The third chapter will address the historical novels, A Lady of Quality (1896) and His Grace of Osmonde (1897), with an eye toward how they refract Burnett’s contemporary concerns through the prism of historical distance. As Zangwill suggested in his review of A Lady of Quality, these novels are best approached as symbols with, I would add, a patina of allegory. Taken together the novels articulate a kind of feminist allegory that challenges gender stereotypes; they introduce the idea of what Angelique Richardson has called “rational reproduction,”35 a concept Burnett returns to through the remainder of her work, including her two sensation-inflected country house social novels, The Making of a Marchioness (1901) and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst (1901). Although not historical in setting, those latter novels offer a more contemporary take on re-productive issues by weaving into the narrative elements of personal and social moral degeneration through metaphors of criminality and class conflict. Taken as a group, they extend the feminist concerns of the historical novels to class concerns in the social-sensation novels, in both cases opening social space for individual women, against at times implacable obstacles, to flourish as human beings.
The fourth chapter will address a pair of transatlantic novels, The Shuttle (1907) and T. Tembarom (1913), which in English country house settings engage Anglo-American kinship and social relations in ways that return to the notion of rational reproduction but sharpen the context through the contemporary fears of degeneration on both sides of the Atlantic. Those novels also deploy elements of sensation fiction, the genre that in the 1860s transformed broad social anxieties into domestic concerns, erasing the boundaries between the public and private, threats to national well-being felt most forcefully as threats to the home. To those themes and generic elements Burnett weaves in an economic thread through the use of American wealth by way of transatlantic marriage to stave off the threat of degeneration through what we might call irrational reproduction: one transatlantic marriage in the novel is irrational, productive of lame offspring; the other transatlantic marriage is rational, regenerating an estate and by extension a nation (Great Britain) through the vitality of a woman.
The fifth chapter will explore another pair of novels, The Head of the House of Coombe (1922) and Robin (1922), originally written as one, that engage with and refuse the disillusionment of a post-World War I English society defined by fragmentation, social alienation and metaphysical despair. In a generic return to domestic realism, these novels draw on Burnett’s career-long experimentation with other generic modes, weaving them together in a story about the growth of two children into adulthood in the years leading up to and then well into the Great War. In the later years of her life, Burnett took a keen interest in psychical research, the occult powers of the mind, an interest shared by figures as diverse as Conan Doyle, William James and Havelock Ellis. Critics have dismissed Burnett’s interest, however, suggesting that she was another deluded, grieving mother looking for solace after the death of her favorite child (her son, Lionel, at 16). Based on some of her more incidental texts such as In a Closed Room (1905), an illustrated children’s book, The Dawn of a Tomorrow (1906), a novella turned into a stage play, and The White People (1917), another novella about a form of second-sight, Burnett’s interest was serious, sustained and in its time a source of productive imaginative response to what felt like in the Great War as the ruin of English speaking culture. (Think of the line from T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, also published in 1922: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” [l. 430]). In this chapter I will read those novels against Eliot’s long poem, arguing for the value of Burnett’s turn to physical resilience infused with spirit in the image of heroic maternity against Eliot’s synthetic gathering up of pieces that cannot be made whole.
Notes
1Edward L. Burlingame. “Art. VI.—New American Novels.” North American Review, vol. 125, no. 258 (September 1877): 309–21.
2Mrs. S. Bledsoe Herrick. “Frances Hodgson Burnett.” Southern Review, vol. 25, no. 49 (January 1879): 87–117.
3Edward Eggleston. “Some Recent Works of Fiction.” North American Review, vol. 129, no. 276 (November 1879): 510–17 (513).
4Thomas F. Ford and C. Lillian. “A Chronicle of Young Love.” Los Angeles Times (“The Literary Page”), August 20, 1922 (Section III), 36, 43.
5Peter D. McDonald. British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997, p. 14.
6Martin Hipsky. Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885–1925. Athens: Ohio UP, 2011, p. 21.
7“Recent Literature.” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 40 (November 1877): 630–31.
8“That Lass O’Lowries.” Southern Review, vol. 24, no. 48 (October 1878): 491–96.
9Herrick, “Frances Hodgson Burnett,” 630–31 and 491–96.
10Eggleston, “Some Recent Works of Fiction,” 510–17.
11Chicago Daily Tribune (July 30, 1922), Section F, 1.
12Ann Thwaite. Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Author of The Secret Garden and A Little Princess. Boston: David R. Godine, 1991, p. 86. All subsequent references to Thwaite throughout this book are drawn from this volume.
13Andreas Huyssen. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986, p. 48.
14Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004, p. 208. All subsequent references to Gerzina throughout this book are drawn from this volume.