BURNETT, Frances (Eliza) Hodgson

Born 24 November 1849, Manchester, England; died 29 October 1924, Plandome, New York

Daughter of Edwin and Eliza Boond Hodgson; married SwanMoses Burnett, 1875 (divorced 1898); Stephen Townsend, 1900 (until 1907)

Frances Hodgson Burnett, the middle of five children, lived until she was sixteen in Manchester, England. A dame school she attended there provided her only formal education. In 1865, after her businessman father died, the family joined a relative in Knoxville, Tennessee, where financial need prompted Burnett to sell her first story, published when she was nineteen. In 1873 she married an eye specialist, with whom she had two sons. Burnett's writing proved a major means of the young family's support, and her success as a writer of popular fiction made her a celebrity which allowed her family to enjoy an expensive international lifestyle. In 1898 Burnett and her husband were divorced. From 1900 to 1907 she was married to Stephen Townsend, whose theatrical aspirations she had been championing since 1889 in London, while she was overseeing the stage production of her stories.

Burnett's career was productive as well as long. Her 55 titles include five bestsellers, and 13 of her stories and novels were adapted for the stage in England or America. After her first story was published in Godey's Lady's Book in 1868, Burnett wrote formulaic love stories for fashionable magazines before graduating to novels. Several of these, novels of working-class and political life such as That Lass o' Lowries (1877), Louisiana (1880), and Through One Administration (1883), gained her critical recognition as a serious artist. American reviewers compared her work favorably with that of George Eliot and placed her in the front rank of young American fiction writers.

Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), based on her son Vivian, established Burnett's reputation as a popular writer. Intended primarily for children, the book became a bestseller and was soon translated into more than a dozen languages. Burnett's stage version was popular in England and France as well as in America; in 1924, Mary Pickford starred in a film version. After this success, Burnett wrote more books for children, two of which continue to find an appreciative audience: A Little Princess (1905), which has been made into several film adaptations, including in 1939 starring Shirley Temple; and The Secret Garden (1911), a pastoral novel considered a juvenile classic.

The books that found their way onto annual lists of bestsellers, however, were novels of fashionable social life written for adults: A Lady of Quality (1896), the story of a strong-willed woman in early 18th-century England; The Shuttle (1907), a novel about an Anglo-American marriage; T. Tembarom (1913), a Horatio Alger-type sequel to The Shuttle; and The Head of the House of Coombe (1922), a portrayal of social life in London before World War I.

Burnett's life and writing were characterized by tensions between the serious artist and the popular writer, the independent woman and the self-sacrificing wife and mother. While she was laboring over a 512-page portrayal of Anglo-American relationships (The Shuttle), she would shock her readers with a heroine who has been reared as a boy and later kills her husband with a riding whip (A Lady of Quality), then dash off a novella about a woman who, through self-abasing humility, wins the hand of a wealthy nobleman (The Making of a Marchioness, 1901).

A Burnett biographer, Ann Thwaite, suggests that Burnett's first bestseller changed her from a talented realist comparable to Elizabeth Gaskell into a pen-driving machine turning out inferior romances. But it can also be argued that Burnett excelled when she stayed close to the fairy tale, as in her best-known children's works, or when her tensions as artist and woman were allowed to inform and discipline her work, as in The Making of a Marchioness, which contains within the literary context of a romantic Cinderella tale a scathing portrayal of women's plight in the Edwardian marriage market.

Other Works:

Dolly (1877, reprinted as Vagabondia, 1883). Pretty Polly Pemberton (1877). Surly Tim (1877). Theo (1877). Earlier Stories, First and Second Series (1878). Kathleen (1878). Miss Crespigny (1878). Our Neighbor Opposite (1878). A Quiet Life (1878). The Tide on the Moaning Bar (1878). Haworth's (1879). Jarl's Daughter (1879). Natalie (1879). Esmeralda (1881). A Fair Barbarian (1881). Editha's Burglar (1888; dramatization, Nixie, 1890). The Fortunes of Philippa Fairfax (1888; dramatization, Phyllis, 1889). The Real Little Lord Fauntleroy (1888). Sara Crewe (1888). A Woman's Will; or, Miss Defarge (1888). The Pretty Sister of José (1889; dramatization, 1903). Little Saint Elizabeth (1890). The Drury Lane Boys' Club (1892). Giovanni and the Other (1892). The Showman's Daughter (1892). The One I Knew the Best of All (1893). Piccino, and Other Child Stories (1894). The Two Little Pilgrims' Progress (1895). The First Gentleman of Europe (1897). His Grace of Osmonde (1897). In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim (1899; dramatization, That Man and I, 1904). The Methods of Lady Walderhurst (1901). In the Closed Room (1905). The Dawn of a Tomorrow (1906; produced 1909). Racketty Packetty House (1906; produced 1912). The Troubles of Queen Silver-Bell (1906). The Cozy Lion (1907). The Good Wolf (1908). The Spring Cleaning (1908). Barty Crusoe and His Man Saturday (1909). The Land of the Blue Flower (1909). My Robin (1912). The Lost Prince (1915). Little Hunchback Zia (1916). The White People (1917). Robin (1922). In the Garden (1925).

Bibliography:

Bixler, P., Frances Hodgson Burnett (1984). Burnett, C. B., Happily Ever After (1969). Burnett, V., The Romantick Lady (1927). Koppes, P. B., "Tradition and the Individual Talent of Frances Hodgson Burnett," in Children's Literature 7 (1978). Laski, M., Mrs. Ewing, Mrs. Molesworth, and Mrs. Hodgson Burnett (1950). Mollson, F. J., "Frances Hodgson Burnett, (1828-1924)," in American Literary Realism (Winter 1975). Thwaite, A., Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett (1974).

—PHYLLIS BIXLIR KOPPES