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Most well known today as the author of the children’s classics The Secret Garden (1911), A Little Princess (1905) and, perhaps still infamously, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), Francis Hodgson Burnett was for most of her career a serious and ambitious writer of adult fiction. Her first two novels, That Lass O’Lowries (1877) and Haworth’s (1879), garnered strong critical reviews, American periodicals pairing those novels with George Eliot’s and Henry James’s and announcing in the process the emergence of a significant new voice on the American literary scene. That Lass O’Lowries was reviewed with James’s The American in the North American Review in 1877,1 and the Southern Review in its 1879 review of that novel opined that “Mrs. Burnett […] has come to take the first rank among living American novelists” (n.p.).2 That same year the North American Review paired Eliot’s The Impressions of Theophrastus Such with Burnett’s Haworth’s; the review states: “When a new writer arrives who is indeed a new voice, and not a confused echo of voices already familiar, the first office of the critic is to ask what results characterize his work and by what methods he achieves his results or makes his impression. Mrs. Burnett […] has proved herself a distinctly new personality among our novel-writers.”3 Though both reviews seem to concur in their high evaluation of the literary quality of Burnett’s early novels, presenting them as vehicles of a distinctive voice that mark Burnett as the preeminent novelist of her time (note the absence of the qualifier “woman” novelist in the first review), there is some suggestive slippage in the language of the second review as Burnett is relocated from the “first rank” of novelists to a “distinctly new personality among novel-writers.” First-rate novelist, new writer, distinct personality: taken together, the blurriness of such terms captures the way in which Burnett may be said to have oscillated within the Anglo-American literary field between 1877 and 1924. If one review locates her at the top of the field of literary production, another seems to concur but fudges, shifting terms from novelist to writer and, by implication, from author to personality. The mobility of Burnett’s critical location suggests that she was both everywhere and nowhere in the literary field of her time. One way to read her career is as a struggle between her effort to be everywhere in the literary field—as novelist, writer of short fiction, playwright, author of children’s books and even as a significant figure in the adaptation of literature to film in the early years of the film industry—and of the self-appointed overseers of literary culture, book reviewers and critics, to define and thus confine her. The dominance of the critics in that struggle can be suggested by an August 20, 1922, Los Angeles Times review of Burnett’s last novel, Robin (1922):
That Mrs. Burnett handles the situation with consummate art and in so doing tells the most moving story of her career will be the opinion of all lovers of the good, the true and the beautiful as expressed in romance, who read this book. Not since Meredith gave free rein to the romantic spirit in the love passages in “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel” has young love been so feelingly and poetically chronicled.4
What better way to blunt the literary ambitions and constrain the critical reputation of a woman with the imagination, energy and range to produce high-quality, widely distributed and financially successful literary productions in novel and story for adults and children and in adaptive forms for stage and screen than to praise her “consummate art” to the lovers of Romance.
The tensions just sketched out that are discernible in the language of the critical response to the earliest and the latest novels of Burnett’s literary career are an epi-phenomenon of the broad struggles within the Anglo-American literary field at the end of the nineteenth and through the first two decades of the twentieth century. Recent critics of British modernism, literary culture and publishing history have figured those struggles in various though parallel and complementary terms. For example, Peter D. McDonald, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction between the “‘sub-field of restricted production’” and the “‘subfield of large-scale production’” (Bourdieu 115–31 cited in McDonald), argues that Bourdieu’s distinction captures the “rival extremes, which give the [literary] field its hierarchical structure.” Those extremes, McDonald suggests, set “the ‘purists’ against the ‘profiteers’.”5 The “purists” are those who measure literary value in “aesthetic terms; they concern themselves chiefly with the particular demands, traditions, and excellences of their craft; they respect only the opinion of peers or accredited connoisseurs and critics; and they deem legitimate only those rewards, like peer recognition, which affect one’s status within the field itself” (13). The “profiteers” in contrast—note the pointedly pejorative quality of the term—rely on “extra-literary principles of legitimacy […] [where] value is measured in strictly economic terms; the agents see their craft […] as a commercial enterprise; the opinion of the greatest number, expressed through sales, is all that counts” (13–14). Of course, such a figuration of struggles within the literary field is an “idealized” binary (14). “Between the two extremes,” McDonald notes, “there are a number of positions which combine the two perspectives in various degrees” (14). The implication here is that the opposition between purity and profit has more rhetorical than real value since almost every writer, including such “pure” literary figures as Henry James and Joseph Conrad as McDonald demonstrates, desires a broad readership confirmed and validated by financial success. So when peers and “accredited connoisseurs and critics” rely on that binary to judge the aesthetic originality and power of any particular work and author, consigning works that sell to the merely “popular” and justifying financial failure on the basis of a high cultural aesthetics, it is reasonable to wonder how much praise of aesthetic quality is spiced with more than a dash of financial sour grapes? Answering that question is both helped and complicated when we fold in the matter of gender.
Martin Hipsky suggests two possibilities for women writers of fiction during those years: “By 1880, the year of [George] Eliot’s death,” he writes,
evidence suggests that there existed in the world of English letters these two ready-made roles for any would-be fiction writer who happened to be female: on the one hand, there was the “serious lady novelist,” staking her claim to verisimilitude and the complex portrayal of moral problems and psychological truths and thereby taking the mantle of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot; on the other, there were the writers of melodramatic popular novels for the entertainment of the less-educated audience, in a tradition spanning from Ann Radcliff to Mrs. Henry Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The former category was understood to be a very small club, yet its members were accepted as the peers of the greatest male novelists.6
That last sentence helps account for the lack of any gender qualification in the 1879 Southern Review assessment of Burnett. Consider these other assessments of Burnett’s first novel: the Atlantic Monthly (November 1977) compares the novel to those of Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell, claiming “there is not a superfluous sentence in the book”;7 the Southern Review (October 1878) calls Burnett “the George Eliot of America” and “the first and best living American novelist”8 (Eliot too was still alive); three months later that same journal (January 1879) compares her to Dickens in a “kinship of mind and imagination”;9 and in that same month and year the North American Review added to the praise, comparing That Lass O’Lowries to Jane Eyre and Adam Bede, announcing the arrival of a new major writer of “original power” and calling the titular character Joan Lowrie “one of the finest feats in modern novel writing.”10 It is clear from those representative reviews that Burnett was welcomed in America as not just a “serious lady novelist” but a novelist of great skill and stature. When we take the Los Angeles Times assessment quoted above and the Chicago Daily Tribune (1922) review of Robin—“It will probably give the tear glands more exercise than anything since ‘The Wide, Wide World.’ It ought to make Laura Jean Libbey, Bertha M. Clay, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Augusta May Evans shed celestial tears of envy”—11together, it is equally clear that at the close of her career she was deemed a “melodramatic” writer of “popular novels for the entertainment of the less-educated audience.”
