FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
Half a dozen plays and half a hundred stories stand to the credit of
Frances Hodgson Burnett, born in Manchester, England, naturalized as an
American citizen in 1905 or thereabouts, the author of _Little Lord
Fauntleroy_, most famous of children’s stories by a living writer. Mrs.
Burnett is a novelist, as such books as _The Shuttle_ and _T. Tembaron_
attest. She is thought of half or more than half the time as a writer of
tales for youngsters, and rightly. Of these she has produced a great
number and their success is amazing. No beating of drums, no blasts on
trumpets, even toy trumpets: yet as the publishers assure you, in
respect of even her less known “juveniles,” they keep on selling, year
after year, with the most relentless endurance. They don’t have to be
advertised. In the famous sentiment of a famous advertisement, they are
advertised by their loving friends.
The best thing for the adult to do, after paying his tribute to
_Fauntleroy_, is to read _The Shuttle_, “a novel of international
marriage.” It represents Mrs. Burnett’s life. She alone of all the
writers of our day could have written such a book, declares a friend
whose desire to remain anonymous is here observed. He supplies a sketch
of Mrs. Burnett which had better be reproduced verbatim:
“She is English of the English by birth and temperament; born in
Manchester, as you know, where she lived until she was about thirteen.
Then, her father having failed in business, owing to the war in
America--his failure had something to do with the blockading of the
Southern ports, I believe--and he having died, the business went to
ruin, although Mrs. Burnett’s mother tried her gentle best to save it.
There was a large family of them, and Frances, who had already developed
the faculty of story-telling, was the life and spirit of the crowd.
“An older brother had gone to join an uncle in Tennessee, and when the
family’s fortunes were at lowest ebb he advised them to join him in
America, which they did, and lived in the greatest poverty on the
outskirts of Knoxville. They were so poor that when some one suggested
that Frances write out one of her stories and send it to _Godey’s Lady’s
Book_ the money for the stamps had to be earned by picking blackberries.
“The first story was accepted and all subsequent stories sent. Then Mrs.
Burnett graduated to _Peterson’s Magazine_. The Petersons were great
friends of Mrs. Burnett in her early days. They recommended that she
send some of her stories to the _Century_, which she did, but the
quality of them was so English that the _Century_ editors suspected they
were not original but copied by the little Tennessee girl from stories
in English magazines. When her second story was sent to them, they gave
expression to their doubt. The thing was explained to them, and the
publication of the stories--I believe the first was _Surly Tim’s
Troubles_--was made immediately.
“Mrs. Burnett has always kept in touch with England and English life. As
soon as she had made her success, in fact, just after the publication of
_That Lass o’ Lowrie’s_, she went back to England, and has spent some
part of nearly every year in England since then. She has lived in all
sections of England and has had houses in London; one at 63 Portland
Place, and another in Charles Street, Mayfair. She has had country homes
in Norfolk, Kent and Surrey. For nearly fifteen years she leased a very
interesting old house in Kent, Maytham Hall, really the manor house of a
very ancient estate. The house stands in the most wonderful of Kentish
gardens, which Mrs. Burnett, with her enthusiasm for gardening, made
even more beautiful than they were when she took them.
“Maytham Hall was the homestead of an ancient family of Moneypenneys. On
the corner of the Hall grounds stands an ancient Norman church--the
church of the Hundred of Rolvenden which is mentioned in the Domesday
Book. All the Moneypenneys are buried in this church, which, in its
simple way, is of remarkable beauty. Their tombstones surround the great
Hall pew, which is almost as big as a room, and has tables and chairs in
it. The Hall grounds stand between two very picturesque villages, both
appanages of the estate, one called Rolvenden Village and the other
Rolvenden Street. They are as picturesque as they can be, full of the
quaint old gaffers and gammers.
“As to the American side of Mrs. Burnett, she has lived over here in
touch with the most characteristically and the most broadly American
society in Washington and later in New York and its vicinity. As a young
girl she saw a good deal of New York life and it was during that time, I
imagine, that she got the impressions that produced the earlier part of
_The Shuttle_. Her saying that she was ‘English by birth and American by
the birth of her two sons’ I have always thought an amusing expression
of her case. In describing Bettina to me, once, she said that Bettina
was a woman’s version of the cleverness and sense of values that the
first Reuben Vandenpoel expressed. This seems to me to be the underlying
quality in Bettina. Her sense of the world of things backed by her
balance, her self-control and her typical American practicality.”
Mrs. Burnett loathes New York for its noise and dirt. Though she no
longer has Maytham Hall with its great terraced lawns and its rose
gardens she has a big country place near Manhasset, Long Island, New
York, called Plandome. It is within commuting distance of New York but
oh, how different!
A comfortable, rambling house is surrounded by gardens for which Mrs.
Burnett buys flowers as uncontrollably as a bibliophile buys books. The
house faces northwest and has “remarkable glimpses of sunsets.” Mrs.
