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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The seeds for this book were planted long ago and without my notice. Grace Vasington asked me to supervise her University Scholars thesis on the mythological background of Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Her research took her to France and the United Kingdom, where she read extensively on the origins and histories of mythological narratives that survive unnoticed as skeletons of story in literary fiction. Her work showed me that Burnett’s writing repays thoughtful, close reading. Some years later as I was working on a book of publishing history, my colleague Sarah Winter introduced me to A Fair Barbarian in the context of British village fiction along the lines of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. A year or two after that, I taught a graduate seminar on Gaskell and Burnett where, with Christina Henderson, Steven Mollmann, Katie Panning, Christiana Salah and Emily Tucker, we read Gaskell’s early novels alongside Burnett’s. That led to a paper on Gaskell and Burnett at the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) meeting in Pasadena, California. Later at NAVSA’s conference in Banff, Alberta, Sharon Weltman introduced me to Joanna Seaton, who is steeped in Burnett’s adult fiction. We discussed the work I had been doing on Burnett and Gaskell, at which point I knew I had to write this book. Over the last two years my colleagues at the University of Connecticut, especially Sarah Winter, Kate Capshaw, Victoria Ford Smith and Margaret Higonnet, supported this work in ways big and small and always important. Genevieve Brassard of the University of Portland offered timely bibliographic advice on women’s writing and The Great War. The university’s Interlibrary Loan staff has not only helped facilitate the provision of books and articles from other research libraries, they have helped track down periodical sources in some deeply hidden places. The University of Connecticut Scholarship Facilitation Fund has also been generous with financial support. Special thanks to the New York Public Library for access to the hidden collection. To all I am grateful. But especially to Eleni Coundouriotis, whose intellect, scholarly integrity and moral vision have been a daily inspiration to me for more than two decades, I owe a debt I can never repay. This book is for her and our son, Thomas.