The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Thomas Recchio
adult fiction from its near oblivion will probably admit that the survival of The Secret Garden as Burnett’s masterpiece is just […]. She deserves a primary place in the annals of children’s and popular literature” (Bixler).31
III
Excavating Burnett’s adult novels from under the layers of neglect and the popular cultural replication and critical praise of her children’s stories requires, I think, that we begin by making some distinctions about the range and quality of those novels. A short passage from Thwaite’s biography provides a place to begin:
The Times Literary Supplement wrote [in a review of her final novel, Robin]: “Lush sentiments flow from her pen with a sweetness that suggests syrup rather than plain ink […] This is a pity, because once upon a time Mrs Burnett could write differently.” She could indeed; if she had died at forty-five, before she had written Little Lord Fauntleroy, she might well have had a reputation comparable with Mrs Gaskell’s. (240)
To extrapolate from Thwaite’s assessment, it is logical to assume that the novels written before 1886 when Fauntleroy was published constitute a body of work worthy of the respect afforded Elizabeth Gaskell, who, since the 1960s, has acquired an increasingly important place in studies of the Victorian novel and culture. The question that begs for an answer here is if the pre-1886 work is so good, why neglect it? A corollary that flows from that question is that not all of her novels conform to the same genre, were written in the same style or reveal the same depth of engagement either directly or indirectly with the cultural moment at the time of their composition. Nor do we know, without broad and sensitive re-readings today, how the novels might speak to our current cultural moment. So in much the way she occupied various positions in the literary field during her lifetime, she could be located in various positions in the field of literary and cultural studies in the present. For instance, in the contemporary reassessment of romance written by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the few allusions to Burnett place her squarely in the group of women romance writers. That placement consequently ignores her engagement with mid- and late Victorian realism, and it has not stimulated any reassessment of the depth and complexity of what is considered her romance novels. That is, her novels have been categorized under the broad category of romance; romance itself has been rethought and recalibrated in ways that open up its thematic, ideological, aesthetic richness, but Burnett’s “romances” have not been reread. There is a double failure in differentiation here, exemplified oddly in Phylis Bixler’s Twayne study, where she organizes Burnett’s literary career in the following terms: “From Magazine Fiction to Romance to Realist Novel (1868–84) […] Popular Romances for Children and Adults (1885–99) […] Fairy Stories for Children and Adults (1900–1924)” (Table of Contents, n.p.). The pattern of those chapter titles seems circular, from romance to realism, then back to romance with a further move away from realism through fairy stories with the distinction between adult and children’s novels being erased. In the end writing for children emerges as the dominant thread that unifies her career, her adult novels subordinated to that purpose.
Based on my reading of Burnett’s fiction written for an adult audience, I would classify 14 as full-length novels; there is also a subset of novellas and an extensive bibliography of short stories. While the novellas, such as A Woman’s Will or Miss Defarge (1888), The Dawn of a Tomorrow (1906) and The White People (1917), are varied and fascinating in their own right, I will focus on the novels, which appeared in not always chronological clusters at the beginning, middle and end of her writing career. The first cluster, That Lass O’Lowries (1877), Haworth’s (1879) and A Fair Barbarian (1881), emerges from the mid-Victorian realist tradition, and they take their inspiration from Burnett’s fellow Mancunian, Elizabeth Gaskell. The first two novels, in fact, which are set in Lancashire, England, could be classified as latecomers to the tradition of British industrial fiction of the 1840s while the third novel is squarely aligned with a traditional village fiction inaugurated by Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1826–32) and confirmed in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853). The second cluster, Louisiana (1880), Through One Administration (1883) and In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim (1899), is a complex mixture of regional American fiction with, in the case of Through One Administration in particular, a heavy investment in what was called the “new fiction” associated with William Dean Howells and Henry James, and in the case of the latter two novels deeply engaged with the social and bureaucratic complexities of political life in Washington, DC. The third cluster, A Lady of Quality (1896), His Grace of Osmond (1897), The Making of a Marchioness (1901) and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst (1901), draws on a tradition of historical fiction (the first two titles) and domestic fiction (the third and fourth titles), leavened with more than a touch of sensation in the Wilkie Collins tradition. The fourth cluster, inspired perhaps by a thread of inquiry begun in Little Lord Fauntleroy, comprises transatlantic novels: The Shuttle (1907) and T. Tembarom (1913), which, while ostensibly focused on transatlantic marriages of very different sorts, struggles with contemporary anxieties about familial and national decline in England and American ineptness, through a lack of cultural institutions and practices analogous to European social forms, on the international stage. The Head of the House of Coombe (1922) and Robin (1922) constitute the fifth cluster. Although those last two titles were written as a single volume, because of their length, at the publisher’s insistence they were published as two titles. The first of those novels probes the English experience in the years preceding the Great War, and the second peels back layers of trauma experienced on the home front in London during the war. They are, as I will demonstrate in my last chapter, Burnett’s antithetical version of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Within the generic variety of Burnett’s novels so briefly sketched above, there are a couple of patterns: first, the novels tend to come in pairs (A Lady of Quality and His Grace of Osmond; The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst; and The Head of the House of Coombe and Robin), the first pair offering the same narrative first from the point of view of the heroine, Clorinda, and the second from the point of view of her eventual husband, the Duke of Osmond, and the second volume of the other pairs being a continuation of the narrative in the first volume. Second, the plots tend to move in the direction of romance with an emphasis on the moral, spiritual and physical challenges faced by a female protagonist, but rendered in a way that makes the romance marriage plot/consummation merely incidental. Burnett may deploy recognizable romance plot conventions, but she is not interested in those conventions as such. She exploits those conventions in her effort to explore the possibilities of her female protagonists experiencing the world fully through their bodies and reanimating life-denying social conditions through the attunement of their bodies and spirits. In other words, she works to imagine the full being of women in the world.
Given the generic range and imaginative ambition of Burnett’s novels, we can push back against Thwaite’s suggestion that after the runaway popularity of Fauntleroy as a novel, a stage play and a cultural phenomenon (mothers dressing their young sons in velvet coats and frill collars), Burnett was no longer taken seriously by critics, and we can offer some resistance to Molson’s assertion that “From 1900 onward, Burnett ceased to have anything significant to say as far as the major journals were concerned” (37). We can begin by looking more closely at what the critics actually had to say about Burnett’s novels, pre- and post-Fauntleroy, reading with an eye for the details of what the critics specifically notice about the novels and considering to what extent we would evaluate those things the same or differently today. Of A Lady of Quality, for instance, Molson observes: “Especially affronted were the many reviewers who […] were bothered not only by Burnett’s romanticism but also by her feminist stance” (36). Molson documents The Atlantic reviewer’s distress that the heroine of the novel escaped “punishment” for killing the man who stalked her and threatened her life while also noting how the reviewer for the Critic found the novel Burnett’s best because it “attested to the author’s acknowledgement, regardless of cost, that women no longer accept the double standard” (36). I stress those details from Molson’s overview of the history or Burnett’s novel