Ann Thwaite in her 1991 biography of Burnett views that change in terms of unrealized potential, stating explicitly that Burnett was a serious author who sold her talent for money. Writing of the transatlantic impact of Little Lord Fauntleroy, a book, she notes, that some said “changed relations between America and Britain” for the better (86), Thwaite asserts that Fauntleroy’s commercial success “changed her from being a serious writer, striving to master an art, into a craftswoman who had discovered she had the Midas touch.” But more than mere touch, making money required work: Burnett as a “pen-driving machine was to become a machine for printing money.”12 While that view certainly can be defended, it is also misleading and unsatisfying for it assumes that Burnett simply rejected her aesthetic ambitions and sensibilities because of a concern for money. It also assumes that since she succeeded in making money she had, by definition, absolutely subordinated her art to that purpose. However, if we place Burnett’s work in the context of the changing configuration of the literary field in England and America over the span of her career, we need to acknowledge that the dynamic driving those changes in the assessment of her work was not produced by strictly aesthetic criteria but was generated by developments in an incredibly productive and expansive literary industry. Those developments not only concern distinctions between high and popular culture and the concomitant expansion of the market for popular fiction but also concern, to vary a phrase from Andreas Huyssen, how the idea of popular (or mass) culture was defined as feminine.13 The literary field, in this formulation, with its distinctions between the high and the low, the aesthetic and the popular, purity and profit, gendered the popular and profitable as feminine as a way to elevate the masculine as aesthetic, the feminine then being (as usual in patriarchy) simultaneously belittled, feared and desired. “Thus,” Huyssen writes,
the nightmare of being devoured by mass culture through co-option, commodification, and the “wrong” kind of success is the constant fear of the modernist artist, who tried to stake out his territory by fortifying the boundaries between genuine art and inauthentic mass culture. Again, the problem is not the desire to differentiate between forms of high art and depraved forms of mass culture and its co-options. The problem is rather the persistent gendering as feminine of that which is devalued. (53)
And, I would add, the devalued is also the desired since what is devalued is, not so paradoxically, money, the marker of value (and the enabler/mediator of material comfort).
The documented material that chronicles Burnett’s relationship with Henry James contains small but powerful details that function as symptoms if not comprehensive evidence of the tensions laid out so abstractly above. Burnett and James were well acquainted with each other if not exactly friends. When Burnett’s elder son, Lionel, died of tuberculosis at age 16 in 1890 in Paris, James paid a visit of condolence to Burnett in London, an act of “kindness,” according to Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, that Burnett recalled years later with gratitude and fondness.14 Burnett and James were neighbors in England in the late 1890s, where James was a frequent casual correspondent but an infrequent visitor. Burnett tried to cultivate a friendship, offering, for instance, to support him by attending the debut of his ill-fated play Guy Domville, an offer that James fortunately declined, sparing himself the humiliation and Burnett the embarrassment of her witnessing the audience hoot and jeer at the author during the curtain call. Their relationship was restricted to letters in which, according to Gerzina, James was “always the epitome of thoughtfulness.” His courtesy on paper, which we will see as unsettlingly overstated at times, and his reticence in person can perhaps be accounted for by the fact that Burnett sold many books and he sold few. “He admitted to his brother [William],” Gerzina notes, of “being somewhat disheartened by the fact that her books sold far more copies than his and, unbeknown to her, had years before written an anonymous and not particularly flattering review of her play Esmeralda in the Pall Mall Gazette” (208). While it is impossible to know the proportions, it would not stretch the truth to suggest that the aesthetic principles that grounded James’s criticism of Burnett’s play were leavened by a dose of financial jealousy.
That latter possibility is strengthened when we examine in more detail James’s letters to Burnett during the years when they were neighbors in Kent, he at Lamb House in Rye and she at Maytham Hall in Rolvenden. As Ann Thwaite tells it, before leaving London for Maytham, Burnett bought “a set of James’ books” and sent them to him “to be autographed.” He signed the books and attached the following note when he returned them:
Dear Mrs Burnett
And yet I lingered—I never leave your presence and precinct on wings or by leaps—was leaden-footed and most reluctant. And now I’m glad of anything—even anything so dreary as my own books—that may renew our communion.
I am divided between joy at the thought of so many copies sold—my publishers’ statement is usually one on alternate years—and anguish for your having added that thumping, pecuniary excrescence to the treasure you are lavishing at Maytham.
But I will charge you nothing for the signs-manual. There, don’t take them to Maytham (unless you are really otherwise homeless); they will require an extra van. However, if you do, I will speed over and scatter broadcast that I am.
Yours most respectfully,
Henry James (Quoted in Thwaite 184)
While the extravagance of style is certainly very much Henry James, there are three noteworthy things to notice in that note. The self-deprecating reference to the paucity of sales of James’s works (one book every other year) is contained within an elaborate allusion to the “treasure” Burnett was “lavishing at Maytham”; the value of James’s books marks a damning contrast to Burnett’s financial success/excess. The lurking notion here is that his books are expensive and aesthetically demanding, which accounts for their limited sale, but Burnett’s wealth, which was based on the sales of her less demanding books, reduces James’s books to objects whose value is not aesthetic but monetary, a bit of extra and incidental treasure. The corollary lurking notion here is that for Burnett, that is all his books could possibly be. His compliment masks an insult. And his promise to “speed over” is not kept. As Thwaite puts it, “But when they were both in Kent […] James did not do much speeding over” (184).
The faintly discernible, simmering resentment in the letter quoted above screams for recognition in an undated letter from that same period. Burnett had sent fruit from her orchard at Maytham to James at Lamb House. Here is the first part of his “Thank You” note:
Noblest of Neighbors and Most Heavenly of Women!—
Your gorgeous, glorious gift shook Lamb House to its foundations an hour or two ago—but that agitated structure, with the light of purpose rapidly kindling in its eye, recuperates even as I write, with a sense of futility, under the circumstances of a mere, economical swoon. We may swoon again—it is more than likely (if you can swoon from excess of—everything!)—but we avail ourselves of this lucid interval absolutely to fawn upon you with the force of our gratitude.
It’s too magnificent—we don’t deserve the quarter (another peach, please—yet it is the 7th—and one more fig—it is I can’t deny it—the 19th!) Well, I envy you the power to make a poor, decent body so happy—and, still more, so proud. The decent body has a pair of other decent bodies coming to him for the week’s end, from town, and—my eye! won’t he swagger over his intimate friend, the Princess of Maytham, for whom these trophies and treasures are mere lumps of sugar or grains of salt. (Quoted in Thwaite 184–85)
Such a note, which contains two more paragraphs after the ones quoted, could be written off as hyperbolic humor in a style one might expect from Henry James, but the content is nonetheless odd. After the elaborate cliché of the greeting, James conflates Lamb House with himself, the house recuperating after its swoon “even as I write, with a sense of futility.” Is the house’s recuperation futile or is the writing futile, James’s effort to suggest to Burnett that her gift smacks of economic one-upmanship pointless? As “the light of purpose [rekindles] in its [the house’s] eye,” one can imagine James’s own eyes sharpen with satiric intent, claiming a brief interval of consciousness before being overwhelmed again with some manifestation of excess from Maytham, that is, Burnett. Perhaps if he were to “fawn” upon Burnett “with the force of [his] gratitude,” the torrent of gifts, which in their excess smack of condescension, would stop. That implication emerges more explicitly in the next paragraph. After the comic images of consumption (7 peaches and 19 figs!), James deftly contrasts his poverty and decency to Burnett’s indecent display of wealth, an indecency reinforced by the final comparison between the particularity and quantity of the gifts as they appear in Lamb House and the undifferentiated mass from which they were extracted, the peaches and figs in Lamb House being equivalent to “lumps of sugar or grains of salt” in Maytham. The mask of jest in the note barely conceals an animosity born of pain that energizes the prose. The selective use of italics (in the handwritten letter markers of emphasis rendered as italics in print) emphasizes the general hyperbolic tone more pointedly. As Thwaite mildly observes, “James rather resented a munificence which cast him in the role of comparatively unsuccessful writer” (185).
