Beyond the Secret Garden

by Ann Thwaite

  The last phrase was overdoing it, besides being a confusing mixed metaphor. Frances never considered herself a “poor little woman”. Swan would write back, of course, and say he cared; it was nonsense for her to say nobody else cared a cent. But Frances didn’t want his help. She wanted to be the one to do the raising. Swan should have been warned. And although Frances’ desires in this letter are impeccable—books, travel, music—and the homely “wedgetables” enforces the wholesomeness of her longings, her stories at this time show that she already knew the temptations of “luxurious gayety”, of selfishness and scheming ambition. She protests too much about how horrible it is to marry for money. If she had been beautiful and had had no talent . . . But she was not, and she had. She was also extremely hard-working, though naturally, she insisted, lazy.

  The editor who was receiving most of her work in 1871 was Charles Peterson, owner and editor of Peterson’s Ladies Magazine. Like Godey’s, Peterson’s contained fashions and recipes but Mr Peterson himself was a cultivated man with a real concern for literature.

  Mr. Peterson began by paying me as the rest did but after I had sent him a few stories he wrote me a letter I could not easily forget. He told me that my work was worth more to him than that of his other contributors and that this being the case, he felt it only fair that he should pay me more . . . He sent me a check which was almost double what I had received before . . . This was only the initial act of a series of most generous kindnesses. I was so young and so unprotected by any worldly knowledge, and he protected me against my own simplicity.

  He actually encouraged her to aim higher and try the literary magazines which she had thought beyond her abilities. The contrast between early stories like “Kathleen Mavourneen” and “Pretty Polly Pemberton” and the others, such as “Surly Tim” and “Seth”, is a striking one. It is not that the first type are clumsy or amateurish. Certainly Frances was writing about a world she did not know, but she was a lot older than Daisy Ashford and the gaffes are few. She has the air of being a confident young writer. If the ideas are commonplace, limited to the conventions of the women’s magazine stories of the time, and the language dull, there is a lightness of touch in the telling and enough humour to distinguish them from most of their companions in Peterson’s or Godey’s.

  Frances always had a weakness for physical beauty (her obsession with Cedric’s beauty is one of the flaws in Little Lord Fauntleroy) and in these stories all the girls are beautiful, with pretty, innocent faces and lovely figures. Their heads are set on their charming throats like lilies on their stems. She also indulges her weakness for romantic names: Gaston Framleigh and Diana Dalrymple are the sort of people who move in this world. The two particular stories I have mentioned, “Polly Pemberton” and “Kathleen Mavourneen”, illustrate how repetitive she could be (which is not surprising, remembering how she was churning them out). Both stories use Frances’ favourite theme throughout her life—that of a sudden reversal of fortune. Polly’s great-aunt dies, Kathleen’s uncle dies. They both leave vast sums of money to these penniless young women, one an actress, the other a governess. Both girls know money won’t buy happiness, both have misunderstandings with their lovers, and both end happily. Frances had admonished her character: “Stick to your jackdaw’s feathers, Polly Pemberton, and don’t let yourself dream—even dream—of peacock’s plumes.” But Polly gets her peacock plumes all right in the end.

  Frances’ own path to similar adornment was not through romantic women’s magazine stories but through much more impressive fiction, a new realism. In September 1871—she was then nearly twenty-two—Frances decided to approach the prestigious Scribner’s Monthly in New York. It was a new magazine—its first issue had appeared the previous November. It was the first quality magazine to carry advertising, it paid well and it at once fulfilled Charles Scribner’s ambitions for it: “I want to issue a magazine that is handsomely illustrated beautifully printed and that shall have as contributors the best writers of the day.” This is the reply Frances received when she sent off her first story:

  October 3 1871

  F. Hodgson or Dr Burnett:

  The story of “The Woman who Saved me” is declined on account of its length. It would make nearly 16 of our pages which is too much for a “short story” and we don’t want any more serials.

  Who are you? You write with a practised hand and we shall always be glad to hear from you. Stories should not be more than eight or ten pages in length.

