Burnett Frances Hodgson - Beyond the Secret garden: the life of Frances Hodgson Burnett

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

The ebook of my first biography is the sixth appearance of my life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, and this Print-on-Demand edition is the seventh. I am very glad Macmillan Bello is making the book available in these new forms. Macmillan was one of my earliest publishers, bringing out my childrens novel The Camelthorn Papers (later a Puffin) in 1969 and the annual Allsorts, which I edited, over five years.

The first hardbacks of this book were published under the title Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett. They came out in 1974, both in England, from Secker and Warburg, and in America, from Scribner, one of Burnetts own publishers, whose archives at Princeton were a useful source. So were her daughter-in-law, Constance, and her grand-daughter, Dorinda, in Boston, both long since dead.

The excellent reviews included ones from Alison Lurie (on both sides of the Atlantic) and from Elizabeth Jane Howard, who reminded me of hers, not long before her recent death.

Two paperbacks followed, under the same title: from David R. Godine of Boston in the United States in 1991 and from Faber and Faber in London in 1994. Both of these came out after the award of the Biography of the Year prize to my life of A. A. Milne.

Then, when they were out of print, Sophie Bradshaw, a keen young editor at Tempus (later part of the History Press) included both books in her list of literary biographies. In 2007 she asked me to agree to a new title, which would make readers immediately aware of Burnetts most beloved book. We have kept this title for the new editions and I look forward to a new generation of readers.

Ann Thwaite, Norfolk, 2014.

FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people have asked me how I came to write this book. I can trace my first consideration of the possibility to a passage in John Rowe Townsends useful study of childrens literature Written for Children (1965).

Frances Hodgson Burnett was a more powerful and I believe a more important writer than Miss Yonge or Mrs Ewing or Mrs Molesworth. On the strength of only three books... I believe she must be acknowledged as standing far above every other woman writer for children except E. Nesbit; and there are depths in Mrs Hodgson Burnett that Nesbit never tried to plumb. It is hard to account for her neglect (neglect by critics that is; she has not been neglected by readers). I do not know of any modern study of her work beyond an eighteen-page chapter in a book by Marghanita Laski... True, Mrs Hodgson Burnetts personal character was flamboyant and unappealing; in the years of her success she suffered a gross inflation of the ego; and Miss Laski justly says she emerges from the pages of her sons book The Romantick Lady as aggressively domineering, offensively whimsical and abominably self-centred and conceited. But if we were to judge writers by theirpersonal qualities rather than their worka mistake which Miss Laski does not makethe map of English literature would be a very odd one. I think myself that a large part of the explanation lies in the notoriety of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Instead of adding to its authors reputation, as it should, this book hangs albatross-wise round her neck.

Until I read this, I had no idea that Mrs Burnett was considered to have been flamboyant and unappealing. Could the author of The Secret Garden really have been so self-centred and unattractive a character? I could not believe it, and I wanted to find the evidence. The Secret Garden was one of the three or four most important books of my own childhood, in that it was read and re-read, and the atmosphere of it became part of my own life. I knew Mary Lennox better than most of the children in my own form at school and Misselthwaite Manor better than many places I had lived in. Marghanita Laski, in the study referred to by John Rowe Townsend, says of The Secret Garden: It is the most satisfying childrens book I know. I have found countless people share this view.

I would like to express my thanks to both Mr Townsend and Miss Laskito the latter in particular for her bibliography, which first put me on the track of many books I had never heard of and which is the basis of my own fuller one. It was Miss Laski who first drew my attention to the fact that Mrs Burnett was not only the author of three outstanding childrens books but of numerous adult novels and plays. She did not begin as a writer for childrenher first novel was compared favourably with those of George Eliotand even after the phenomenal success of Little Lord Fauntleroy she continued to devote much more of her time to the adult market.

I must also acknowledge my debt to Vivian Burnetts book about his mother: it was published by Scribners in New York in 1927 but never appeared in England. If Mrs Burnett emerges from this book as domineering, conceited and the rest, it was certainly not because Vivian saw her that way. His book is an act of filial piety. It is written in a style which, forty-five years later, we find unbearably fey but it is strong on facts and surprisingly frank at times. I have whenever possible gone back to original sources and I have read hundreds of letters, newspaper interviews and news items, some of them quoted in that book. It is interesting to find that the only consistent cuts in Vivians quotations from letters are in references to smoking. Israel Zangwill is not allowed to wish Frances cigarettes and peppermints ad lib, nor is she permitted to call one of the rooms at Maytham a smoking-room. There are other letters, of course, particularly during the short years of his mothers marriage to Stephen Townesend, which Vivian did not use at all. My most important source outside the family and the hundreds of unpublished letters to and from Frances in the Scribner archives at Princeton University, was an unpublished memoir, including a number of her letters, by Henry Hadfield which I found in Manchester Public Library. This added considerably to my knowledge of her early years which is otherwise based largely on her own memories recorded in 1892 in The One I Knew the Best of All.

Throughout I have remembered R. L Stevensons dictum, It must always be foul to tell what is false and it can never be safe to suppress what is true, and I am very grateful to the Burnett family for their cooperation. I know they did not welcome the idea of a new biography. They knew how much Vivian had suffered all his life from his identification with Little Lord Fauntleroy. They were worried that a biographer would turn psychiatrist and analyse with cruelty that motherson relationship. They felt that Vivian had written Mrs Burnetts life and that that should be enough. But once they accepted I really was writing the book, Vivians daughter, Dorinda, and her husband Robert Le Clair could not have been kinder and more helpfulsending me fat parcels of old letters and encouraging me with their sympathetic interest in the task I had set myself.

I have used the name Frances throughout for convenience, although she was rarely called that. As a child, she was Fannie; later it was Fluffy or Dearest or Mrs Burnett or Mrs Townesend. With a man it is simple to use his surname throughout; with a woman it is more complicated. If Frances suggests a degree of intimacy she would never have allowed me, I am sorry.

Some people may find the plot-paraphrases and reviews of books and plays irritating and prefer to get on with the life; but it seemed to me essential, when so many of her books and plays are totally forgotten, to give considerable space to them. I have not been consistent in my treatment. Mrs Burnett wrote too much for me to cover fully the contents and reception of everything she produced. I have preferred to be influenced more by the interest of the material available than by the importance I place on the book or play.