The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett
Frontispiece “She Stepped Into The Gallery Before He Could Protest”. The frontispiece is from the first edition of That Lass O’Lowries (Scribner’s 1877).
The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett
In “the World of Actual Literature”
Thomas Recchio
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
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Copyright © Thomas Recchio 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-363-6 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-363-9 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter OneLearning from Elizabeth Gaskell
Chapter TwoWriting as an American: The Portrait of a Washington Lady
Chapter ThreeHistorical Dreamscapes and the Vicissitudes of Class: From A Lady of Quality to The Methods of Lady Walderhurst
Chapter FourTransatlantic Alliances in The Shuttle and T. Tembarom
Chapter FiveAfter the Great War: Emerging from the Wasteland in The Head of the House of Coombe and Robin
Bibliography
Index
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.
I
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