  R. W. Gilder

  Swan Burnett had returned to Knoxville from New York and had taken a small office in Gay Street and was trying to establish himself as a specialist in the eye and ear. When not working, he spent a good deal of time, as he was to do for many years, writing Frances’ business letters for her. He was also still spending a good deal of time trying to persuade her to marry him.

  Frances was a little hurt that none of the numerous stories she had contributed to other magazines had made any impression on the editorial staff of Scribner’s, for she had long ago discarded her nom de plume and had been writing as “Fannie Hodgson”. But she was not put off, and when, soon after, she found herself weeping as she finished “Surly Tim”, she decided to try Scribner’s again. The editor-in-chief was Dr J. G. Holland, who, under the name of Timothy Titcomb, was at this time in the middle of waging a campaign against the “literary buffoon”, Mark Twain; R. W. Gilder was the assistant editor, then aged twenty-seven. This rather unconventional acceptance eventually arrived from New York:

  Feb 23 1872

  My dear Miss Hodgson:

  Dr Holland, Dr Holland’s daughter (Miss Annie) and Dr Holland’s right-hand man (myself) have all wept sore over “Surly Tim”. Hope to weep again over MSS from you.

  Very sincerely and tearfully,

  Watson Gilder

  This was the beginning of a long working relationship and friendship with Richard Watson Gilder. Throughout her life, Frances was to regard him affectionately as a sort of “cherished relative”, though, in later years, they rarely met. He was the one person she would really trust to read her proofs or cut with his blue pencil. At one stage, in 1881, their relationship was dangerously unbusinesslike and did much to weaken her marriage, but in the first few years he was the ideal editor, encouraging her, listening to her and making sure she did justice to the talent he had recognized in this first story, “Surly Tim”. After his death in 1909, she wrote: “I could imagine no pleasure more keen to one born with the storytelling habit than to sit and tell a growing story to Richard Gilder, led on and on by the mere luring gleam in the extraordinary eyes no-one who knew him well will ever forget.”

  “Surly Tim” is sub-titled “a Lancashire Story”. Most of the tragic story—and it has the true ring of tragedy, so much so that Gilder’s acceptance letter seems unbearably flippant—is told in the words of Tim Hibblethwaite himself. It was more than six years since Frances had left Lancashire but the dialect was still in her ears, and Tim’s story is the real thing, in quite a different category from the tales of watering-places and society with which Frances had boiled her pots. So is the story “Seth”—set in a Tennessee mining village called Black Creek but with the main characters all Lancashire people. There were indeed numbers of Lancashire immigrants mining in East Tennessee at that time. The story is beautifully controlled from its first plain sentence: “He came in one evening at sunset with the empty coal-train—his dull young face pale and heavy-eyed with weariness.” Much of the final effect of the story depends on the revelation that the young miner, Seth, is in fact a girl, but again the feeling is a truly tragic one. There is nothing sensational about it.

  From now on Frances found “it was not necessary to write six stories a month when she wanted to cross the Atlantic”. She wanted to return to England for a visit and she had money enough to do so. She was determined to go, and nothing Swan Burnett could say would stop her. But she agreed to marry him on her return. Swan wondered whether she would ever come back. He concentr
ated on the eyes and ears of Knoxville with despair. But in fact Frances’ feelings flourished on their separation and the regular diet of love-letters. Seen from the other side of the Atlantic, Swan became a more romantic figure than he had ever been when readily available. Frances enjoyed the rôle of separated lover.

  She left Tennessee for the first time in nearly seven years and, at the age of twenty-two, met for the first time some literary people. It was five years since Frances had imagined editors as tigers with hydrophobia foaming at the sight of an untidy manuscript or an insufficiency of stamps, but it was still with a certain amount of trepidation that she arrived in New York on her way to England. There is only one story of her days in New York; she was apparently whisked off by a rival editor—a woman considered “advanced” in her thinking—from under the nose of R. W. Gilder. Gilder waited at her hotel until the two women finally returned after midnight. However, he was not deterred and accepted a revised version of “The Woman who Saved me”, the story he had sent back, because of its length, a few months before. The payment was a hundred dollars. He also gave her a list of books she should read. Her self-education continued.

