The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett

In "the World of Actual Literature"

By Thomas Recchio

Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series

Although she is remembered today mainly as a writer of children’s books, Frances Hodgson Burnett was a widely published novelist. Of high literary quality, her novels covered a range of genres, including industrial novels, American-themed social novels, historical novels, transatlantic novels and post–World War I novels. They were popular subjects in the early years of cinema. “The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett” reads Burnett’s novels in the context of the changing literary field in England and the United States in the years between the death of George Eliot in 1880 through to the Great War.

Paperback, 238 Pages

ISBN:9781839982330

April 2022

£25.00, $40.00

  • About This Book
  • Reviews
  • Author Information
  • Series
  • Table of Contents
  • Links
  • Podcasts

About This Book

Frances Hodgson Burnett is remembered today as the author of the children’s classic “The Secret Garden,” but in her lifetime she had a long and successful career as a novelist, dramatist, and writer of children’s stories. Born in 1849 in Manchester, England, Burnett settled in Tennessee with her mother and siblings at sixteen after her father’s death. She began writing stories to supplement her family’s income. With the acceptance of the story “Surly Tim’s Trouble” by “Scribner’s Magazine” in New York and the subsequent publication of her first novel “That Lass O’Lowries” in 1877, the critics hailed Burnett as a new voice in American fiction comparing her favorably to Charles Dickens.

Burnett’s early novels were written in the years prior to and immediately after the death of George Eliot in 1880, their form very much in the Victorian tradition of realism. Her first two novels were social problem novels set in a mining and manufacturing district in Lancashire and they deployed the local dialect to great effect. Even in those early traditional novels, the contours of Burnett’s unique conception of her later female characters can be discerned. After her industrial novels, she published a short American regional novel about rural life in North Carolina and an English village novel modelled on Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Cranford” with this difference: Burnett’s heroine in that tale is a young, vibrant American woman. With the publication of her Washington novel “Through One Administration,” which critics compared to Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady” as fine examples of the “new fiction,” Burnett’s career as a novelist was firmly established. Thus, the early chapters of this book read Burnett’s novels alongside those of Elizabeth Gaskell and Henry James as a way to demonstrate her place is the changing literary field of the time.

After her Washington novel, she turned away from realism and the psychological minuteness of the new fiction to experiment with both traditional and popular novel forms. She next published two historical novels “A Lady of Quality” and “His Grace of Osmonde,” the first a tale of her most challenging heroine Clorinda Wildairs and the second a tale of the man Clorinda ultimately marries. Taken together the two novels tell the same tale from a woman’s and a man’s point of view. “The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett” places those novels in the context of theories of the Victorian historical novel and in relation with Victorian narrative deployment of multiple points of view.

She next published a pair of transatlantic novels roughly modelled on a pattern she sketched out in her children’s classic, “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” The novels engage with issues related to the “new woman” novel of the period, especially in relation to fears of cultural degeneration and the responsibility of women to redress those fears. Her last two novels appeared after the Great War in which she wrestled with the crisis of meaning for Anglo-American culture in the wake of the war. The final chapter of this book, then, places those last novels in relation to Great War novels written by women and frames a reading of Burnett’s engagement with the Great War through T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Read as a body of literary fiction, Burnett’s novels constitute an important thread that chronicles the changing contexts and forms of English and American fiction from the end of the Victorian period to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

Reviews

“Recchio’s book on Frances Hodgson Burnett is an excellent example of a popular woman writer reclaimed in the twenty-first century for her generically varied, financially successful and still relevant fiction. This book is a must for anyone interested in women’s writing, Victorian to modernist literary developments and First World War writing.” —Janine Hatter, Programme Manager, PGTS, Doctoral College, University of Hull, UK

With this literary reclamation of Burnett's novels, Thomas Recchio has made a significant contribution to nineteenth- and twentieth-century studies, persuasively arguing for the recognition of Frances Hodgson Burnett as a serious writer. One way in which The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett develops its in-depth analysis is by exploring intersecting threads of Burnett's life and career, thereby offering rich contexts in which to highlight her craft. - Ruth Y. Jenkins, The Lion and the Unicorn, Johns Hopkins University Press, Volume 44, Number 2, April 2020, pp. 213-215.

Recchio offers detailed readings of most of Burnett’s fourteen adult novels (by his count), which he organizes into five roughly chronological clusters grouped by genre and topic. […] This book amply documents Burnett’s prolific work as a novelist for adults, her engagements with and influence on literary traditions in two countries and two centuries, and the rewards of reading her fiction more widely and critically —Victorian Studies

Author Information

Thomas Recchio is professor of English, emeritus at the University of Connecticut, USA. He is the author of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford: A Publishing History (2009) and the editor of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (2008). Recchio has published widely in Victorian studies.

Series

Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Introduction; Chapter One Learning from Elizabeth Gaskell; Chapter Two Writing as an American: The Portrait of a Washington Lady; Chapter Three Historical Dreamscapes and the Vicissitudes of Class: From A Lady of Quality to The Methods of Lady Walderhurst; Chapter Four Transatlantic Alliances in The Shuttle and T. Tembarom; Chapter Five After the Great War: Emerging from the Wasteland in The Head of the House of Coombe and Robin; Bibliography; Index.

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