Burnett naturally has many children as visitors. For them there is a
great doll house, the home of Lady Annabelle, who is larger than many of
the youngsters that call on her, and who has a wonderful wardrobe. The
big house is full of nests of children’s toys. It also contains much
age-darkened furniture brought over from Maytham Hall, principally oak
pieces of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which Mrs. Burnett has
collected. Lady Annabelle’s residence, for example, was formerly a bread
and cheese cupboard which an antiquarian would tell you was probably
made by a skilled woodworker not later than the year 1500.
As if visitors were not enough, in such numbers as are hers, Mrs.
Burnett is always “neighborizing.” To children who live near by her she
read chapters of _The Secret Garden_ as they were finished. Now, she is
a most skillful reader. A very little girl of the lot sat listening for
hours on end. Impressions which flowered in _The Secret Garden_ came
from Maytham Hall where the rose gardens are surrounded by walls about
900 years old. Peasemarsh, Smallhive, Benenden are the names of towns
not far from Maytham Hall and all over the countryside you may
encounter, or could not many years back, children wearing red cloaks
given them by the Earl of Cranbrook. And what is the secret of _The
Secret Garden_? What does all this delightful picturesqueness enclose?
Why, an idea, namely, that if a healthful thought be planted in the mind
it pushes out unhealthful thoughts; and that if the body be unwell it
adjusts itself to the healthful thought and grows well. The secret
garden which, with its roses, surrounds the characters of the story,
plants in their minds all sorts of healthful thoughts. Mrs. Burnett is
not metaphysical, however. “Her roses, she declares, are always sincere
and endlessly instructive.”
She has suffered much from people who have interviewed her and have not
understood her, departing to write what they wanted her to say. She has
a philosophy but it is written in her books, definitely and decidedly.
It has no other existence and it cannot be separated from the tales
which are its embodiment. It is a peculiar characteristic of hers that
the moment an idea--a “concept” philosophically speaking--formulates
itself in her mind _it does so as some part of a story_. Her pleasant
persons and places have as definite ideas and theories and beliefs as
the most serious thesis but since they never presented themselves
abstractly to Mrs. Burnett they are not so conveyed by her. It is really
presumptuous, under the circumstances, to endeavor to express them
abstractly as we have just done in the case of _The Secret Garden_.
This will seem a hard saying to most of us, who are trained to try to
get at the kernel of everything. All modern education is designed to
teach men and women to think and express themselves abstractly with ease
and freedom and surety. Why? Because since the Greeks certain
abstractions and abstract thought and expression generally have been
prized as the best and safest and handiest medium of intellectual
exchanges. They are the intellectual coinage--a kind of verbal money
that obviates the clumsy old methods of barter. But while we are all
used to money and would not do without it we have to remember that the
majority of mankind still carries on a vast amount of intellectual
exchange by barter. You tell me an actual incident or a story you have
heard and I tell you what I have experienced or heard. We “swap”
experiences and knowledge and each benefits by what he gets from the
other without so much as drawing a single abstract conclusion or
generalization. The method has its disadvantages but lack of interest is
not one of them!
Understand this and you understand Mrs. Burnett. She is dealing with you
as you would deal with your neighbor. You would not go to your neighbor
and say: “It is possible to live too long.” You would go and tell him:
“John Smith’s mother isn’t treated decently. Yesterday,” etc., and you
would relate the actual occurrence. He would nod. And he would tell you
something in exchange. And neither of you would generalize about your
respective narrations, but each of you would take the lesson in them
well to heart. That is the way of the world and of neighbors. It is Mrs.
Burnett’s easily comprehended way too.
When she leaves Plandome Mrs. Burnett consents to spend a few days in
noisome New York--you can buy things there, after all, and editors and
publishers there do congregate--and then she flees to Bermuda. But not
until the last cosmos of autumn has perished and gone and every
flowerbed at Plandome has been “tucked in a blanket of fertilizer.” In
Bermuda she--gardens. She imports, in times more favorable than the
present, countless roses from England. Her Bermuda cottage is
unpretentious but charming.
To revert for a moment to _The Shuttle_, we may note something almost
prescient in what Mrs. Burnett said, in 1907, about England and America,
in a letter respecting this novel. She somewhat regretted the
characterization of the book as “a novel of international marriage.”
That, she argued, was hardly her theme. Of course not. She has no
abstract themes. She wrote:
“The subject (of international marriage) is an enormous one, and if I
had written all I have been observing for years and all I should have
liked to write I should have made a three-volume novel.
“When I say ‘the subject’ I do not mean merely the international
marriage question, but the whole international outlook upon a situation
between two great countries such as the history of the world--as far as
I know it--has not previously recorded. The wonderfulness of it lies in
the fact that two nations which were one, having parted with violence
and bitterness, are with a strange sureness being drawn nearer, nearer
to each other. That they are of the same blood--the mere fact that they
speak the same tongue--makes the thing inevitable in the end.