  Frances arrived in England late in the spring of 1872. She had evidently made some arrangement with the Knoxville Daily Chronicle, for the first news of her is a piece in that paper by-lined “Chester, August 1st 1872” telling of some of the hazards of an American tourist in England. It is interesting to realize that these rather familiar activities were going on more than a hundred years ago:

  Of course we were prowling you know. It means going to a place as tourists always do go to places, wandering from one end of it to the other, appearing in groups in all sorts of impossible corners that are remarkably hard to get at, and not much to look at when they are reached. It means snatching a ghost of a dinner at a fashionable restaurant, and then rushing off again and goading one’s unfortunate guide to madness by insisting on being led into mouldy places in damp situations for the express purpose of seeing nothing in particular.

  Sightseeing was a new experience for Frances and she probably enjoyed it a good deal more than she thought it proper to express in a column for the local paper in Tennessee. A letter to Rosie Campbell, the small daughter of their Knoxville doctor, is more typical. All her life Frances was really fond of the company of children. She had often walked along the banks of the Tennessee River with Anne and Ada and Rosie Campbell and told them stories of the days when the Cherokee Indians were camped near Knoxville. Now she wrote to Rosie from England. The letter is dated New Year’s Day 1873, and Frances was staying at Clifton Hall, the home of the sister-in-law of her old friend, Henry Hadfield. Nearly all the Hadfields were there and it was a happy time. Frances wrote for the “amateur theatricals” a burlesque called The Fool of the Family, but her great personal success was as Bo Peep, though it is difficult to believe the children thought she was beautiful when we see the moon-faced girl whose portrait appeared that Christmas, with others, on the title-page of Petersons Magazine. Frances nearly always disliked the photographs that were taken of her and she had good reason to dislike this one.

  She wrote to Rosie:

  I have been very sick for a long time, but I am quite well again. I have been having a very merry Christmas. Just before Christmas day the ladies I am visiting gave a grand party for little children and twenty nice little girls and boys came, all beautifully dressed, and danced and had cake and wine and almonds and raisins and all sorts of good things.

  And besides that we grown-up people acted a little piece on a stage for them like people do at the theater. I had a very pretty dress made on purpose to wear while I sung them a little song called “Little Bo Peep”. I was the little Bo Peep and my dress was made of rose-colored silk and had flowers and lace and satin bows on it and the children thought I was beautiful. After I had sung the song I came off the stage onto their dancing room and they all crowded round me and begged me to dance with them. And I did dance with them, one after the other and you should have seen how sweet they were and how prettily they behaved. I wish my Rosie had been there to dance with little Bo Peep too.

  Frances also told Rosie that she had some presents for her and would bring them when she came home in the summer. It is the first record of a pleasure she was to give herself all through her life, the buying of dolls’-house furniture and equipment:

  In the first place there is a whole dinner service for your doll, plates and dishes and sauce boat and vegetable dishes and bread plates and everything else.

  There is a set of doll’s chairs covered with rose-colored silk and edged with gilt and then there is a doll’s center table with a real marble top and a little decanter stand with pink bottles on it to put on the table. And then there is a bureau and a sideboard with real marble tops and mirrors over them and all of these things I am saving for you, my love. Give my love to Anne and Ada and tell them I shall have something too, for them. Don’t forget to be a good little girl and help mamma,

  Your affectionate, Fannie.

  Rosie remembered them as the best present she had ever had.

  Frances spent most of her time in England with the Boonds, her Uncle John’s family, but she also stayed with friends in Cheetham Hill and with the Hadfields at Strawberry Hill, just outside Manchester. Henry Hadfield recorded: “She spent several weeks with us, making herself completely one of the family. She wrote a good deal, but was seldom absent from the family circle for long.”

