The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett: In "the World of Actual Literature" by Thomas Recchio (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett: In "the World of Actual Literature" by Thomas Recchio Frances E. Dolan (bio) The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett: In "the World of Actual Literature", by Thomas Recchio; pp. vii + 230. London and New York: Anthem, 2020, $125.00, $40.00 paper, $40.00 ebook, £80.00, £25.00 paper, £25.00 ebook. As The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett: In "the World of Actual Literature" demonstrates, Frances Hodgson Burnett commands our attention not only as an enduringly popular children's author but also as a writer who defies categorizations that still structure curricula and bestseller lists. Born in Manchester, she emigrated with her widowed mother to Tennessee in 1865, when she was sixteen years old. Throughout her career, Burnett was as much an American writer as a British one. She wrote plays as well as novels and stories. Although she wrote more novels for adults than she did for children, those novels have been relatively little discussed. Thomas Recchio's book aspires to correct this oversight and to make the case for Burnett's worth as a serious novelist, a case that he argues has been stalled by her very success and visibility as a writer for children. The phrase in the book's subtitle, "in 'the world of actual literature,'" is one Recchio adopts from Burnett, and it suggests that children's literature is not actual literature, a dated assumption but still one against which the authors, teachers, and critics of children's literature must contend (23). Whether Burnett's adult fiction is actually more literary than her novels for children, the novels repay sustained attention. 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 (including British, mid-Victorian domestic realism in Burnett's first novels; regional American social realism in the 1880s; historical fiction in the 1890s; novels about transatlantic marriages in the early twentieth century; and, finally, her post-World War I modernist romances). Simply summarizing Recchio's structure suggests how Burnett wrote across genres and across periods. Recchio bookends his study by reading Burnett against Elizabeth Gaskell in the first chapter and T. S. Eliot in the last. Recchio is particularly concerned with challenging two widely repeated narratives about Burnett. First, he challenges the notion that critics lost respect for Burnett [End Page 365] following the boom and bust of her children's novel Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885–86), which was hugely popular upon its publication but later disdained as sentimental. While the novel has not stood the test of time quite as well as A Little Princess (1905) or The Secret Garden (1911), it also was not, he argues, a watershed in terms of critical reception of Burnett's work. Second, Recchio is at pains to argue that Burnett did not lose her creative ambition as a writer or shift her focus only to profit, but remained invested in aesthetic achievement to the end of her career. If there was a shift, he argues, it was not in Burnett herself but in perceptions of her as a female writer of popular novels, a disparaged group. The more she was identified by her gender, Recchio argues, the harder it was for her to command respect. Let me focus in particular on the chapter on historical fictions, "Historical Dreamscapes and the Vicissitudes of Class: From A Lady of Quality to The Methods of Lady Walderhurst." As Recchio points out, Burnett wrote romance plots without being all that interested in their conventions and usually focused more on the female protagonist than the male or the couple. This is especially true of the extraordinary protagonist in A Lady of Quality (1896), Clorinda Wildairs, whom contemporary reviewer Israel Zangwill praised for her "Nietzsche-like individualism" (94). Recchio sees the novel as "a thought experiment" and "not a philosophical novel as such but a historical novel distanced enough in time to allow for socially sensitive material to be handled without reserve" (94). Recchio rightly waives the question of historical inaccuracy, assigning the historical novel the more interesting function of using the past to...