In the January 1885 issue of the British periodical Time the English socialist, feminist writer Clementina Black (1853–1922) wrote a critical assessment of Burnett’s career, “The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett,” which provides an apt framing of her place in the Anglo-American literary field.18 The American critical establishment had drawn specific comparisons between Burnett and Dickens and Burnett and Thackeray (see Richard Henry Stoddard’s December 17, 1881, piece in The Critic, for example)19 and had placed her among the “seven writers who hold the front rank today in general estimation” (see James Herbert Morse’s “The Native Element in American Fiction” in the Century Illustrated Magazine in July 1883),20 but Black’s assessment is unusual in the quality of its nuance. Rather than pointing to specific comparisons—such as Stoddard does when he writes, “She impresses me as understanding her suffering and sinning characters as fully as Dickens ever understood his—as having a more genuine affection for them, and as never at any time caricaturing them”—Black identifies a literary strategy that characterizes Burnett’s fiction as a whole during the first decade of (and arguably throughout) her career:
It is not easy to find a final word on Mrs. Burnett’s work, or to venture a conjecture as to its further development. It has gone on steadily improving, and its latest level is high. Its weakness, I suspect, lies where much of its charm, and even its strength, lies—in its versatility. Mrs. Burnett reminds us now of one writer, now of another; the likeness is never servile, her work is often equal, sometimes superior to the work resembled, and it has always a distinct flavour of its own, but the flavour is seldom quite so marked as the likeness. As there are people so quick to catch the accent that you may almost guess at their last companion, so you might range Mrs. Burnett’s stories each in a different place on your bookshelves, and each beside its literary next-of-kin.
In Black’s formulation, the strengths and weaknesses of Burnett’s novels are the same; in an argument that smacks of oxymoron, Black asserts that the versatility of the novels is a function of their accentual relations to other novels. Although the accent feels native at first, not long after its origins come to the fore, the voice is not quite native, just as Burnett herself may be said to have been not quite English, not quite American; she writes in one accent and then in the other but in a tenor that is distinctively hers. To locate Burnett’s place in the literary field, then, is to locate her in relation to others who preceded her and have stepped aside as it were (as in the death of Dickens in 1870 and George Eliot in 1880), opening a space for her. But she does not fit comfortably into one space; her work, though accented, is her own.
Another way to get at the paradox I have been struggling to pin down is to place Burnett’s early novels in the context of the broader publishing practices of the period. In an essay called “Directions and Volume of Our Literary Activities” in the January 1894 issue of Forum, Ainsworth R. Spofford, the then Librarian of Congress, wrote the following: “In the field of book literature there appears a marked tendency toward reproduction of standard authors, and this may be hailed as a wholesome symptom both of the public taste and of the judgment of publishers who cater to it. In general terms it may be said that this is an age of compilation rather than creation.”21 The 1880s and 1890s saw an explosion of a series of standard authors produced by publishing giants like Macmillan in England and Harper’s in the United States and by a multitude of small publishing houses such as the Dodge Publishing Company in New York and the Henry Altemus Company in Philadelphia. This was also a time when those same publishers printed uniform editions of the work of living authors, marking that work in its material form as the continuation of a tradition. Consequently, when readers took a Scribner edition of a Burnett novel in their hands and noted the embossed cover and the frontispiece and in-text illustrations, the form of the book established a familiarity for readers who would then read the novel in the context of the many novels by other authors that have preceded it. But that familiarity may also have enabled Burnett to inflect her narrative material differently, as suggested by Stoddard’s rhapsody over Joan Lowrie:
She is a glorious creature—elemental, primitive, cast in the mold of the mothers of the [human] race—the daughters of Job, as they live in the vigorous drawings of Blake, or the Daughters of Men, whom the Sons of God saw were fair. She belongs to a sisterhood of heroic heroines whom the novelists of the period are fond of delineating […] but she overtops them all in massive simplicity and thorough womanhood.
Joan is familiar and unfamiliar, drawn from a complex narrative and visual history but rendered somehow with “massive simplicity,” as if the Biblical narrative and romantic illustrations fuse into a figure that is somehow purer, more accessible to Burnett’s readers who can feel something of that mythic history in the figure of a working girl.
The second resonance of the cultural collisions and reconciliations in Burnett’s early novels is a by-product of the first. That is, in pursuing her literary project throughout her career as a novelist, Burnett provided voice, image and story to emergent political, cultural and literary developments in the relationship between her mother country and her adopted homeland. That is to say, her literary ambitions were enabled and constrained by her particular historical context and her intimate personal history as an Anglo-American woman forging a literary career between 1877 and 1922. Her particular strategy located her in a space on a transatlantic literary field defined by a tension between residual literary values associated with Victorian realism and emergent literary values associated with modernism, a term that points to qualities that also define what Rita Felski calls “the popular sublime.” Aspirations toward the sublime in popular forms of narrative, Felski suggests, “seek to familiarize the ungraspable, to materialize the transcendent, thereby setting up a field of tension between the otherworldliness they invoke and its depiction through familiar and established conventions.”22 The difference between that and literary modernism could be articulated by changing the adjectives “familiar” and “established” to “unfamiliar” and “innovative.” We might say, then, that Burnett’s literary practice was pulled back to the world of Elizabeth Gaskell and forwarded to the world of Henry James then past (or through) James into the world of popular romance, a world that James himself evoked in a high modernist way in, for instance, The Portrait of a Lady, his novel that was published serially in the Atlantic just prior to the time that Burnett’s Through One Administration (the central text in my next chapter) was running in Scribner’s.
Notes
1The One I Knew Best of All. London: Frederick Warne, 1893, p. 110.
2Arthur John. The Best Years of the Century: Richard Watson Gilder, Scribner’s Monthly, and Scribner’s Magazine, 1870–1909. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1981, p. 13.
3See Joseph Kestner’s Protest and Reform (1985), especially pp. 70–81 and Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (1988), especially pp. 69–84 for detailed discussions of Stone’s novel.
4See especially Chapter Six, which contains the well-known description of the typhoid-infected Davenport damp cellar home on Berry Street in Manchester.