Such a corrective of sentiment is extended in the Granny Dixon bequest. Just before her death, she reveals to her impoverished, working-class family the source of the wealth that she has been hoarding for more than 60 years: “Does ta want to know where th’ money come fro’? Fro’ Will Ffrench—fro’ him. He war one o’ th’ gentry when aw wur said an’ done—an’ I wur a han’some lass” (348). The brevity and incisiveness of that revelation is stunning. Will Ffrench is the grandfather of Rachel, the upper-class woman for whom Haworth sacrificed all he had worked for and of whom Granny Dixon says, “she’s th’ very moral on him” (i.e., her grandfather) (348). Granny parlayed her beauty into financial security, and although it is unclear who Granny Dixon’s child or children might be, it is clear that she was by any definition a kept and thus a fallen women. She may not have inspired any affection—she played on her relatives’ greed to inherit her money—but she provides a hard-headed reading of what a fallen woman’s life might mean were we to abolish moral judgment and sentiment. That life would be as much an open question and just as free from or liable to blame as anyone’s. In addition, her equation of her youthful seducer, Will, and his granddaughter Rachel provides a powerful clue to our understanding of the woman who serves as the novel’s biggest puzzle: the self-contained Rachel Ffrench.
As was the case in North and South, the scene most fraught with the dangers of public exposure is when Rachel Ffrench intervenes between the strikers and the object of their wrath, Hilary Murdoch. Murdoch, the workers believe, has invented a device that will make their labor (and thus their livelihood) obsolete; Haworth circulated that idea in an effort to destroy his romantic rival. As is the case in North and South, labor conflict and sexual desire permeate the experiences of key figures in the manufacturing class if not the workers themselves. For Burnett as a writer, that confluence of social and personal tension seems to have focused and energized her narrative. In a letter to Richard Gilder, she described her difficulties in writing the early chapters of Haworth’s and then identifies the chapter that made everything from that point on smooth sailing:
After working & going through agonies untold & raving & tearing & hating myself & every word I ever wrote I have suddenly walked out into a cool place & begun to soar & have soared & soared until I don’t think I shall return to earth again […]. The room I have written it [Haworth’s] in has been a torture chamber & yet at Chapter 27 I am just tearing along & to my utter bewilderment I feel as if I have done something […] far beyond the Lass. (Cited in Gerzina 75)
Chapter 27, oddly enough, is entitled “Beginning,” and the extended narrative sequence introduced is of the labor strike and Rachel Ffrench’s response to it. It is as if the riot scene in North and South inspired what became the imaginative core of Haworth’s. While Haworth takes active measures to disrupt the strike before it starts, rallying his own men and gauging their loyalties before exploiting the uncertainty of the situation to play a protective role with Rachel, Rachel responds with excitement, relishing, it seems, the opportunity to assert her feminine and class power by an act of public defiance toward both the strikers and toward Haworth himself.
When Haworth rushes into the room to tell Rachel of the strike, he feels as he almost always does in her presence, “unstrung” (184).
“I’ve come to tell you not to go out,” he said. “There’s trouble afoot—in the trade. There’s no knowing how it’ll turn out. There’s a lot of chaps in th’ town who are not in th’ mood to see aught that’ll fret ‘em. They’re ready for mischief, and have got drink in ‘em. Stay you here until we see which way th’ thing’s going.”
“Do you mean,” she demanded, “that there are signs of a strike?”
“There’s more than signs of it,” he answered sullenly. “Before night the whole place will be astir.”
[…]
“Nothing would keep me at home,” she said. “I shall drive through the town and back again. Do you think I will let them fancy that I am afraid of them?”
[…]
She left the room, and in less than ten minutes returned. He had never before seen in her the fire he saw then. There was a spark of light in her eyes, a color on her cheek. She had chosen her dress with distinct care for its luxurious richness. His exclamation, as she entered buttoning her long, delicate glove, was a repressed oath. He exulted in her. His fear for her was gone, and only this exultation remained
“You’ve made up your mind to that?” he said. He wanted to make her say more.
“I am going to see your mother,” she answered. “That will take me outside of the town, then I shall drive back again—slowly. They shall understand me at least.” (184–85)
Rachel’s enigmatic final statement that “they shall understand me at least” raises the question of who else does she want to understand her? How far does the audience for her public display of herself extend? As a representative of her social class (her father has become Haworth’s partner in business, an aristocrat dabbling in trade), she relies on the clues of dress, her beauty and the fact that she is publicly known because of her class rank to protect her and to be tools of intimidation; if her social position is unassailable, she is unassailable. But insofar as the former working-class man and current factory owner Haworth assumes any authority over her (her father’s economic dependence on Haworth’s success reinforces any personal authority Haworth may hope to have over her), there is a gender dimension to her defiance. Her beauty may intimidate but it also attracts, and as a man of working-class origins who is attracted to her and is in fact engaged in an unspoken transaction with her father to buy her (she is the understood price of their partnership), Haworth is the most dangerous of the working men. It is he above all who shall understand her.
Rachel’s understanding of Haworth as an extension of the working-class threat to her social position and personal integrity is reinforced by two events: the stone thrown at the near riot and Haworth’s physical assault on her body. The near riot begins in a manner reminiscent of the scene quoted above: Rachel dresses for it. After her father and she discuss the fact that their dinner guests would not be coming because of the unrest in the streets, Rachel goes to her room “to prepare for dinner.” When she returns, her father is startled by her appearance: “‘Why did you dress yourself in that manner?’ he exclaimed. ‘You said yourself our