The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett

Thomas Recchio

Description

A reading of Burnett’s novels in the context of the changing literary field in England and the United States

Frances Hodgson Burnett is remembered today as the author of the children’s classic “The Secret Garden,” but in her lifetime she had a long and successful career as a novelist, dramatist, and writer of children’s stories. Born in 1849 in Manchester, England, Burnett settled in Tennessee with her mother and siblings at sixteen after her father’s death. She began writing stories to supplement her family’s income. With the acceptance of the story “Surly Tim’s Trouble” by “Scribner’s Magazine” in New York and the subsequent publication of her first novel “That Lass O’Lowries” in 1877, the critics hailed Burnett as a new voice in American fiction comparing her favorably to Charles Dickens.

Burnett’s early novels were written in the years prior to and immediately after the death of George Eliot in 1880, their form very much in the Victorian tradition of realism. Her first two novels were social problem novels set in a mining and manufacturing district in Lancashire and they deployed the local dialect to great effect. Even in those early traditional novels, the contours of Burnett’s unique conception of her later female characters can be discerned. After her industrial novels, she published a short American regional novel about rural life in North Carolina and an English village novel modelled on Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Cranford” with this difference: Burnett’s heroine in that tale is a young, vibrant American woman. With the publication of her Washington novel “Through One Administration,” which critics compared to Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady” as fine examples of the “new fiction,” Burnett’s career as a novelist was firmly established. Thus, the early chapters of this book read Burnett’s novels alongside those of Elizabeth Gaskell and Henry James as a way to demonstrate her place is the changing literary field of the time.

After her Washington novel, she turned away from realism and the psychological minuteness of the new fiction to experiment with both traditional and popular novel forms. She next published two historical novels “A Lady of Quality” and “His Grace of Osmonde,” the first a tale of her most challenging heroine Clorinda Wildairs and the second a tale of the man Clorinda ultimately marries. Taken together the two novels tell the same tale from a woman’s and a man’s point of view. “The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett” places those novels in the context of theories of the Victorian historical novel and in relation with Victorian narrative deployment of multiple points of view.

She next published a pair of transatlantic novels roughly modelled on a pattern she sketched out in her children’s classic, “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” The novels engage with issues related to the “new woman” novel of the period, especially in relation to fears of cultural degeneration and the responsibility of women to redress those fears. Her last two novels appeared after the Great War in which she wrestled with the crisis of meaning for Anglo-American culture in the wake of the war. The final chapter of this book, then, places those last novels in relation to Great War novels written by women and frames a reading of Burnett’s engagement with the Great War through T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Read as a body of literary fiction, Burnett’s novels constitute an important thread that chronicles the changing contexts and forms of English and American fiction from the end of the Victorian period to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

Acknowledgments; Introduction; Chapter One Learning from Elizabeth Gaskell; Chapter Two Writing as an American: The Portrait of a Washington Lady; Chapter Three Historical Dreamscapes and the Vicissitudes of Class: From A Lady of Quality to The Methods of Lady Walderhurst; Chapter Four Transatlantic Alliances in The Shuttle and T. Tembarom; Chapter Five After the Great War: Emerging from the Wasteland in The Head of the House of Coombe and Robin; Bibliography; Index.