  Frances did not try the English magazines but she sent stories back to America regularly. Stories appeared almost monthly in Scribner’s, Harper’s, Peterson’s, Leslie’s and Godey’s Lady’s Book. The Editor of Harper’s, in accepting “One Quiet Episode”, predicted that a brilliant career lay before her.

  She returned to Tennessee in August and the wedding was fixed to take place in the Burnett family home in New Market on 19th September 1873. Frances wanted to delay the wedding, because the wedding dress she had ordered in England had not yet arrived. But Swan was not having it. He said he had waited seven years and he was not waiting any longer—any more waiting would have to be after the wedding: “and this in face of all my prayers, tears and agonised appeals”, Frances wrote to the Hadfield girls in Manchester. “Men are so shallow—they have no idea of the solemnity of things! I am fully convinced that today he does not know the vital importance of the difference between white satin and tulle, and cream-colored brocade. He thinks that one did quite as well as the other and that neither could have much to do with the seriousness of the marriage ceremony.”

  Edith and Edwina were both already married and they came to the wedding from Knoxville, each with a baby in arms. Edith described the occasion briefly: “the old-fashioned living-room, lit with candles, had a sort of plain dignity, and after the simple ceremony we went into the dining-room for supper.”

  Frances and Swan went to New York for the honeymoon. Through Richard Gilder they met George MacDonald and Bret Harte. W. H. Auden called MacDonald “one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century”. Mark Twain had said that Harte was “the most celebrated man in America—the man whose name is on every single tongue from one end of the continent to the other”. Frances rejoiced, in a letter to Manchester, at the noise of “literary lions roaring in the drawing-rooms”. It was a sound well calculated to send a chill down Swan’s spine.

  Chapter Three

  Chestnuts off a Higher Bough

  1874–1881

  From the beginning, Frances was restless. Knoxville was impossible, that first summer of her marriage. It was unbearably hot. Whenever she could, she got out of town and visited friends where the air was cooler and fresher: her particular friend was a seven-year-old girl called Birdie, whose father had been a Confederate officer in the war and was now a teacher. Frances claimed later “she was the only very intimate acquaintance I had, though I knew a good many people”. Frances took Birdie’s doll home to Knoxville with her, as she was said to need convalescence after measles. S
he made her a new outfit and sent her small owner letters, purporting to tell of the delights of recuperation at Montvale and White Sulphur. It was for Birdie that Frances wrote her first children’s story—“Behind the White Brick”. She sent it to her to put in a paper that Birdie and her brothers and sisters published. Frances always had time for children.

  And now, in this first year of her marriage, she was expecting one of her own. She felt extremely unwell and Swan’s energy seemed to make her feel worse. “He is positively aggressively healthy and is always confiding to me that he never was so well in his life as he had been since he was married.” Writing to Manchester in the July of 1874, when she was seven months pregnant, she said: “I have suffered fearfully from the intense heat of this summer. I do not think I shall ever sing the praises of a summer in the sunny south again—I have positively gasped through the last two months and I shudder at the thought of August. I spend two or three hours every afternoon lying on the bed in the loosest and thinnest of wrappers fanning with a palm leaf fan and panting and longing for rain. I can’t sleep and I can’t rest—in fact, I can’t do anything but feel profane.”

  Already, after ten months of marriage, she was longing to get away. “I am trying to persuade my husband to give me six months’ leave of absence next year, and if he will, I intend to come to England. I wish his friends in Washington would make him consul to somewhere in Europe. I am tired of the south.” There is a mysterious reference to the sort of activities she explored in her later Washington novel, Through One Administration: “It is possible we may go to Washington this winter—that is, if a certain geological, political, official friend gets a certain Bill through—and if so, I am going to plunge into politics like the rest of the feminine Washingtonians and be an active lobbyist and exert my influence on the affairs of the nation. I begin to think political life would suit me. Don’t you think I could do myself justice on civil right or protective Tariff? If I should ever distinguish myself, you can write a book entitled Half-hours with Immortal Females.”