The undercurrent of palpable pain one can feel in James’s note is more visible in a letter he wrote to his brother in 1899 when he was negotiating the purchase of Lamb House.
My whole being cries out aloud for something that I can call my own—and when I look round me at the splendor of so many of the “literary” fry, my confreres (M. Crawford’s, P. Bourget’s, Humphrey Ward’s, Hodgson Burnett’s, W.D. Howellses, etc.) and I feel that I may strike the world as still, at fifty-six with my long labour and my genius, reckless, presumptuous and unwarranted in curling up (for more assured peaceful production) in a poor little $10,000 shelter—once for all and for all time—then I do feel the bitterness of humiliation, the iron enters into my soul, and (I blush to confess it,) I weep! But enough, enough, enough! (Quoted in Thwaite 185)
James’s anguish about the gap between the “genius” of his aesthetically first-rate literary productions and the second-rate financial return on the material production of those works is a mixture of honest self-assessment and frustration expressed in a way that makes it difficult to discern whether honesty or frustration is the more dominant quality. That instability in tone is also reflected in the contradictory way he represents his fellow novelists—two American men (Crawford and Howells), a popular French poet (Bourget) and two English women (Ward and Burnett)—as both “confreres” (colleagues with a connotation of brotherhood) and “fry,” little fish (with James, of course, standing in for the big fish). In James’s personal correspondence, then, we can tease out a major fissure in the literary field of his (and Burnett’s) time, a fissure that does have an aesthetic dimension to be sure, but one driven more by competition in the literary marketplace than by art as such. As Mary Hammond puts it, “on an ideological level it was sales figures, blatant self-advertisement and financial success which ‘feminized’ popular literature in the 1880s and 1890s, rather than the formal properties of either realism or romance.”15 Once divergent aesthetic practices (realism variously defined and romance variously practiced) were reinscribed ideologically as high and low, pure and profitable, male and female, the second term in each binary became marginalized, and as feminists critics since Ellen Moers and Elaine Showalter have worked so comprehensively to reveal and to correct, women and the popular were written out of literary history.16
Most of the critics I have quoted thus far (among others such as Rita Felski17) have worked to reclaim the place of women writers in British literary modernism. But Frances Hodgson Burnett does not appear in any substantial way in any of that work. It is the purpose of this book to include Burnett in the broad reclamation project of popular women novelists as practitioners of forms of popular narrative with similar aspirational drives as those attributed to works of high literary modernism. Hipsky makes a similar point when he writes: “The ‘popular sublime,’ as embodied in the novels of Marie Corelli and other romancists of the period, strove after a ‘transcendence of quotidian reality and the material world’ (Felski 120) in a variation of the same mythic and metaphoric quests for transcendence, specific to early twentieth-century forms of social alienation in the metropolitan sphere” (17). I would include Burnett’s novels, especially her post-1890s work, in the Marie Corelli “romancist” category. I need, then, to explore why Burnett has not been a subject of such reclamation work in the first place. Then I need to make the case as to why she should be. That will be the burden of the main body of this book, which will comprise a series of contextualized readings of her most ambitious and innovative novels.
II
Burnett’s fiction has not been the subject of literary reclamation perhaps because there has been no perceived need to reclaim a writer who seems already to have a clearly defined place in Anglo-American literary history as a writer of literature for children. The Secret Garden (1911) has attracted much attention from scholars of children’s literature, who have interpreted its mythic, psychological and colonial engagements in addition to its literary sourcing (making connections mostly with the Brontes).18 There is a hard cover lavishly illustrated Norton Annotated Edition of the novel (2007) edited by Burnett’s most recent biographer Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy have also garnered critical attention, the former for thematic reasons related to the colonial context of the story and the latter for historical reasons related to its initial enthusiastic cultural and political acceptance that later transformed into nearly universal condemnation. But the venue that has solidified Burnett’s cultural significance as a first-rate children’s author has been film and television. What follows is a partial list of English-language productions in reverse order: The Secret Garden television productions (2015, forty-two episode series, television movie 1987, seven episode series 1975, eight episode series 1960 and eight episode series 1952); A Little Princess television productions (10 episode series 2009, mini-series 1986, six episode series 1973) and under the title Sara Crewe (six episode series 1957, six episode series 1951); Little Lord Fauntleroy television productions (six episode series 1995, six episode series 1976, three episode series 1966, four episode series 1957); The Secret Garden films (1993, 1949 and 1919); A Little Princess films (1939 and 1917); and Little Lord Fauntleroy films (2003, 1980, 1936, 1926, 1921, 1918 and 1914).19 Burnett’s broader cultural visibility is suggested by two relatively new biographies, one by Ann Thwaite (Godine 1991) and the other by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (Rutgers UP 2004), but each ties her fame to her significance as a children’s author as evidenced by the full title of each biography: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett author of The Secret Garden and A Little Princess (Thwaite) and Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden (Gerzina).
There was a flurry of interest in Burnett’s adult novels in the film industry during the last dozen or so years of her life: between 1913 and 1924 there were ten films made of her novels, stories and plays, including adaptations of That Lass O’Lowries (1923), A Fair Barbarian (1917), A Lady of Quality (1913 and 1924) and The Shuttle (1918). But as Francis J. Molson put it in a survey of Burnett’s publication and critical history, “[V]irtually every standard history of American literature or specialized study of American fiction or drama omits reference to Frances Burnett’s writing.”20 That fact remains true today for both histories of American and British literature of the period between 1880 and 1920. The Columbia History of the American Novel (1991), for instance, does not mention Burnett anywhere while Philip Waller in his magisterial Writers, Readers, & Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–191821 alludes to Burnett three times in nearly 1,200 pages of text, each reference drawn from material in Thwaite’s biography on such matters as early film adaptations (Waller 10, Thwaite 231–32, 237, and 245–46), public speeches in Burnett’s honor (Waller 598–99, Thwaite 164–65 and 170) and celebrity photographs (Waller 354, Thwaite 112 and 214). Alex Zwerdling in Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London devotes two pages to Little Lord Fauntleroy.22 Peter Keating in The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 refers to Burnett four times, misrepresenting her when he writes, “Hodgson Burnett lived in Britain for some time and wrote on British themes, but she too was American.”23 (She was born in Manchester, emigrated with her widowed mother and siblings to America at 16, shuttled back and forth between the UK and the United States spending extended periods in both places during all of her writing life, and did not become an American citizen until compelled for financial reasons around 1905, a decision she made “possibly to avoid [her English husband’s] claims on her property and income” (Thwaite 216). We might say that she was as American as Henry James was English.) And David Trotter in The English Novel in History 1895–1920 alludes to Burnett in passing twice.24 One might think that in the recent reevaluation of the long-standing conviction in literary studies that “realism is inherently superior to romance” (Molson 41), Burnett would have drawn some attention, but in studies as disparate as those by Suzanne Clark (1991),25 Joseph McAleer (1992),26 Peter D. McDonald (1997),27 Nicholas Daly (1999),28 Mary Hammond (2006)29 and Martin Hipsky (2011),30 Burnett is not mentioned once. Even the one single-volume study of Burnett and her work published in Twayne’s English Authors Series (1984) offers this final assessment: “Even the critic trying to resurrect some of Burnett’s adult fiction from its near oblivion will probably admit that the survival of The Secret Garden as Burnett’s masterpiece is just […]. She deserves a primary place in the annals of children’s and popular literature” (Bixler).31
III
Excavating Burnett’s adult novels from under the layers of neglect and the popular cultural replication and critical praise of her children’s stories requires, I think, that we begin by making some distinctions about the range and quality of those novels. A short passage from Thwaite’s biography provides a place to begin:
