by Ann Thwaite
But Frances knew perfectly well that the way she was to do justice to herself was not by playing at politics but through her writing. Her long visit to Manchester the year before had stirred her memories of the Backstreet People, who had held her imagination as a child in Islington Square. In particular, she kept remembering the face of the girl who had knitted the blue worsted stocking and who had refused to be daunted by her father’s raised fist and angry words. This girl had been an operative in one of the cotton-mills, but Mrs Gaskell, whose novels had been much discussed in Manchester, had already explored the lot of the distressed mill-workers. Frances decided to make her heroine a pit-girl. When she had been staying with the Boonds, the Manchester Guardian had carried “some facts about the Lancashire coal mines”. And it seems quite likely that her interest in dialect had been further stimulated by the Reverend William Gaskell’s “Lectures on the Lancashire Dialect” which had been appended to later editions of Mary Barton. Most of the material for That Lass o’ Lowrie’s undoubtedly came from real life but it is possible that Frances had seen Kay-Shuttleworth’s pamphlet on “The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester”. Dan Lowrie is certainly a portrait of the typical working man described in it: “He lives in squalid wretchedness, on meagre food and expends his superfluous gains in debauchery.”
The old questions of social inequality and injustice had struck Frances even more forcibly on her return to England from the comparative democracy of Tennessee: what right have we to be more fortunate? Like Mrs Gaskell, Frances believed in charity and opportunity rather than revolutionary change. The division in the established Church between the old clergyman (smugly confident in the benefits of his orthodox encouragements and rebukes) and the new young curate, labouring for literacy and social justice, was also one that must have been brought home to her on that visit. The reception of her Lancashire stories in the literary magazines and Richard Gilder’s warm approval of her ideas gave her the confidence to start work on her first major novel.
It was not easy. Lionel was born in a small house on Temperance Hill, Knoxville, on 20th September 1874. She engaged an elderly Negro woman called Prissie, who had been a slave, to help her look after the child. Edith described her as “fine and upstanding, with pipe, bandanna, a deep voice and a heart of gold”. From the first, Frances invested a good deal of emotion in her son. Before the birth, she had apparently knelt to pray for the unborn child: “Let it be happy, oh God! I pray you let it be happy! It does not matter what you do to me, but let it be happy!”
When Frances was trying to write and the baby was crying and the patients were not coming to Swan’s surgery, it was not easy to thank God. Knoxville was really too small to support an eye and ear specialist. The family depended more and more on Frances’ pen. Swan thought if only he could further his studies in Paris, he would on his return find it easier to establish himself in Washington.
But how on earth could they afford to live in France? Frances had some money saved but it would not keep them long. There were four fares to be paid, as Prissie would certainly have to go too, to cook and look after Lionel, if Frances was to be able to write. There were no rich relatives as there were so conveniently in so many of Frances’ stories. But there was a sort of fairy godfather. Charles Peterson, Peterson’s Ladies Magazine, agreed to advance to the couple one hundred dollars a month, to be paid back by Frances in the form of stories for his magazine.
They left Knoxville in the spring of 1875, when Lionel was six months old. Frances wrote to tell Edith that they had found a flat at 3 Rue Pauquet, close to the Champs Elysées, at a rent of “34 a month for five rooms: two bedrooms, kitchen, dining-room and parlor, quite nicely furnished. Prissie does our cooking and you know how economical she is, so be sure that nothing is wasted . . . Paris is an awfully tempting place to poor people but we are so poor as to be almost beyond temptation . . . You may imagine how busy I have been when I tell you I have seen nothing of Paris yet but the streets. I have not been to any of the churches or palaces or galleries, though of course I have seen the outsides of them. We have to pass the Madeleine and the Tuileries and the Palace of the Louvre on the way to the Bon Marché.”
Frances had to write two stories a month for Petersons in return for the regular cheque, but she was also trying to get on with the book, That Lass O’ Lowrie’s. On the strength of the first couple of chapters, Gilder had promised to start serializing it in Scribner’s Monthly the following year, 1876. Edith gives some idea of the difficulties Frances had to contend with: “When Sister wanted quiet for her writing, Prissie would shout to Lionel, ‘You come here! You keep away from yoh Ma, you little rascal or Ah’ll flay you alive!’ And the child would dance and shout for glee, as if to be flayed alive was the sweetest thing that could happen to a child.”
That winter in Paris, Frances described Lionel like this: “the roughest, biggest, tearingest rascal the family has ever known. He grubs and scrubs and a new dress lasts him just half a day. If you could see how he looks sometimes, you would not wonder that I found a gray hair on my head last week. I can only fold my hands resignedly and give him up as a bad job . . . If I kept him clean, he would not only have his cuticles washed off, he would pine away and die. Sometimes I don’t see him for weeks for all the dirt on him.” It is worth quoting at length these passages about her small son, for it is sometimes suggested, by those influenced by the associations of the phrase “Little Lord Fauntleroy”, that Frances’ view of children was a totally unrealistic one.
Lionel’s toys and his treatment of them are also reassuringly familiar.
