The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Thomas Recchio
Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, p. 136.
16Elaine Showalter. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977 and Ellen Moers. Literary Women. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1976.
17Rita Felski. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.
18The most often cited scholar on the Bronte–Burnett connection is U. C. Knoepflmacher. See, for instance, his “Little Girls without Their Curls: Female Aggression in Victorian Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature, vol. 11 (1983): 14–31 and his “Introduction” to the 2003 Penguin edition of The Little Princess. For a summary of the scholarship comparing Burnett’s The Secret Garden to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, see the debate in Connotations in response to Susan E. James’s “Wuthering Heights for Children: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden,” vol. 10, no. 1 (2000): 59–76. The first response by Lisa Tyler is called “Bronte and Burnett: A Response to Susan E. James,” vol. 12, no. 1 (2002): 61–66, and the second by Anna Krugovoy Silver is called “Wuthering Heights and The Secret Garden: A Response to Susan E. James,” vol. 12, nos. 1–2 (2003): 194–201.
19See the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) for more details.
20Francis Molson. “Frances Hodgson Burnett (1848–1924).” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910, vol. 8 (1975): 35–41 (39).
21Philip Waller. Writers, Readers, & Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.
22Alex Zwerdling. Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London. New York: Basic Books, 1998, pp. 31–32.
23Peter Keating. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914. London: Fontana Press, 1991, p. 226.
24David Trotter. The English Novel in History 1895–1920. London: Routledge, 1993.
25Suzanne Clark. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
26Joseph McAleer. Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914–1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
27McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice.
28Nicholas Daly. Modernism, Romance and the Fin De Siecle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
29Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England.
30Hipsky, Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain.
31Phyllis Bixler. Frances Hodgson Burnett. Twayne’s English Authors Series. Boston: Twayne, 1984, pp. 119 and 128.
32Frances Hodgson Burnett. The One I Knew Best of All. London: Frederick Warne, 1893, p. 75.
33Israel Zangwill. “Without Prejudice.” The Pall Mall Magazine, vol. 9, no. 37 (May 1896): 154.
34Helena Michie. The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies. New York: Oxford UP, 1987, p. 22.
35Angelique Richardson. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction & the New Woman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.
LEARNING FROM ELIZABETH GASKELL
I
At 18 years old in 1868, Burnett published her first stories in Godey’s Lady’s Book, a popular woman’s magazine, and over the next four years “[S]he had stories published […] in every magazine in America, ‘except Harper’s, Scribner’s and the Atlantic’” (Thwaite 37). She was hesitant to try the latter three magazines because, as she herself put it: “It would have seemed to me a kind of presumption to aspire to entering the actual world of literature” (cited in Thwaite 37). Despite the fact that she stated quite baldly when she sent out her first story to Ballou’s Magazine that her “object is remuneration,” she developed a sense early on that writing strictly for the market was one thing while writing at the behest of her own imaginative impulses and aesthetic vision was another. One question she must have asked herself concerns the principles that might guide her hand were she to write with ambitions of “entering the actual world of literature.” We can infer an answer to that question in two ways: by considering the literary field in America in the 1870s and by careful reading of the novels (all first published serially before being published in volume form) she published with Scribner’s in the 1870s and early 1880s. One thing we will find is deep points of contact between three of her first four published novels and three of Elizabeth Gaskell’s first four published novels. How we might understand that depth of contact depends, in part, on our understanding of Burnett’s response to her most immediate literary predecessors and how those predecessors were positioned in the literary field at the time.
Burnett was born in Manchester, England in 1849, the year after Chapman and Hall published Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, and Burnett lived in Manchester for the next 16 years until 1865, the year of Gaskell’s death and the year Burnett emigrated to Tennessee. As her 1893 autobiography of her childhood shows, she read voraciously, everything from the Bible to histories of Greece and Rome to the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. She read the odd periodical volume as well, even the “Blackwood” [sic Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine], “a big book and heavy.”1 Although Burnett’s contemporary reviewers detected influences from Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes and Gaskell on Burnett’s early novels, and while Burnett herself alludes to Dickens, Thackeray and their contemporaries in her autobiography, she never mentions or alludes in even the most tangential way to Elizabeth Gaskell, the most significant literary figure in Manchester during the years of her formal education in school and her informal education as an insatiable, undisciplined reader. Burnett’s ready acknowledgment of the interest and excitement with which she read the great Victorian realists, who were arguably at the height of their powers in the year she was born and through much of her childhood, and her silence about the figure