someone, not exactly sure who they are. You know, as in “Maybe that’s Edmund Burke?” They definitely had spectacles back then, right? I mean, we’ve all seen cartoon Ben Franklin wearing his, but I guess it wasn’t necessarily considered “proper” to wear them in “company,” and lord knows contacts weren’t an option, so what was a nearsighted spinster to do back then? In Fanny’s case, she usually erred on the side of hanging back and not saying hello to people.

  This was probably a smart thing to do, etiquette-wise, because circa 1781, they had tons of super complicated rules about who could talk to whom. But maybe it also explains how she wound up being a spinster in the first place. Makes sense, right? Obviously, if you hang back a lot at parties, you’re probably not meeting tons of people. You’re not, as we would say in the modern parlance, “putting yourself out there.” So how did the very nearsighted Fanny Burney describe the “ugly & aukward” Jeremiah Crutchley? At the end of May 1781, she said his “first appearance, his coldness, pride, reserve & sneering all wear off upon further acquaintance, & leave behind nothing but good humour & good will.” By August she was describing him as “one of the worthiest & most amiable creatures in the World, however full of spleen, oddities, and minor foibles,” and unlike Thomas Barlow, he doesn’t disappear completely from her diaries once his guest star arc is complete. She runs into him again in 1788, when she’s a thirty-six-year-old spinster, and here is what she has to say on that occasion…

  I never knew him, in any essential point, vary from the strictest honour in every notion he ever uttered. He is, indeed, a singular Character; good, upright, generous,—yet rough, unpolished, whimsical & fastidious: believing all women at his service, for the sake of his Estates, & disbelieving any would accept him for any other reason. He wrongs both Them & Himself by this conclusion.

  And, heck, that sorta sounds like love to me.

  I mean, not that I would know, of course. Spinsters are not generally considered to be the very best authorities on love. It’s not one of our historical areas of expertise. Like, say, embroidering things. Or writing novels. Or securing the vote. But it does seem to me that if you need that many adjectives to describe a person, something must be going on. And indeed, in all of Fanny’s many encounters with Jeremiah Crutchley, she always seems to be moved by him in some essential way:

  He makes her mad.

  He makes her sad.

  He makes her sorry to see him wretched beyond measure.

  Very often, when she re-creates their dialogues, she describes him as “laughing.”

  Or sometimes “half laughing.”

  Or sometimes she’s laughing.

  At a really bad haircut he’s just gotten.

  At something saucily sarcastic he’s just said to Mrs. Thrale.

  Or sometimes at something saucily sarcastic he’s just said to her—for as Fanny herself once put it…

  FANNY

  He makes less ceremony with me than any man I ever knew.

  And she backs this up with examples:

  “Nonsence” (spelled with a “c” passes among them).

  “Teizing” takes place.

  Merriment is had.

  But it wasn’t all good times.

  Jeremiah Crutchley was also, by her own admission, the first man Fanny ever quarreled with, and if you’ve ever seen a typical, by-the-numbers Hollywood romantic comedy or tried to write one or read any books that purport to tell you all the rules of how to write one—well, then you basically know what that means…

  It means you’re in love but you just don’t know it yet.

  Of course, a lot of people tend to think that is bullshit. They think it’s impossible to be in love without knowing you’re in love, and I don’t know if this is consequence or coincidence, but those people tend to be the same people who can’t stand romantic comedies. They get bored watching people bumbling around for two hours when it’s totally obvious from the get-go who’s in love with whom, and they’d probably get even more bored if they were forced to watch a six-part miniseries about a nearsighted, badly dressed novelist who never has any idea who she’s in love with. Although I tend to think that if it’s the summer of 1781, and you haven’t been exposed to a lot of popular entertainment on the subject of Love—you know, apart from the popular entertainment that you yourself have written on the subject—well, in that case I think people should cut you a little slack and agree that it’s possible to be in love without actually knowing you’re in love.

  Mrs. Thrale, Fanny’s best friend, agreed with me on this point. In September 1781, she wrote in her diary, “I think She honestly loves the Man,” and reading that, I’m sold. I don’t need to stop and gather any more evidence because in my world (the world of teenage melodrama), that sort of declaration carries a lot of weight. An avowal of love from a best friend? Heck, in certain situations—depending on where it takes place and to whom it’s being avowed—that could even be, like, a second-act break or something. Because in the world of teenage melodrama, if your best friend says that you love someone—guess what?

  You probably do.

  But I guess people who write scholarly biographies need more evidence than that. They can’t just go around creating act breaks and rewriting history based on something some BFF wrote in her diary. They have to stick to the facts—just the facts—which is where Fanny’s lifelong habit of Journaling for Anxiety™ should absolutely positively totally come in handy. Only here’s the rub: the pages of Fanny’s diary that might actually explain what the fuck was going on with her and Jeremiah Crutchley during the summer of 1781—the part when she comes to “relate the conclusion of Mr. Crutchly’s [sic] most extraordinary summer career at Streatham”—well, those pages seem to be missing.

  They’re gone.

  They’ve been lost to history.

  Either Fanny destroyed them because she didn’t want future generations to know the conclusion of “Mr. Crutchly’s [sic] most extraordinary summer career at Streatham,” or the person who inherited all of Fanny’s diaries and letters—her niece, Charlotte Barrett—destroyed them because she didn’t want people to know, or somebody just spilled something on them and they got all fucked up.

  It’s been a long time since 1781.

  Shit happens.

  I get that. But obviously, this is a major bummer from the perspective of someone who has gotten herself all emotionally involved with Jeremiah Crutchley and devoted an entire episode of her six-part miniseries to him. The Thomas Barlow Affair (aka Part One of my six-part miniseries) has a really great ending: She say
s no, she refuses to marry him, she chooses The Spinster Way—fade out, cut to commercial, end of episode. The George Owen Cambridge saga in Part Three will also have a satisfying conclusion. Or, wait, maybe it won’t be satisfying. Maybe it’ll just be heartbreaking. But to have no ending? To be left hanging like this, to never know what actually went down between Jeremiah Crutchley and Fanny Burney during the summer of 1781? For a storyteller, a professional storyteller, to do that to her audience—well, I always hate to judge Fanny, I hate to harsh on her, but that just seems cruel, don’t you think? Cruel and unusual. No, when I finally get unstuck and make it back to that incident in Part Two of my ill-fated, six-part miniseries, I’ll do what any self-respecting member of the Writers Guild would do…

  I’ll lie.

  I’ll lay it on thick about how Jeremiah Crutchley actually really did love Fanny Burney. I’ll say he was totally into her, thought she was amazing, couldn’t get enough of her. I’ll say it didn’t bother him that she was a successful, hardworking novelist prone to lurking fevers. If I’m making shit up, why not, right? Why not just toss Fanny that tiny little bone. The woman’s going to live to be eighty-seven, for Chrissake. She’s got tons of heartbreak ahead of her; a lot of bad times. Like in early 1800, her favorite sister, Susanna—the one who loved to play the piano and spoke French really well—is going to die in lodgings in a town called Parkgate. That’s totally going to break Fanny’s heart. And then in 1811, when she’s fifty-nine, she’s going to get breast cancer, and they’re going to cut off her right breast… without anesthesia.