by Ann Thwaite
While it was still running, plans were going ahead for the production of A Lady of Quality. Julia Arthur, who had been “taking Ellen Terry parts during her illness—Irving will speak for her fitness”, was “wild for Clorinda”, so were her friends and backers who were willing to do anything to give her her chance. They took Wallach’s Theatre, New York, and spent twenty-five thousand dollars on re-arrangement and decoration for the opening. Stephen cabled a friend he trusted, asking him to see her in Cymbeline in London, and the reply came: BEAUTY INTELLIGENCE POWER. So Frances was not prepared for the intense disappointment she felt when she first saw Miss Arthur’s Clorinda. “When one writes for the stage one is a bird flying with wings bound by limitations of time, of space and of the powers of actors,” she told an interviewer from the Sunday World. “It is immensely exhilarating and immensely depressing.”
It was a relief that summer to put the theatre out of her mind and concentrate on a new book—the only drawback being that Scribner’s were anxious it should be published to coincide with the production of the play, for it was to be, not a sequel, but a complement to A Lady of Quality. It was called His Grace of Osmonde and, as the sub-title put it, it was “the portion of the history of that Nobleman’s Life” which was “omitted in the relation of his Lady’s story”. The most remarkable thing about it was that it was finished on 4th October and published on 13th November, in both England and America. Such was her confidence in Scribner’s speed that Frances wrote on 18th October wanting to put in some new passages in Chapter 28: “Is there time to get these in the English edition without delaying date of publication?” There was not, but the whole timetable is still incredible to anyone familiar with publishing today.
Frances had worked “like a galley slave”; they had been “the hardest pushed months” of her life. But there was no time for dreaming or relaxation. There was trouble over the play. Vivian had read reports in the newspapers: “They are all lies”, Frances told him. “The trouble was not between Miss Arthur and myself . . . It was a matter of these amateur greenhorns having the impertinence to refuse to allow me to talk over the conception of the parts with the actors alone . . . I could not be driven mad by discussions with vulgar incapables . . . Miss Arthur has not—I regret to say—got the right conception. This quotation will illustrate all. In the Rose Garden scene, instead of standing drawn to her full height, she huddles down on a seat and sulks and nags and shakes her shoulders. Instead of crying at last ‘Go! Back to your kennel—cur!’ she says ‘Go back to your kennel you cur.’ [That] is a woman of the gutter having a row—the other a creature of race and fire and flame and magnificent defiance and disdain . . .”
The play opened at Detroit Opera House in the first week of October. On the 7th, Stephen, who was playing the Earl of Dunstanwolde, sent Frances a telegram: SORRY TO SEND BAD NEWS STOP THEATRE BURNED TO GROUND STOP EVERYTHING LOST BUT I BELIEVE ALL OUR STUFF INSURED. Frances replied: SPLENDID ADVERTISEMENT STOP IF ALL INSURED MEANS ONLY DELAY NOT LOSS . . . CLORINDA WILDAIRS IS NOT BURNED AND WILL RISE LIKE A PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES STOP COURAGE COMRADES ALL.
On the 14th, Frances wrote to Burlingame: “All the really beautiful and valuable scenery and costumes [were] utterly destroyed . . . The company I believe returns to New York tonight. If they have the pluck to dash out into the fray, get more costumes and scenery, rehearse their parts every day until they get a perfect thing and keep their opening night in New York in the teeth of grinning Fates, the curtain ought to go up in a roar of sympathy and applause.”
Miss Arthur was a mule, Frances wrote to Vivian on the 27th, and she was not very pleased when Scribner’s brought out a new “Julia Arthur” edition of the novel: “I trust the appallingly depraved looking person who is depicted on the cover will not be supposed to be a representation either of A Lady of Quality or of Frances Hodgson Burnett. It really does Miss Arthur cruel injustice.” She might not be able to act Clorinda but she was not hideous. And she liked the drinking song that Frances herself had composed. “The refrain of the chorus suddenly appeared in my head as I was walking down Sixteenth Street. I ran into the MacFarlanes and picked it out on the piano and wrote it down in letters . . . If you require a collaborateur on your new opera,” she wrote to Vivian, “you know now where to find one.”