Sujets

• Women
• Modern history
• Literary criticism
• 20th century
• Woman
• The Women
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 02 mai 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785273650
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett
Frontispiece  “She Stepped Into The Gallery Before He Could Protest”. The frontispiece is from the first edition of That Lass O’Lowries (Scribner’s 1877).
The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett
In “the World of Actual Literature”
Thomas Recchio
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
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Copyright © Thomas Recchio 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-363-6 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-363-9 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One Learning from Elizabeth Gaskell
Chapter Two Writing as an American: The Portrait of a Washington Lady
Chapter Three Historical Dreamscapes and the Vicissitudes of Class: From A Lady of Quality to The Methods of Lady Walderhurst
Chapter Four Transatlantic Alliances in The Shuttle and T. Tembarom
Chapter Five After the Great War: Emerging from the Wasteland in The Head of the House of Coombe and Robin
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The seeds for this book were planted long ago and without my notice. Grace Vasington asked me to supervise her University Scholars thesis on the mythological background of Burnett’s The Secret Garden . Her research took her to France and the United Kingdom, where she read extensively on the origins and histories of mythological narratives that survive unnoticed as skeletons of story in literary fiction. Her work showed me that Burnett’s writing repays thoughtful, close reading. Some years later as I was working on a book of publishing history, my colleague Sarah Winter introduced me to A Fair Barbarian in the context of British village fiction along the lines of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford . A year or two after that, I taught a graduate seminar on Gaskell and Burnett where, with Christina Henderson, Steven Mollmann, Katie Panning, Christiana Salah and Emily Tucker, we read Gaskell’s early novels alongside Burnett’s. That led to a paper on Gaskell and Burnett at the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) meeting in Pasadena, California. Later at NAVSA’s conference in Banff, Alberta, Sharon Weltman introduced me to Joanna Seaton, who is steeped in Burnett’s adult fiction. We discussed the work I had been doing on Burnett and Gaskell, at which point I knew I had to write this book. Over the last two years my colleagues at the University of Connecticut, especially Sarah Winter, Kate Capshaw, Victoria Ford Smith and Margaret Higonnet, supported this work in ways big and small and always important. Genevieve Brassard of the University of Portland offered timely bibliographic advice on women’s writing and The Great War. The university’s Interlibrary Loan staff has not only helped facilitate the provision of books and articles from other research libraries, they have helped track down periodical sources in some deeply hidden places. The University of Connecticut Scholarship Facilitation Fund has also been generous with financial support. Special thanks to the New York Public Library for access to the hidden collection. To all I am grateful. But especially to Eleni Coundouriotis, whose intellect, scholarly integrity and moral vision have been a daily inspiration to me for more than two decades, I owe a debt I can never repay. This book is for her and our son, Thomas.
INTRODUCTION
I
Most well known today as the author of the children’s classics The Secret Garden (1911), A Little Princess (1905) and, perhaps still infamously, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), Francis Hodgson Burnett was for most of her career a serious and ambitious writer of adult fiction. Her first two novels, That Lass O’Lowries (1877) and Haworth’s (1879), garnered strong critical reviews, American periodicals pairing those novels with George Eliot’s and Henry James’s and announcing in the process the emergence of a significant new voice on the American literary scene. That Lass O’Lowries was reviewed with James’s The American in the North American Review in 1877, 1 and the Southern Review in its 1879 review of that novel opined that “Mrs. Burnett […] has come to take the first rank among living American novelists” (n.p.). 2 That same year the North American Review paired Eliot’s The Impressions of Theophrastus Such with Burnett’s Haworth’s ; the review states: “When a new writer arrives who is indeed a new voice, and not a confused echo of voices already familiar, the first office of the critic is to ask what results characterize his work and by what methods he achieves his results or makes his impression. Mrs. Burnett […] has proved herself a distinctly new personality among our novel-writers.” 3 Though both reviews seem to concur in their high evaluation of the literary quality of Burnett’s early novels, presenting them as vehicles of a distinctive voice that mark Burnett as the preeminent novelist of her time (note the absence of the qualifier “woman” novelist in the first review), there is some suggestive slippage in the language of the second review as Burnett is relocated from the “first rank” of novelists to a “distinctly new personality among novel-writers.” First-rate novelist, new writer, distinct personality: taken together, the blurriness of such terms captures the way in which Burnett may be said to have oscillated within the Anglo-American literary field between 1877 and 1924. If one review locates her at the top of the field of literary production, another seems to concur but fudges, shifting terms from novelist to writer and, by implication, from author to personality. The mobility of Burnett’s critical location suggests that she was both everywhere and nowhere in the literary field of her time. One way to read her career is as a struggle between her effort to be everywhere in the literary field—as novelist, writer of short fiction, playwright, author of children’s books and even as a significant figure in the adaptation of literature to film in the early years of the film industry—and of the self-appointed overseers of literary culture, book reviewers and critics, to define and thus confine her. The dominance of the critics in that struggle can be suggested by an August 20, 1922, Los Angeles Times review of Burnett’s last novel, Robin (1922):

That Mrs. Burnett handles the situation with consummate art and in so doing tells the most moving story of her career will be the opinion of all lovers of the good, the true and the beautiful as expressed in romance, who read this book. Not since Meredith gave free rein to the romantic spirit in the love passages in “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel” has young love been so feelingly and poetically chronicled. 4
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 t