They are confined to a lamb without legs and a three-sous doll without either arms or legs, which doll he calls Gutter. Gutter’s trials are numerous. She was used to stir up the charcoal pile; she was dragged round the house with a string; she was beaten and severely admonished because she refused to eat crusts, and then her head was split open and filled with tobacco-smoke from Prissie’s pipe. And I think when standing in a corner with the smoke issuing from her cranium, and a mournful smile upon her battered countenance, she gave for the moment supreme satisfaction. The lamb, who is used principally to scrub the floor, wears a constant expression of long-suffering painful to behold. His Ba-a was broken off early in life, and then he got into difficulties about crusts. It seems there is something radically wrong with the moral nature of a lamb who refuses crusts. The owner of this recreant flock of one has got a double-tooth and is the most engaging little sinner out.
Swan was making the most of his time in Paris but was acutely aware that it was Frances who was supporting the family. Frances wrote to Edith: “You must not think I begrudge my struggle . . . When I am the wife of the greatest ophthalmologist in two hemispheres, I shall forget my present troubles.” Frances called Swan “Doro” now, which was something to do with the fact that he had called her Dora Copperfield when they were first married because she was so hopeless at cooking. Like the Copperfields, the Burnetts’ joints had seemed to come from deformed sheep and had never hit any medium between redness and cinders. Fortunately Prissie was taking care of that side of things now. “D. is just as busy in his way as I am in mine—studying all morning, at the hospitals all evening and studying again at night. D. feels he is reaping great benefit from his stay here, and if he does, my end will be accomplished to a great extent.” And again in another letter: “D. is getting along splendidly. He is drawing and painting eyes, and says he would not have missed these opportunities for anything. He has met so many celebrated men . . .”
Frances met no one. She stayed at home and wrote, and when she was not writing she sewed. There was no money to spend on clothes. She wrote to Edith: “I never worked so hard in all my life as I am doing this winter. I have just made myself a black velvet hat, remade my black velvet basque, made Lionel two outdoor suits: one black velvet trimmed with white fur, the other gray and blue flannelette; made him two under-dresses and a warm skirt and bodic
e; made Aunt Prissie a black cashmere dress and basque, and cleaned and entirely made over my black silk, which was as much trouble as ten dresses. We dine at six, and last night after dinner I made flannel underclothing, and the night before hemmed half-a-dozen large handkerchiefs . . .” For weeks she had either a needle or a pen in her hand.
And she found she was expecting another child. They had planned to travel a good deal on the continent that year of 1876, and it seems they did get to Rome for, writing to her second son in 1895, Frances recalled the time when she was expecting him:
I love your love for your music. It was I who did it anyway. Before you were born, I used to go and sit in St Peter’s in Rome and listen to the music and lift up my little soul praying for you in a sort of trance of love, and I used to look always at a lovely little marble angel with a scroll of music in its hand and an instrument on its knee.
This may have been one of the winged cherubs carved by the baroque sculptors of the eighteenth century working in Bernini’s tradition. It was, of course, a common idea in the nineteenth century that women could affect their children’s lives by their thoughts and attitudes during pregnancy. Whether Frances actually believed this seems doubtful to me. It sounds more like the sort of charming thought which occurred to her in middle age, with little real feeling behind it, though her attitude to music throughout her life was genuine enough. In the character of Judge Rutherford in In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim she put the matter more cogently: “There’s a mean streak in a man that don’t care for music. I wouldn’t trust him behind a broomstraw.” It’s amusing to speculate how different Frances’ attitude to Vivian might have been if she had thought of herself gazing, not at the music angel, but at one of the marvellous lions on Canova’s monument to Clement XII.
What is certain is that Frances had little time for gazing during her pregnancy and she was not full of joyful anticipation. A poem dated 7th March 1876, four weeks before Vivian was born, gives some idea of her state of mind. It is dangerous, of course, to take biographical evidence from creative writing but the mood of this poem fits in with other evidence in her letters. She was not suicidal but she was tired and she often felt very much alone, as Swan rushed off happily to his hospitals:
When I am dead and lie before you low
With folded hands and cheek and lip of snow,
As you stand looking downward
Will you know
Why the end came and why I wearied so?
I think you will remember as you gaze
Another look you saw in other days
A brighter look you used to love and praise.
But will you know
Why the change came and why I wearied so?
Perhaps a hot, impassioned, useless tear
Will fall upon the face you once held dear
And you will utter words I cannot hear
But will you know
Why the end came and why I wearied so?
I think you will remember something done
By the hands chilled to Death’s responseless stone,
Something to give to thought a tenderer tone.
But will you know
Why my heart failed and why I wearied so?
You cannot mourn me long—Why weep for Death?
Rather let Death weep for Life’s laboring breath
And the sharp pangs Life’s labor ever hath!
But will you know
What mine have been and why I wearied so?
The world—your world will be before you yet—
E’en while my grave grass with Spring rain is wet
You will have found it easy to forget
But will you know
Why my heart failed and why I wearied so?
But I—the Dead—shall lie so low—so low
And soft above me the Spring winds will blow
And Summer rose will pale to Winter snow
And—No, you will not know
Why the end came and why I wearied so.