The Times Literary Supplement wrote [in a review of her final novel, Robin]: “Lush sentiments flow from her pen with a sweetness that suggests syrup rather than plain ink […] This is a pity, because once upon a time Mrs Burnett could write differently.” She could indeed; if she had died at forty-five, before she had written Little Lord Fauntleroy, she might well have had a reputation comparable with Mrs Gaskell’s. (240)
To extrapolate from Thwaite’s assessment, it is logical to assume that the novels written before 1886 when Fauntleroy was published constitute a body of work worthy of the respect afforded Elizabeth Gaskell, who, since the 1960s, has acquired an increasingly important place in studies of the Victorian novel and culture. The question that begs for an answer here is if the pre-1886 work is so good, why neglect it? A corollary that flows from that question is that not all of her novels conform to the same genre, were written in the same style or reveal the same depth of engagement either directly or indirectly with the cultural moment at the time of their composition. Nor do we know, without broad and sensitive re-readings today, how the novels might speak to our current cultural moment. So in much the way she occupied various positions in the literary field during her lifetime, she could be located in various positions in the field of literary and cultural studies in the present. For instance, in the contemporary reassessment of romance written by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the few allusions to Burnett place her squarely in the group of women romance writers. That placement consequently ignores her engagement with mid- and late Victorian realism, and it has not stimulated any reassessment of the depth and complexity of what is considered her romance novels. That is, her novels have been categorized under the broad category of romance; romance itself has been rethought and recalibrated in ways that open up its thematic, ideological, aesthetic richness, but Burnett’s “romances” have not been reread. There is a double failure in differentiation here, exemplified oddly in Phylis Bixler’s Twayne study, where she organizes Burnett’s literary career in the following terms: “From Magazine Fiction to Romance to Realist Novel (1868–84) […] Popular Romances for Children and Adults (1885–99) […] Fairy Stories for Children and Adults (1900–1924)” (Table of Contents, n.p.). The pattern of those chapter titles seems circular, from romance to realism, then back to romance with a further move away from realism through fairy stories with the distinction between adult and children’s novels being erased. In the end writing for children emerges as the dominant thread that unifies her career, her adult novels subordinated to that purpose.
Based on my reading of Burnett’s fiction written for an adult audience, I would classify 14 as full-length novels; there is also a subset of novellas and an extensive bibliography of short stories. While the novellas, such as A Woman’s Will or Miss Defarge (1888), The Dawn of a Tomorrow (1906) and The White People (1917), are varied and fascinating in their own right, I will focus on the novels, which appeared in not always chronological clusters at the beginning, middle and end of her writing career. The first cluster, That Lass O’Lowries (1877), Haworth’s (1879) and A Fair Barbarian (1881), emerges from the mid-Victorian realist tradition, and they take their inspiration from Burnett’s fellow Mancunian, Elizabeth Gaskell. The first two novels, in fact, which are set in Lancashire, England, could be classified as latecomers to the tradition of British industrial fiction of the 1840s while the third novel is squarely aligned with a traditional village fiction inaugurated by Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1826–32) and confirmed in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853). The second cluster, Louisiana (1880), Through One Administration (1883) and In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim (1899), is a complex mixture of regional American fiction with, in the case of Through One Administration in particular, a heavy investment in what was called the “new fiction” associated with William Dean Howells and Henry James, and in the case of the latter two novels deeply engaged with the social and bureaucratic complexities of political life in Washington, DC. The third cluster, A Lady of Quality (1896), His Grace of Osmond (1897), The Making of a Marchioness (1901) and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst (1901), draws on a tradition of historical fiction (the first two titles) and domestic fiction (the third and fourth titles), leavened with more than a touch of sensation in the Wilkie Collins tradition. The fourth cluster, inspired perhaps by a thread of inquiry begun in Little Lord Fauntleroy, comprises transatlantic novels: The Shuttle (1907) and T. Tembarom (1913), which, while ostensibly focused on transatlantic marriages of very different sorts, struggles with contemporary anxieties about familial and national decline in England and American ineptness, through a lack of cultural institutions and practices analogous to European social forms, on the international stage. The Head of the House of Coombe (1922) and Robin (1922) constitute the fifth cluster. Although those last two titles were written as a single volume, because of their length, at the publisher’s insistence they were published as two titles. The first of those novels probes the English experience in the years preceding the Great War, and the second peels back layers of trauma experienced on the home front in London during the war. They are, as I will demonstrate in my last chapter, Burnett’s antithetical version of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Within the generic variety of Burnett’s novels so briefly sketched above, there are a couple of patterns: first, the novels tend to come in pairs (A Lady of Quality and His Grace of Osmond; The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst; and The Head of the House of Coombe and Robin), the first pair offering the same narrative first from the point of view of the heroine, Clorinda, and the second from the point of view of her eventual husband, the Duke of Osmond, and the second volume of the other pairs being a continuation of the narrative in the first volume. Second, the plots tend to move in the direction of romance with an emphasis on the moral, spiritual and physical challenges faced by a female protagonist, but rendered in a way that makes the romance marriage plot/consummation merely incidental. Burnett may deploy recognizable romance plot conventions, but she is not interested in those conventions as such. She exploits those conventions in her effort to explore the possibilities of her female protagonists experiencing the world fully through their bodies and reanimating life-denying social conditions through the attunement of their bodies and spirits. In other words, she works to imagine the full being of women in the world.
Given the generic range and imaginative ambition of Burnett’s novels, we can push back against Thwaite’s suggestion that after the runaway popularity of Fauntleroy as a novel, a stage play and a cultural phenomenon (mothers dressing their young sons in velvet coats and frill collars), Burnett was no longer taken seriously by critics, and we can offer some resistance to Molson’s assertion that “From 1900 onward, Burnett ceased to have anything significant to say as far as the major journals were concerned” (37). We can begin by looking more closely at what the critics actually had to say about Burnett’s novels, pre- and post-Fauntleroy, reading with an eye for the details of what the critics specifically notice about the novels and considering to what extent we would evaluate those things the same or differently today. Of A Lady of Quality, for instance, Molson observes: “Especially affronted were the many reviewers who […] were bothered not only by Burnett’s romanticism but also by her feminist stance” (36). Molson documents The Atlantic reviewer’s distress that the heroine of the novel escaped “punishment” for killing the man who stalked her and threatened her life while also noting how the reviewer for the Critic found the novel Burnett’s best because it “attested to the author’s acknowledgement, regardless of cost, that women no longer accept the double standard” (36). I stress those details from Molson’s overview of the history or Burnett’s novel reviews to suggest that the reviews were more variegated than summary characterizations of trends in the reviews indicate and to highlight that whether writing in mid-Victorian realistic mode or later Victorian and modernist romance mode, Burnett’s novels were always engaged with the ideological struggles of their time. And one of those struggles, articulated variously (e.g., the redundant or odd woman, the fallen woman, the new woman and so on) and consistently, concerns the evolving social visibility and broadening range of activity for women. So rather than laying out patterns across the reviews for novels published between 1877 and 1924, which would look in the end like a crazy quilt, a wild mixture of high praise and extreme condemnation with shades or moderation in between, it would be more productive to tease out what Burnett’s contemporary critics had to say about her fictional women with an emphasis on Joan Lowrie, Clorinda Wildairs and Emily Fox Seton, the titular heroines of That Lass O’Lowries, A Lady of Quality, and The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst.
