Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden (review)

A first-rate biography requires a fascinating life told with a storyteller's skill. Gerzina provides both in this compelling new biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett. It's unclear why Gerzina chose to subtitle the book by highlighting the "unexpected" aspects of Burnett's life, for while her contemporaries (and Burnett herself), would have been surprised to see her lasting fame rest on The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, rather than the sensationally popular Little Lord Fauntleroy or her many acclaimed novels for adults, the basic outline of Burnett's life and legacy is familiar to the many readers of Ann Thwaite's equally readable biography of Burnett, Waiting for the Party, published in 1991.

At times, particularly in the earlier chapters, the two books seem overly similar, with Gerzina merely providing a somewhat longer and more embroidered account of the identical material offered by Thwaite. For example, in the chapter on the first years of her marriage to Swan Burnett, both authors quote a miserably hot and pregnant Frances as "lying on the bed in the loosest and thinnest of wrappers fanning with a palm leaf fan & panting & longing for rain." Both quote all seven stanzas of an unpublished poem suggesting suicidal thoughts, beginning with the ominous line, "When I am dead & lie before you low." Both describe young Lionel's amusing play with his little doll named Gutter. Those turning to Gerzina's biography after a recent reading or re-reading of Thwaite's may find themselves thinking, "Where have I read these very lines before?"

However, Gerzina's biography is considerably more substantial, more scholarly, and more fully realized than Thwaite's. Thwaite focuses on the single theme of "waiting for the party," structuring her story around Burnett's restless dissatisfaction throughout her life, waiting for a metaphorical party that never really lived up to her dizzying expectations. Gerzina offers a more multi-layered and multi-themed portrait of Burnett's life, telling us in her prologue that "Frances was known for five things: her unrelenting literary production, which often drove her to illness; her love of beautiful clothes and domestic surroundings; her inability to remain settled in one place, or even in one country; her wonderful gardens; and in the second half of her life, compassion and enormous generosity to friends and strangers alike" (xv).

Gerzina's most striking observation, in my view, is her comparing "the heart-wrenching premise" of Little Lord Fauntleroy—"that in order to inherit the title Cedric must live separately from his 'Dearest'"—to Frances's own life: this "sounds a poignant note from the pen of a woman who spent months each year away from her sons" (122). Gerzina sees the turning point in Burnett's life as the death of her firstborn son, Lionel, of consumption; she unflinchingly faces Frances's "curious" behavior of leaving her dying son in Paris for more than two weeks to attend to business regarding the production of a new play in London. Even acknowledging Frances's exhaustion and financial pressures, "it is hard to excuse her for what seems like temporary abandonment" (141). Later, in her relationship with her surviving son, Vivian, who endured the lifelong stigma of having been the model for Fauntleroy, it was, above all else, important to Frances to earn sufficient income to establish him as a gentleman; she consoled him for yet another lengthy separation by writing, '"Do you realize how different you would have been if I had not been determined to do the best for you and make you happy. . . . You would have lived in a small house & worn shabby clothes, & would have spent your summers & winters in Washington. You would not have traveled and seen new countries . . . you would not have learned French & Italian'" (154).

While this will seem to reflect misguided maternal priorities to many readers, Gerzina provides an ultimately generous interpretation of Burnett's maternal and...