Frances Hodgson Burnett
A LITTLE PRINCESS
The swings of fortune experienced by the heroine of A Little
Princess, Sara Crewe, are hardly more fabulous than those of the author’s own life.
Frances Hodgson Burnett was born plain Frances Hodgson in Manchester, England
into comfortable circumstances in 1849, but her father died when she was just
four and the family was forced to live in a slum district of the city. There,
young Fanny developed a passion for reading, like Sara Crewe, together with an
unsentimental sympathy for the very poor and a sharp ear for their authentic
speech.
In 1865 her mother and her family emigrated to Knoxville,
Tennessee, where they lived in a log cabin, and where the growing teenager tried
one enterprise after another in order to help support the family. These
included attempting to run a small private school which, of course, in the form
of Miss Minchin’s infamous seminary, provides the setting for A Little
Princess.
Like Sara Crewe, Frances Hodgson triumphed over adversity
through the exercise of her imagination, through her ability to turn the plain
and messy experience of ordinary life into adven-tures and romances. She
started to send her stories to magazine editors whilst still a teenager, and
was immediately successful. She got married in 1873 to a doctor called Burnett,
with whom she lived in Washington and Paris, and had two sons whom she adored.
In 1883 her novels of social realism were being compared
with the literary giants of the day, like George Eliot and Henry James. But in
a letter she wrote with the first story she sent out, she made her intentions
quite plain: ‘My object is remuneration’; and her extravagant tastes ensured
that this would continue to be her main motivation for writing. So when she
discovered an ability to turn out more popular and undemanding works, she did
not resist it. However, if the billowing romance of these wish-fulfilling
narratives caught her readers’ imaginations, they did so through her ability to
ballast them with gritty realism, and through her attention to the telling
detail. As she herself once said of the art of writing, ‘It is not enough to
mention they have tea; you must specify the muffins.’
It was in this way that Hodgson Burnett came to share the
best-seller lists in 1886 with arguably the greatest novel ever written,
Tolstoy’s War and Peace. She achieved this with her most famous title, Little
Lord Fauntleroy. The eponymous hero (modelled upon her own son, Vivian) is a
brave-spirited little American boy who inherits an English earldom, and
succeeds in impressing upon his illustrious but crusty relatives the great
democratic principle of Hodgson Burnett’s adoptive country, expressed by the
poet Tennyson as ‘kind hearts are more than coronets’.
Little Lord Fauntleroy, published in 1886, brought Hodgson
Burnett fame and fortune. The book was turned into a play on both sides of the
Atlantic – the equivalent of a major Hollywood film today – and the splendid
little fellow’s outfit of black velvet knee breeches and tunic with Vandyke
collar and golden curls was subsequently inflicted on a whole generation of
little boys.
Her next novel was ‘Sara Crewe’; or what happened at Miss
Minchin’s, which was serialised in 1887, and appeared in book form the
following year. This was also turned into a stage play, renamed A Little
Unfairy Princess for the production in London, and A Little Princess in New
York. And it, too, was a wild success, so much so that the author was persuaded
to expand the original novel to include characters and incidents developed in
the stage version, particularly in the first half of the book. The result, A
Little Princess, has gone on to become an enduring and much-loved children’s
classic. It is a satisfying fantasy of virtue rewarded and vice punished as
well as delivering a deeper message, which is that morality is based in the
human imagination, in the ability to imagine what others feel.
Unfortunately, Hodgson Burnett discovered that real life is
never quite as romantic as fiction. One of her sons, called Lionel, died
tragically young, and she divorced her husband in 1898, marrying a much younger
man, whom she divorced in turn in 1901, after only a few months.
She lived in Kent during the 1890s, but continued to travel
constantly between London and New York. If she had not finally settled in Long
Island to tend her garden when the Titanic made her maiden voyage in 1912, she
would more than likely have been on- board the doomed liner. In fact, her last
great novel came out the previous year, in 1911, and was inspired by her love
of gardens. This was The Secret Garden, another story about an orphan brought
to England from India. But the dramatic reversals of fortune of her previous
popular fictions are here eschewed in favour of a gradual moral and spiritual
transformation of the young heroine.
Hodgson Burnett lived until 1924, in considerable style,
defying mundane reality – like little Sara Crewe – by creating her own image of
herself. She sustained her romantic dream in the face of old age with swathes
of chiffon and lace and a large orange wig. However, she was certainly right
when she wrote towards the end of her career: ‘What we all want is more...
life, love, hope – and an assurance that they are true. With the best that was
in me I have tried to write more happiness into the world’.
Her novels stand among the best from the great age of
children’s writing, which the Naxos junior classics collection is helping to
bring to a new generation of children, with recordings of Little Women, The
Railway Children and other favourites of the genre.
Notes by Duncan Steen