One of the earliest reviews of That Lass O’Lowries was published in the November 1877 issue of Atlantic Monthly. The review opens by observing that the novel’s
essential quality is power. It impresses rather than pleases; it holds rather than entertains; for while it is both entertaining and pleasing in a very marked degree, yet to say that it were simply that would be to give no hint of its masculine vigor, its dramatic intensity, its clear truthfulness to life and the consummate art of its execution. (Italics added, 189)
As an aesthetic judgment, the adjectives “masculine” and “dramatic” refer to the quality of language and narrative focus, but in conjunction with the review’s assessment of the novel’s protagonist, those adjectives become somewhat agitated: “The prominent character is Joan Lowrie; a sort of queen among her people, self-contained, heroic, masculine in proportions both physically and morally. Few such figures have been seen in fiction” (189). The formulation of a “queen” who is both “physically and morally” masculine may be jarring, but it does gesture toward a degendering of the masculine; that is, if, as the reviewer claims, “[T]he motive of the story is the development of the feminine in Joan” (189), that development builds upon a moral and physical force that is culturally associated with the masculine but may be, in the world of Burnett’s novel, the basic ground upon which human beings, men and women, develop in ways peculiar to each individual.
In 1879 in a long review essay in Southern Review on a volume of Burnett’s short stories and That Lass O’Lowries, Mrs. S. Bledsoe Herrick makes a related point:
Whenever the subject matter of her story has been gathered, however it may be told […] she reaches down through the external crust of untrained manner, and custom, and speech, and lays hold upon some primal instinct of the race. In fact, the moral beauty and real strength consists in the portrayal of character, whose determining principle is an unswerving loyalty to love or to duty,—sometimes to one, to the exclusion of the other; and sometimes to both—but the key-note to the music of them all is loyalty; and its presence lends all the tenderness and beauty, its lack all the bitterness. (102)
In the abstract, Herrick’s assessment seems highly conventional: a woman novelist would perforce conform to the conventions of gender by harnessing her narrative to love or to duty, in either case subordinating herself to the needs of others with loyalty to someone or something outside of herself determining her value. But a counter-reading is possible. By “reach[ing] down through […] custom” in an effort to make contact with “some primal instinct of the race” (i.e., the human race), Herrick catches a glimpse of Burnett’s effort to place socially determined gender constructions of masculinity and femininity in tension with each other, if not to erase the distinction at least to destabilize it and in the process to expand the range of human behavior as that behavior emerges from a ground of physical and by extension moral strength. The idea implicit here is that the more attuned one’s body is to the physical realities of being in the world, the moral contours and physical development of the individual life emerge through the interchange between the capacities of the body and the rigors of the material world, a world that includes, of course, other people. So perhaps loyalty of any sort must begin with loyalty to one’s self.
That latter point is implicit in the story about the human original upon whom Burnett based the character of Joan. Here in Ann Thwaite’s telling, the tale begins with Burnett’s observation of a group of factory girls congregated in Islington Square, Manchester:
They were talking loudly, pushing each other, glad to be free. But there was one who was not fooling around. She was knitting a coarse blue worsted stocking. There was something strange and special about her. Frances could not explain it. As she watched, a man came into the Square—a tough-looking man with a moleskin cap pulled over his brow.
“Here’s thy feyther!” one of the girls exclaimed. The group stopped laughing and broke up. But the girl knitting went on knitting. When the man swore at her and bullied her and threatened her with his fist, she went on knitting but started to walk slowly out of the square.
“Dom tha brazen impidence!” Frances heard him say. Frances never forget the girl. Fifteen years later, changed into a pit-girl, she was the heroine of Frances’ first novel. (15)
The details in that anecdote are striking, the knitting of the stocking, the moleskin cap, the raised fist, the composure of “The Junoesque Factory Girl” (Vivian Burnett, 65). Most powerful, however, is the girl’s composure. She responds to her father’s threat of violence (a standard image of patriarchal authority) with composure, self-contained and unafraid. The girl is thoroughly embedded in the physical realities of her social and personal circumstance, and awful as they are, she is undaunted, loyal, it is safe to assume, to herself, to the fundamental integrity of the reality of her body/being in the world. In the short autobiography of her childhood, The One I Knew the Best of All, which she wrote in the third person, Burnett’s reflections on the factory-girl evoke an image of a woman abused, even dismembered, but asserting nonetheless her strength and beauty:
But she thought of her [the factory-girl] often and pondered her over, and felt her power and mystery. Not until she had given some contemplative thought to various antique marbles, and had wondered ‘what was the matter’ with the Venus of Milo, did it dawn upon her mind that in this girl in the clogs and the apron she had seen and been overpowered by Beauty such as goddesses were worshipped for, and strength such as should belong to one who ruled.32
The vision of the factory-girl and Burnett’s comparison of her to a dismembered statue serve as powerful metaphors for Burnett’s sense of how the patriarchal society she was born into keeps women constrained through the implicit and explicit imposition of physical force, an idea reinforced by the image of the armless marble statue Venus of Milo, an image of strength and beauty plucked from the ruins of Greek civilization, its disfigurement a symbol of female suffering and dignity.
But the violence figured in that image need not be restricted to physical violence; it can be economic as well. In fact, the roots of the father’s violence against his factory-girl daughter most likely had its origins in material deprivation as much as patriarchal authority. As a young girl Burnett’s apprehension of that violence was mingled with outrage and a feeling of injustice, emotions that were reinforced in experiences closer to home. She learned first-hand about the economic frailty of women unprotected by a man when, upon the death of her father, her mother took over the family business, which soon thereafter failed. They then were compelled to leave Manchester for the United States, settling near Knoxville, Tennessee, to the place where her father’s brother had emigrated some years earlier. There they lived in the post-Civil War years perilously close to poverty until Frances found success selling stories to magazines. Her biographers chronicle those years in detail. My point here is that the line between her perception of her own economic and physical vulnerability and her imaginative engagement with what she sees as the vulnerable position of women more broadly is very thin. Thus, the imaginative investment she makes in the configuration of her heroine’s efforts to locate themselves in a position of physical stability and integrity against social structures (and in some cases direct threats of violence from men) that insist on their frailty and dependence is drawn from a deep bank of experience. Her heroines, whether placed in radical or conservative circumstances, find ways to safeguard and develop the potential of their own being in the world.