“I do not mean _The Shuttle_ to be merely a story of international
marriage, but to suggest a thousand other things. The international
marriage must, however, result in being a strong factor, and in the
hands of a writer of fiction it must play a prominent part--a leading
part, so to speak--because it is the love story, and without it we are
lost. For the matter of that, without it ‘the shouting and the tumult’
would die, ‘the captains and the kings depart.’
“Because I am English by birth and American by a sort of adoption, and
because I have vibrated between the two continents for years, I have
learned to be impersonal and unpartisan. I was neither American nor
English when I told the story. I was merely an intensely interested
person who had formed a habit of crossing the Atlantic twice a year.
“There have been disastrous international marriages and there have been
successful ones; there is no reason why there should not be
international marriages at once dignified and splendid--even
history-making. Still, I wish I had had room to add to _The Shuttle_
pictures of the thousand other things I find absorbing.”
It is not possible to do more than make suggestions as to what books of
Mrs. Burnett’s a reader should be sure to dip into. No two set of
suggestions would be identical, in all likelihood, but grownups can
acquire at least a respectable acquaintance with her work by reading
_That Lass o’ Lowrie’s_, _A Fair Barbarian_, _Little Lord Fauntleroy_,
_Sara Crewe_, _The Pretty Sister of José_, _In Connection With the De
Willoughby Claim_, _The Shuttle_, _The Dawn of a To-Morrow_, _The Secret
Garden_, _T. Tembaron_ and _Emily Fox-Seton_. No selective list for
children is worth making; give them any or all!
BOOKS BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
_That Lass o’ Lowrie’s_, 1877. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.
_Dolly, A Love Story_, 1877.
_Kathleen_, 1877. Hurst.
_Surly Tim and Other Stories_, 1877. Scribner.
_Haworth’s_, 1879. Scribner.
_Louisiana_, 1880. Scribner.
_A Fair Barbarian_, 1881. Scribner.
_Through One Administration_, 1883. Scribner.
_Little Lord Fauntleroy_, 1886. Scribner.
_Editha’s Burglar._ The Page Company, Boston.
_Sara Crewe_, 1888. Scribner.
_Little Saint Elizabeth_, 1889.
_Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress_, 1896. Scribner.
_The Pretty Sister of José_, 1896. Scribner.
_A Lady of Quality_, 1896. Scribner.
_His Grace of Ormonde_, 1897. Scribner.
_The Captain’s Youngest_, 1898.
_In Connection With the De Willoughby Claim_, 1899. Scribner.
_The Making of a Marchioness_, 1901. Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.
_The Methods of Lady Walderhurst._ Stokes.
_In the Closed Room_, 1904. Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.
_A Little Princess_, 1905. Scribner.
_Jarl’s Daughter_, 1906. Donohue. Given in the United States
Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).
_Queen Silverbell_, 1906. The Century Company, New York. Given
in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).
_Racketty-Packetty House_, 1906. Century. Given in the United
States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).
_Earlier Stories_ (_Lindsay’s Luck_, etc.), 1907. Scribner.
Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).
_Giovanni and the Other: Children Who Have Made
Stories_, 1907. Scribner. Given in the United States
Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).
_Emily Fox-Seton_ (Combining _The Making of a Marchioness_
and _The Methods of Lady Walderhurst_). Stokes.
_Lindsay’s Luck._ Hurst. Given in the United States Catalogue
of Books in Print (1912).
_Miss Crespigny._ Donohue. Given in the United States Catalogue
of Books in Print (1912).
_Piccino and Other Child Stories._ Scribner. Given in the
United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).
_Pretty Polly Pemberton._ Hurst. Given in the United States
Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).
_Quiet Life._ Donohue. Given in the United States Catalogue
of Books in Print (1912).
_Theo._ Hurst. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books
in Print (1912).
_Vagabondia._ Scribner. Given in the United States Catalogue
of Books in Print (1912).
_The Shuttle_, 1907. Stokes.
_The Cozy Lion_, 1907. Century.
_Good Wolf_, 1908. Moffat, Yard & Company, New York.
_Spring Cleaning_, 1908. Century.
_The Dawn of a To-Morrow_, 1909. Scribner.
_The Secret Garden_, 1909. Stokes.
_My Robin_, 1912. Stokes.
_T. Tembaron_, 1913. A. L. Burt Company, New York.
_Barty Crusoe and His Man Saturday_, 1914. Moffat, Yard.
_One I Knew The Best of All_, 1915. Scribner.
_The Lost Prince_, 1915. Burt.
_The Land of the Blue Flower_, 1916. Moffat, Yard.
_The Little Hunchback Zia_, 1916. Stokes.
_The Way to the House of Santa Claus_, 1916. Harper & Brothers, New York.
_White People_, 1917. Harper.
_The Head of the House of Coombe_, 1922. Stokes.
_Robin_, 1922. Stokes.