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