In a long and miscellaneous piece in the May 1896 issue of the British journal Pall Mall Magazine, the novelist and playwright Israel Zangwill offers the most complex and sensitive reading of A Lady of Quality of any of the reviews I have seen. Most reviewers responded to the heroine, Clorinda, with either praise or blame, basing their assessments on a standard of conventional morality and psychological plausibility. Zangwill, in contrast, suggests that the novel reveals “the latent Byron in Mrs. Burnett’s breast”; he argues that Clorinda embodies a “Nietzsche-like individualism,” and in a gesture I find both illuminating and exhilarating, he observes that the story is “a story of ‘Tess’ triumphant, of the one woman who has conquered Fate.”33 While I object to the metaphor of “Fate” (I would have used the less elegant but more accurate word “patriarchy”), I find Zangwill’s defense of the right of Burnett’s heroine to defend herself from male violence without having subsequently to pay for that defense in moral condemnation and legal judgment bracing. Reading Clorinda “in the spirit of the Symbolists,” Zangwill sees her as a vehicle through which Burnett “says her say on the great problems” (154), but he never says precisely what those “great problems” are. He alludes to the potential influence of the “new woman” novel—“There are [those] who will think the new Mrs. Burnett has caught the infection of the ‘new woman,’” he writes—“But this,” he observes, “will be unjust. Mrs. Burnett has undergone a slow evolution. They were all Clorindas in embryo—that Lass O’Lowries, Rachel Ffrench, little Sarah Crewe, Bertha Amory, that brilliant Bird of Paradise agonizing in an inward hell” (154). Undefined and rejected as not new, the “great problems” must point toward the long-standing problems for women living in a patriarchal society that subjects them to complex structures of constraint and a moral double standard in behavior and judgment. Clorinda’s response to those problems is to redefine herself “as vixen, mistress, and murderess” and wife, “yet remaining withal the matchless Clorinda.” So her core integrity, the various placements of her body in the world, where the placements change but her sense of being in her own body remains the same, enables her to find “her soul and her womanhood through all the stress and storm,” which, Zangwill observes, “is indeed a bold conception” (154).
Zangwill’s praise for the strength of Burnett’s “virile, mannish, almost swashbuckling say” through Clorinda on the “great problems” for women is qualified by his perception of an undercurrent of “feminine sentimentality below,” which transforms some tragic moments in the novel into “inverted sentimentality […] something of womanly weakness” (154). What he construes as weakness, however, may be the result of how Burnett redefines strength less as grounded in hardness, gendered as masculine, and more as unfolding expansion of capacity brought out by circumstances; strength is supple, like the power of flowing water, which is an image gendered as feminine. I would then revise Zangwill’s closing assessment—“Few lady novelists among her contemporaries have excelled her, either in virility or in femininity, and A Lady of Quality, a modern symbolic poem in the guise of an archaic romance, will add a new field to her already ample province” (154–55)—by removing the “or” between virility and femininity and reformulating the expression to “virility in femininity and femininity in virility.” What Zangwill’s language reflects is a glimmer of understanding of how Burnett’s heroines draw on the fullest conception of human capacity, fusing qualities gendered as masculine and feminine in different proportions depending on circumstance, human need and the possibilities of growth.
In contrast to the physical strength of Joan Lowrie and Clorinda Wildairs is the moral strength of Emily Fox-Seton. In the lightly titled “Trips to Book Land” section of the Los Angeles Times, Julian Hawthorne reviewed The Methods of Lady Walderhurst in a piece called “Frances Hodgson Burnett Creates a New Type in Fiction—and of a Woman, at That.” Hawthorne registers a form of strength in that review that seems the antithesis of Joan Lowrie’s and Clorinda’s virility in femininity, and the way he frames the review seems the antithesis of what became the orthodox critical assessment of Burnett as a writer who sold her genius for money and whose work was unworthy of mention after Fauntleroy. With a nod toward That Lass O’Lowries, the publication of which “was the beginning of a reputation which has held its own, and has ever and anon increased its stature ever since,” Hawthorne offers this assessment of Burnett as an author:
For although Mrs. Burnett has written a good many books during these thirty years, she has never permitted herself to compromise with her art for the sake of feeding on her popularity […]. She would want as much as anyone, of course, to make a living: but she could not forecast the flights of her muse or consent to limit them to suit the market. She must write as the god bid her, or not at all. The germ of the idea dawned and gathered force in her mind. It must be developed according to the laws of its own being. She would stretch it upon no bed of Procrustes, to be drawn out or curtailed as the exigencies of publication might make expedient. (Italics added, n.p.)
One’s first response in reading a passage like the one above may be to think that Hawthorne doth protest too much; why bring up notions like “feeding on her popularity” and limiting ambition “to suit the market” unless those notions were already associated with Burnett. But if we take Hawthorne seriously as a reader of Burnett’s fiction (and the fact that he was writing for the Los Angeles Times suggests we should), we might find that he helps us to understand what seems to be contradictory impulses in her novels: one will celebrate a woman’s defiance to convention, another will insist on passivity and acceptance of the status quo. For readers to take one type as representative over the other type requires that we limit Burnett’s choices as a writer according to our own ideological bias. If, for example, I celebrate the audacity of Burnett’s conception of Clorinda Wildairs as I do above, I must then be appalled by the characterization of Emily Fox Seton. Here is Hawthorne’s description:
The type to which she [Emily] belongs is new in fiction. She is not brilliant intellectually, not clever, not quick or ready, but in all things she manifests a gentle unworldliness, like that of a good and innocent child, a sweet slowness of mental movement, a naïve and unquestioning faith in things and persons which render her unprepared for evil or hostility. The controlling passion of her tender and pure heart is her worshiping love of her husband. (n.p.)
Such a passage, with its conflation of woman and child and its fissuring of woman and intellect, could be inserted in John Ruskin’s “Of Queens’ Gardens” (1865) with only minimal editing for grammar. Despite Hawthorne’s title, his description reflects the most conventional Victorian female characterization grounded on the ideology of the separate spheres, confirming unambiguously Zangwill’s detection of the “sentimentality below” A Lady of Quality that takes center stage in The Methods of Lady Walderhurst. But if we take seriously the idea that Burnett developed the germ of her narrative conception “according to the laws of its own being,” we might ask in the context of her narrative world, how does Emily’s character find a path of development that helps her realize her capacities in a way that feels true to her own sense of being, even if that path seems unappealing to us? We might further ask how we might take the depth of Hawthorne’s affective response to the novel:
There are some books which come into one’s heart and mind quietly, without knocking at the door, without herald or introduction; there comes with them a sphere of friendliness and sympathy, an assurance of well-doing, a subtle breathing of truth and goodness, which, if there be in us any goodness, truth and human faith and tenderness, draw it forth, and the book thenceforward seems to have become a part of our inner life, a voice out of nature, always speaking to us, but till now never recognized. (n.p.)
Whether we are put off or not by the vocabulary of goodness, well-doing, sympathy, faith and so on in an evaluation of a serious literary work, and whether we are skeptical about Hawthorne’s response because it smacks of a socially constructed gender ideology that he is assuming as natural, the idea that reading the novel brought to the surface for Hawthorne an affective dimension of his character that he otherwise would not have recognized speaks to how the heroine takes possession of the reader through the power of narrative.
What I am describing does partake of sentimentality, but it also has a quality of Wordsworth’s “unremembered acts of kindness and of love” and is thus something of substance, a kind of strength buried beneath a superficial perception of weakness. So the discourse of reviews that highlight the heroines in Burnett’s novels can lead us to think about them less as contradictory and more as protean: strength appears in many guises, even its apparent opposite. Coming to an understanding of the variety and continuity of the heroines that emerged in Burnett’s novels—from her youthful insight of the Junoesque pit-girl in Manchester, where she apprehended the possibility that an inter-animation of female physical strength and conventional markers of female outer and inner beauty can produce a sense of individual composure defined in the first instance by bodily integrity—provides a through line for my interpretive project in this study.