Vivian came up for the first night on 1st November but it seemed in the excitement of things they scarcely met. One of the newspapers described Frances in her black evening dress, manipulating a black fan of feathers while “a bunch of mauve orchids reposed on the railing of the box”. The applause was generous and there was no doubt it was going to be a financial success—but Frances thought it was dreadful: “If the woman had the brain to understand it, the play would be a different thing.” She thought the actor who played Osmonde was terrible too. The whole evening dragged. One of the reviewers said rudely: “Whatever you took away would improve it”—but Frances was sure “it was not the play which was long but the acting and the scene setting”. Stephen emerged with some credit. Most people liked his performance and one reviewer paid a “special word of compliment to Mrs Burnett’s collaborator, Mr Stephen Townesend, for the unobtrusive dignity and quick grace with which he played a part slight but difficult”.
If Frances had thought before that money and success were synonymous, now she knew it was not so. There was money and she was grateful enough for that. As usual, the more she had, the more she seemed to need. “You shall go through your last year at College as a gentleman,” she assured Vivian, but hoped his father would pay for his new winter outfit. The theatre was packed but there was a real feeling of failure. There was criticism from all sides. What was particularly galling for Frances was that Julia Arthur was praised and the play was damned. “Miss Arthur, being a clever woman, infused more meaning into the part than she could possibly have found in it.” She is “a beautiful, gifted woman with a voice like an aeolian harp” but the play was full of “pomposity, inanity and artificiality”. Was it meant to “assert a wicked woman’s right to be as freely bad as a wicked man”?
The Boston Herald invited Frances to reply, particularly to suggestions that she dealt “with topics that are not savory”. “There are only about half a dozen emotions in the world (quite sufficient for discomfort one finds them),” Frances wrote. “Remove from the drama the man or woman who has fallen upon catastrophe, through love or hate or fear—who has broken a law of society or the State—and there remains little but material for comic opera. There is a thing I have rebelled fiercely against for many years. It is the doom which the mere surroundings the human creature is born into may pronounce upon him . . . Mere circumstances of life may close about a man or woman like the awful iron shroud and crush out will, hopes, gifts . . . I would cry out to the victims ‘Courage! Fight! Fight!’ ” She was an advocate of one moral standard for both sexes, for tolerance and justice. “Let him who is without guilt cast the first stone.” The play may have been full of the “most naïve and weather beaten theatrical tricks imaginable” but its message was a brave one.
Frances was tired, but there was De Willoughby to finish and plans for an English production of the play. Stephen had already handed his part over to an American actor, and at the end of January Frances and Edith followed him back to England. Did Edith have anything in common with adoring, plain Anne Wildairs, Clorinda’s sister in A Lady of Quality? It is tempting to think the character may have been based on her. At this period, more and more she was at Frances’ side. “The world knew Mistress Anne but as a dull, plain gentlewoman, whom her more brilliant and fortunate sister gave gracious protection to, and none missed her when she was absent, or observed her greatly when she appeared upon the scene.” This seems to have been the case with Edith, too. That perceptive child, Pamela Maude, daughter of Winifred Emery who had played Dearest, wrote of Edith that she “was kind and wispy; everything about her was grey—her hair, her eyes and her clothes”.
Soon after their arrival in England, Frances and Edith went
up to Manchester. They had had a worrying letter from their cousin, Emma Daniels, who had been widowed and left with the small boy Willie who suffered from “hip disease”. They were living, with Emma’s two unmarried sisters, in very poor circumstances—“letting three rooms of their tiny house to young men who pay them only six shillings a week . . . Out of that they had to pay twelve shillings a week for rent.” Their furniture and carpets were in the last stages of decay. It was a world “where one farthing counts and where no one expects or dreams of any hope of pleasure or comfort”. They were in even worse straits than they had been nine years before when Frances had done a good deal to help them. It was obvious that they needed more than temporary palliatives. She determined this time to improve their circumstances permanently in the way that she had done for her old teachers, the Hadfields.
It was a situation ideally suited to Frances’ favourite rôle of Fairy Godmother. She set up her cousins in a much better lodging-house. “I went and found a pretty, new, fresh little house, with more and better rooms, for more and better lodgers,” she wrote to Kitty Hall. “I took it and paid the rent and gas and taxes in advance for a year; then I furnished it all from top to bottom. I made it pretty, actually pretty. Fancy even fifteen-shillings-a-week young men having rooms which are fresh and comfortable and furnished and wall-papered in harmonious color . . . I upholstered beds and painted a room and bedstead and hung curtains . . .” Even more practically, Frances interested a manufacturer in the scheme and encouraged him to provide the lodging house with tenants—“young men who can pay decent prices”. Five-year-old Willie, the lame boy, became Frances’ special concern. She kept in touch with him for the rest of her life.
