(1849-)
Mrs. Burnett has told the story of her childhood and tried to interpret
her own personality in her autobiographical story, 'The One I Knew Best
of All.' She has pictured a little English girl in a comfortable
Manchester home, leading a humdrum, well-regulated existence, with
brothers and sisters, nurse and governess. But an alert imagination
added interest to the life of this "Small Person," and from her nursery
windows and from the quiet park where she played she watched eagerly for
anything of dramatic or picturesque interest. She seized upon the
Lancashire dialect often overheard, as upon a game, and practiced it
until she gained the facility of use shown in her mining and factory
stories. One day the strong and beautiful figure of a young woman,
followed by a coarse and abusive father, caught her attention, and years
afterward she developed Joan Lowrie from the incident.
When the Hodgson family suffered pecuniary loss, and hoping to better
its fortunes came to America, then best known to Frances from the pages
of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' she was fifteen. A year or two later she began
to send her stories to various magazines. In 1867 the first of these
appeared. She did not however attain her great popularity until the
appearance of 'That Lass o' Lowrie's' in 1877. The thoughtfully drawn
group of characters--Derrick the engineer, Grace the young minister,
Annie the rector's daughter, and Joan the pit girl,--are dramatic
figures, working out their life problems under the eyes and the comments
of half-cynical, half-brutalized miners. There is nothing in her history
to account for Joan, or for the fact that the strength of vice in her
father becomes an equal strength of virtue in her. Abused since her
babyhood, doing the work of a man among degrading companionships, she
yet remains capable of the noblest self-abnegation. Mrs. Burnett
delights in heroes and heroines who are thus loftily at variance with
their surroundings. Her stories are romantic in spirit, offering little
to the lover of psychologic analysis. Her character-drawing is the
product of quick observation and sympathetic intuition. She does not
write "tendency" novels, but appeals to simple emotions of love, hate,
revenge, or self-immolation, which sometimes, as in the case of her last
book, 'A Lady of Quality' (1895), verge on sensationalism. In 1873 Miss
Hodgson married Dr. Burnett of Washington. Her longest novel, 'Through
One Administration,' is a story of the political and social life of the
Capital. 'Little Lord Fauntleroy' (1886) is the best known of a series
of stories nominally written for children, but intended to be read by
their elders. 'Sara Crewe,' 'Giovanni and the Other,' 'Two Little
Pilgrims,' and 'Little Saint Elizabeth' are chronicles of superlunary
children. After those before mentioned, 'Esmeralda,' 'Louisiana,' 'A
Fair Barbarian,' and 'Haworth's' are her best known stories.