A selective reading of the reviews of Burnett’s novels could be done to arrive at radically different conclusions about the thematic emphases and literary qualities of her work. I could have looked at other reviews and drawn other conclusions about Burnett’s novels more broadly but not necessarily about her heroines. They remain in the body of reviews as a whole various and contradictory, similar qualities celebrated or condemned. Joan is strong, Clorinda versatile and physically adept, Emily stoic, long-suffering and immovable. But whether those heroines are read as “reproducing or heroically resisting a univocal dominant ideology” (Felski 142) is not the point. Rather reading Burnett’s novels with close attention to her heroines in the context of her originating Victorian context and tracking how that context changes to what recent critics have discussed in terms of popular modernism enables us to recognize in her novels what Rita Felski has claimed for women’s popular fiction in the period of high modernism: “popular fiction,” she writes, “can more usefully be read as comprising a variety of ideological strands that cohere or contradict each other in diverse ways” (142). The reproduction/resistance dichotomy becomes a way to simplify and, depending on the ideological position of the critic, to praise or blame. In writing about the work of Marie Corelli under the category of “the popular sublime,” Felski emphasizes ambiguity, the tension in Corelli’s work between “a critical response to irresolvable tensions within the social” and “conservative affirmations of the eternal verities of sexual and racial otherness which are less easily reconciled with any form of resistive impulse” (143). (One’s mind might move not unfairly upon reading those quotations to T. S. Eliot, a point I will address at length in the last chapter.) As noted earlier, Burnett’s work has not been addressed in the recent reassessments of popular fiction. It should be. For not only do Burnett’s novels have the same tensions between resistance and accommodation critics have been exploring in popular modernism, their origins are squarely within the practices of Victorian realism, which Burnett both relies on and reinflects in a way that we might recognize today as Neo-Victorian.
Consider the contrast between Burnett’s emphasis on the literal bodily size and strength of Joan Lowrie and Clorinda Wildairs, for instance, and the emphasis in Victorian domestic fiction on the airy, disembodied heroine as angel in the house. Helena Michie addresses that point as follows: “Even though some Victorian works on beauty espouse ‘plumpness’ in young women, the most positive female characters in nineteenth-century novels are most often frail and weak.”34 She then addresses a gallery of characters from Charlotte Bronte (the contrast between the ethereal Lucy Snow and the voluptuous Ginevra Fanshawe in Villette), George Eliot (the plump Hetty Sorrel and the increasingly thin Dinah Morris in Adam Bede) and Anthony Trollope (too many characters qualify to list), and draws these conclusions: “bigger, more strikingly beautiful women are somehow suspect” (think of Blanche Ingram in Jane Eyre); and “[T]he aesthetic of weakness and hunger only thinly disguises an ideology of male dominance” (22). Thus, male dominance depends on the diminishment of the physical realities of the female body, which must be deprived in one way or another to weaken it, making women fundamentally dependent and subservient. Michie locates resistance to that ideology of male dominance through denying the physical realities of woman’s bodies in the poetry of Adrienne Rich in the 1970s. “For Rich,” Michie observes,
the “abstract” that must be ‘broken through’ is identified with metaphor and figuration […]. In “Natural Resources,” she insists on literalness […]. In describing the work of a female miner, she says:
The miner is no metaphor. She goes
Into the cage like the rest, is flung
Downward by gravity like them, must change
Her body like the rest to fit a crevice.
In resisting metaphor, Rich, along with many other feminists, aligns it with denial of the body. (139)
Rather than a metaphoric “angel,” Burnett’s first novelistic heroine Joan Lowrie is a miner, who works as hard as any man and has the physical strength beyond the capacities of most of her male peers. There is no way to deny the physical capacity of her body for productive labor. She even has a physical courage beyond the others in the mine, demonstrated by her heroism during a mine accident. And like the pit-girl recollected in Burnett’s youth, Joan is under constant physical threat from her brutal father. So even though she is the romantic lead in the narrative, an object of male desire, she too “goes/into the cage like the rest, is flung/downward by gravity.” Burnett, in 1877 not 1977, gives expression to the literality of the female body as a human body, expressive in its capacity for productivity and potential for emotional, imaginative and sexual fulfillment.
IV
In the chapters that follow, I have organized my readings of Burnett’s novels based on their generic variety and rough chronology: Victorian domestic realistic novels of the 1870s and early 1880s, American regional fiction in the early to mid-1880s, historical fiction in the 1890s, transatlantic novels in the early twentieth century and post-World War I modernist romance in the early 1920s. There is some overlapping of categories and unevenness in the chronology, which will become apparent in the details of my discussion in each chapter. For the purpose of this introduction, I will lay out the contours of each chapter.
Three of Burnett’s first four novels are clearly in the tradition of Victorian domestic realism, a tradition still very much alive in the 1870s. Two are located in industrial settings and the third in an English village. That Lass O’Lowries (1877) is an industrial novel, one of a number of subcategories under domestic realism, and is set in a Lancashire mining town. It focuses on the domestic life of Joan Lowrie, who works in the mines, and her drunken brute of a father. Its concerns most broadly are with the plight of the working class. Haworth’s (1879) is also an industrial novel, but its focus is on the owners of a factory, and the tension between their efforts to develop technology that would displace workers and the workers’ resistance to losing their jobs. A Fair Barbarian (1881) is an English village idyll, with a difference; it is visited by a brash American girl, whose father had been born in the village before emigrating to the American west as a young man. The girl’s arrival threatens the equilibrium of the village. Placing those novels next to the pattern of novels in Elizabeth Gaskell’s early career, the parallels are striking. Mary Barton, with its focus on working-class suffering; North and South, with its focus on the moral tensions among factory owners and between factory owners and workers; and Cranford, with its concerns about a traditional English village struggling to maintain its identity in the face of social change arguably provide a pattern of development for an aspiring woman novelist from the very place where Gaskell lived and worked. In this chapter I will explore the relation between Burnett’s and Gaskell’s early novels in the context of American literary culture at a time when that culture was unsure of its own center of gravity. In order to demonstrate the productive influence Gaskell’s work had on Burnett’s, I will address the American reliance on British literary precedents in literary culture, notably in Scribner’s Magazine, which became The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in 1881; how Burnett deployed those antecedents to establish her literary authority; and then how she may be said to have spoken through those antecedents as she shaped her own identity as an important literary figure even as she created heroines defined more by their vitality than their “wise” passivity.
The fourth of Burnett’s novels was published between the industrial and village novels and is a rural American story entitled Louisiana (1880), the name of the novel’s heroine. That novel has antecedents in Burnett’s short fiction, which she had been publishing in popular magazines before achieving success in Scribner’s; at which point she found support and guidance from the editor, Richard Watson Gilder, considered at the time the arbiter of American literary taste in the genteel tradition. In the second chapter, then, I will address Burnett’s American novels, aligning them with American regional fiction and with social realism since that group of novels contains her undervalued political novel Through One Administration (1883) and her long delayed multiregional, political and post-Civil War novel In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim (1899). Burnett began writing the latter novel before the former; she put it aside and did not complete it until she embarked on writing her historical novels. In Through One Administration Burnett probes the desires, doubts, strength and physical beauty of her heroine, Bertha Amory, who builds for herself a depth of integrity in a social milieu that compromises nearly everyone, including Bertha herself. As Henry James had done in The Portrait of a Lady, Burnett explores an enigmatic marriage between a strong woman and a deeply manipulative man in a manner that exposes how corruption is masked and normalized. In both novels the blurred boundary between personal ambition for a life of self-fulfillment and a society that turns such ambition into a form of frustrated illusion animates the narratives.
