The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Thomas Recchio

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