There was one great excitement to sustain her. In spite of all the difficulties, That Lass O’ Lowrie’s had been completed on time and began to appear in monthly instalments in Scribner’s, starting in the February issue. It reached Frances just before the baby arrived and she was amused to see an announcement which grouped her with Bret Harte and Edward Everett Hale as authors of “three remarkable serials by American writers”.
The baby was born on 5th April 1876 in the apartment on the Rue Pauquet. Frances “passed through every conceivable agony” and the baby disappointed her by being a boy. Lionel, just talking, suggested they should throw it in the fire. But, fortunately, the infant was a “sweet, gentle little thing, just nurses and sleeps and nestles and grows fat”. He seemed determined to make himself welcome. “From his first hour, his actions seemed regulated by the peaceful resolve never to be in the way.” The daughter was to have been called Vivien (after Merlin’s seducer in one of the Idylls of the King). Disraeli’s novel showed it would, with a letter’s alteration, do for a boy too. So Vivian it was.
Frances was exhausted. “I have worked like a slave when I ought to have been resting,” she wrote to Edith. “I have earned a great deal but it takes it all barely to live. It seems as if the more I make, the less I get. I have been under heavy expenses for my confinement. I had to have a nurse for two weeks.”
They felt the time had come to return to America. In spite of Frances’ incessant work there was only enough money for their return passages. “We shall not have enough to live on, even in Knoxville. I am all at sea just now, but perhaps it will come out right. And, in spite of all my anxiety, I cannot wish I had not spent my money. Three thousand dollars would certainly have bought a house in Knoxville, but then, you see, I did not want a house in Knoxville; that is not what I have aimed at. I want my chestnuts off a higher bough.
I want a rest. Oh, if I could just
Lay down de shovel an de hoe,
Hang up de fiddle an’ de bow!
I think this is a tired world altogether. But this seems like grumbling, and I don’t want to grumble because, after all, I have not been beaten in this fight yet.”
Before returning to Tennessee, Frances took her family to Manchester. They had stayed there briefly on the way to Paris the previous year. Henry Hadfield recorded his impressions of Frances at this time. “Mrs Burnett has nothing about her of the supposed typical authoress . . . She seemed much like many thousands of other young English wives and mothers, but, though more disposed to chat of her little family than any other topic, she was at the same time a bright intelligent woman, capable of quietly noting types of character and modes of life without betraying the process.” Mr Traice, of Leamington, who was visiting the Hadfields at the same time, had not read any of Mrs Burnett’s work. “If we had not been told she was a writer,” Mr Traice wrote to Mr Hadfield on his return to Leamington, “we might have departed with the feeling of having passed the evening with a frank, unpretentious wife of a husband eager to explore all the depths of physiology.”
Frances was obviously trying her best, at least on such social occasions, to appear as the nineteenth century’s ideal type of womanhood. A girl was “trained to fetch slippers as retrievers to go into the water after sticks”, she wrote later in The Shuttle. She was supposed to be submissive, quiet, gentle, to identify herself with her husband’s will and interests, bear his children and keep to his house. Frances was already well aware that her nature did not fit her for this, but that any other path was likely to be a thorny one. The two types of womanhood are neatly contrasted in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, which it is reasonable to assume Frances had read, for the heroine (and I don’t think this has ever been pointed out) was called Zenobia Fauntleroy. Zenobia says: “The whole Universe . . . and Providence or Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one hair’s breadth out of the beaten track.” Zenobia, passionate, active, has been foolish enough to set a woman’s independent j
udgment against a man’s. It is Priscilla, gentle, passive, whose life had only one purpose, identification with a man’s will, who secures happiness. Zenobia drowns herself—just as Cleo does in “Jarl’s Daughter” and as Lina Clangarthe does in “The Tide on the Moaning Bar”, both stories Frances wrote at this period. Whatever happened, Frances would never drown herself; but nor would she conform, or deny herself the right to make her own life. “I have not been beaten in this fight yet,” she had written. The fight was for what Henry James once called “laurels and shekels”, the two inextricably entwined. But could any victory bring happiness as well? It seemed unlikely.
They returned to Tennessee in the autumn of 1876. Frances and the children took refuge with Swan’s parents in New Market while Swan went to Washington to try to establish himself. In a letter to Edith in 1881, Swan looked back at this time.
I have had in many particulars a hard fight. We came back from Europe not only penniless but in debt, and I came to Washington without money or friends or even acquaintances to establish myself in my profession—As I look back at it now I don’t see how I had the courage to attempt it. But I had determined that I would and I came. I won’t tell you how I suffered and almost starved—of the dreary months of loneliness and despair, but still I would not give up. Finally patients began to come in—very slowly—but they came and have continued to come in slowly increasing quantities all the time since.
In writing in this same letter of their time in Paris, he did not refer to Frances or pay any tribute to the fact that it was her work which had made it possible for him to study there. He found their reversal of roles difficult to accept. Many men find it difficult even now to tolerate a breadwinning wife. In the 1870s the position was so extraordinary as to be unmentionable.