The third chapter will address the historical novels, A Lady of Quality (1896) and His Grace of Osmonde (1897), with an eye toward how they refract Burnett’s contemporary concerns through the prism of historical distance. As Zangwill suggested in his review of A Lady of Quality, these novels are best approached as symbols with, I would add, a patina of allegory. Taken together the novels articulate a kind of feminist allegory that challenges gender stereotypes; they introduce the idea of what Angelique Richardson has called “rational reproduction,”35 a concept Burnett returns to through the remainder of her work, including her two sensation-inflected country house social novels, The Making of a Marchioness (1901) and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst (1901). Although not historical in setting, those latter novels offer a more contemporary take on re-productive issues by weaving into the narrative elements of personal and social moral degeneration through metaphors of criminality and class conflict. Taken as a group, they extend the feminist concerns of the historical novels to class concerns in the social-sensation novels, in both cases opening social space for individual women, against at times implacable obstacles, to flourish as human beings.
The fourth chapter will address a pair of transatlantic novels, The Shuttle (1907) and T. Tembarom (1913), which in English country house settings engage Anglo-American kinship and social relations in ways that return to the notion of rational reproduction but sharpen the context through the contemporary fears of degeneration on both sides of the Atlantic. Those novels also deploy elements of sensation fiction, the genre that in the 1860s transformed broad social anxieties into domestic concerns, erasing the boundaries between the public and private, threats to national well-being felt most forcefully as threats to the home. To those themes and generic elements Burnett weaves in an economic thread through the use of American wealth by way of transatlantic marriage to stave off the threat of degeneration through what we might call irrational reproduction: one transatlantic marriage in the novel is irrational, productive of lame offspring; the other transatlantic marriage is rational, regenerating an estate and by extension a nation (Great Britain) through the vitality of a woman.
The fifth chapter will explore another pair of novels, The Head of the House of Coombe (1922) and Robin (1922), originally written as one, that engage with and refuse the disillusionment of a post-World War I English society defined by fragmentation, social alienation and metaphysical despair. In a generic return to domestic realism, these novels draw on Burnett’s career-long experimentation with other generic modes, weaving them together in a story about the growth of two children into adulthood in the years leading up to and then well into the Great War. In the later years of her life, Burnett took a keen interest in psychical research, the occult powers of the mind, an interest shared by figures as diverse as Conan Doyle, William James and Havelock Ellis. Critics have dismissed Burnett’s interest, however, suggesting that she was another deluded, grieving mother looking for solace after the death of her favorite child (her son, Lionel, at 16). Based on some of her more incidental texts such as In a Closed Room (1905), an illustrated children’s book, The Dawn of a Tomorrow (1906), a novella turned into a stage play, and The White People (1917), another novella about a form of second-sight, Burnett’s interest was serious, sustained and in its time a source of productive imaginative response to what felt like in the Great War as the ruin of English speaking culture. (Think of the line from T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, also published in 1922: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” [l. 430]). In this chapter I will read those novels against Eliot’s long poem, arguing for the value of Burnett’s turn to physical resilience infused with spirit in the image of heroic maternity against Eliot’s synthetic gathering up of pieces that cannot be made whole.
Notes
1Edward L. Burlingame. “Art. VI.—New American Novels.” North American Review, vol. 125, no. 258 (September 1877): 309–21.
2Mrs. S. Bledsoe Herrick. “Frances Hodgson Burnett.” Southern Review, vol. 25, no. 49 (January 1879): 87–117.
3Edward Eggleston. “Some Recent Works of Fiction.” North American Review, vol. 129, no. 276 (November 1879): 510–17 (513).
4Thomas F. Ford and C. Lillian. “A Chronicle of Young Love.” Los Angeles Times (“The Literary Page”), August 20, 1922 (Section III), 36, 43.
5Peter D. McDonald. British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997, p. 14.
6Martin Hipsky. Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925. Athens: Ohio UP, 2011, p. 21.
7“Recent Literature.” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 40 (November 1877): 630–31.
8“That Lass O’Lowries.” Southern Review, vol. 24, no. 48 (October 1878): 491–96.
9Herrick, “Frances Hodgson Burnett,” 630–31 and 491–96.
10Eggleston, “Some Recent Works of Fiction,” 510–17.
11Chicago Daily Tribune (July 30, 1922), Section F, 1.
12Ann Thwaite. Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Author of The Secret Garden and A Little Princess. Boston: David R. Godine, 1991, p. 86. All subsequent references to Thwaite throughout this book are drawn from this volume.
13Andreas Huyssen. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986, p. 48.
14Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004, p. 208. All subsequent references to Gerzina throughout this book are drawn from this volume.
15Mary Hammond. Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, p. 136.
16Elaine Showalter. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977 and Ellen Moers. Literary Women. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1976.
17Rita Felski. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.
18The most often cited scholar on the Bronte–Burnett connection is U. C. Knoepflmacher. See, for instance, his “Little Girls without Their Curls: Female Aggression in Victorian Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature, vol. 11 (1983): 14–31 and his “Introduction” to the 2003 Penguin edition of The Little Princess. For a summary of the scholarship comparing Burnett’s The Secret Garden to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, see the debate in Connotations in response to Susan E. James’s “Wuthering Heights for Children: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden,” vol. 10, no. 1 (2000): 59–76. The first response by Lisa Tyler is called “Bronte and Burnett: A Response to Susan E. James,” vol. 12, no. 1 (2002): 61–66, and the second by Anna Krugovoy Silver is called “Wuthering Heights and The Secret Garden: A Response to Susan E. James,” vol. 12, nos. 1–2 (2003): 194–201.
19See the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) for more details.
20Francis Molson. “Frances Hodgson Burnett (1848–1924).” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910, vol. 8 (1975): 35–41 (39).
21Philip Waller. Writers, Readers, & Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.
22Alex Zwerdling. Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London. New York: Basic Books, 1998, pp. 31–32.
23Peter Keating. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914. London: Fontana Press, 1991, p. 226.
24David Trotter. The English Novel in History 1895–1920. London: Routledge, 1993.
25Suzanne Clark. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
26Joseph McAleer. Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914–1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
27McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice.
28Nicholas Daly. Modernism, Romance and the Fin De Siecle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
29Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England.
30Hipsky, Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain.
31Phyllis Bixler. Frances Hodgson Burnett. Twayne’s English Authors Series. Boston: Twayne, 1984, pp. 119 and 128.
32Frances Hodgson Burnett. The One I Knew Best of All. London: Frederick Warne, 1893, p. 75.
33Israel Zangwill. “Without Prejudice.” The Pall Mall Magazine, vol. 9, no. 37 (May 1896): 154.
34Helena Michie. The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies. New York: Oxford UP, 1987, p. 22.
35Angelique Richardson. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction & the New Woman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.