It was this year, 1898, that Frances broke finally with the past. She started divorce proceedings against Swan Burnett on the grounds of desertion and failure to support, grounds which would have been impossible under English law at that time. And she established a new kind of future for herself in renting a country house, Maytham Hall at Rolvenden in Kent which was to be the background of many of the rôles that remained to be played and many of the books that remained to be written.
Divorce was, of course, by no means commonplace at this date, but there is no evidence to suggest that Frances felt the sort of guilt Edith Wharton was to feel fifteen years later, believing that the price of divorce must be suffering, that a heavy price must be paid for freedom. Frances was not seeking release from an intolerable marriage but merely rationalizing an existing situation. “For a number of years,” Frances wrote to Vivian at Harvard on 28th February, “many of my friends have expressed themselves strongly on this subject and finally I have decided that they are right . . . to be neither married nor unmarried is a difficult position . . . I have purposely avoided making my appeal upon any grounds which would involve scandal. I have put it merely upon the ground of ‘Desertion’, which Dr Burnett himself made quite simple by leaving my house of his own will. I have always thought he did this with intention. This matter will be arranged privately and with dignity and it is better for both that it should be done.” But it was of course impossible to keep it out of the papers. A typical story was in the New York Herald on 20th March, the day on which Frances’ lawyer instituted divorce proceedings in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia:
The circumstances which led up to and caused the action to be taken cover a considerable period of years . . . intimate friends of both Dr and Mrs Burnett had known for a long time of their strained relations, and they only remained as husband and wife for the sake of their child and until he should become of age and able to care for himself. All during the time that he was in the High School in this city there was domestic discord. Husband and wife were rarely if ever seen together, and conducted themselves toward one another only as acquaintances. While Mrs Burnett never posed as a new woman, yet she entertained very advanced ideas as to the rights of women and the duties of a wife, which in no way accorded with those of her husband, and hence what was at first only a difference of opinion grew to be the cause of their final separation.
Mrs Burnett is a woman of pleasing appearance and much personal magnetism, while her husband is of less than ordinary stature and is a cripple. It is said, too, that, while a man of some means, an oculist enjoying a large practice and a writer on scientific subjects, he nevertheless grew jealous of his wife’s reputation which exceeded his, as did also her fortune from her books.
While their son was preparing to go to college and Mrs Burnett was on her way home from Europe, two years ago last fall, Dr Burnett moved from their residence in Massachusetts Avenue, and took a house in Farragut Square. This, it is charged, is the desertion charged in the suit for divorce. Friends, knowing that their differences could never be reconciled, have frequently advised that a divorce be secured.
It is the understanding that the proceedings instituted are with the mutual consent of Dr Burnett and Mrs Burnett and looked upon as a business matter. Dr Burnett will not discuss the case, but his friends say that he will not file a cross bill or take any steps to prevent Mrs Burnett from securing the decree. She is at present in England, having sailed from New York about ten days ago, in company with a lady friend.
The Herald was six weeks out in the date of Frances’ sailing from New York and its summing up of the situation may have been equally inaccurate. But worse was to follow. The New York Telegraph of 25th May carried these lengthy headlines: MRS BURNETT TO MARRY HER STAGE MANAGER. WEDDING OF AUTHORESS AND HER CO-WORKER IN A LADY OF QUALITY NEAR AT HAND. TOWNSEND A MINISTER’S SON. IS 35 AND HIS BRIDE TO BE IS 45 AND BOTH ARE WEDDED TO ART.
All the troubles over the production of A Lady of Quality were dragged up, with the suggestion that Stephen was the cause of the friction.
Mrs Burnett threatened to do all kinds of things unless her director was permitted to have his little say, and she even declared that she would go to law if necessary in order to uphold him in his position . . . It was at Mrs Burnett’s own suggestion that Mr Townsend came to America. While here it was noticed that the couple were constantly in each other’s society and that Mr Townsend paid the authoress rather more attention than normally falls to the lot of a woman of her age and one who is allegedly wedded to her art. The bride that is to be is 45 years old and she is exactly ten years the senior of her future life companion.
The news of the coming wedding will without doubt be in the nature of a surprise to persons who know the couple. Mrs Burnett has before now placed herself on record as stating that matrimony was a distinct hindrance to the votary of art Mr Townsend, too, never gave any indications of yearning for the wedded life. He, too, adores art with a capital A.
Mr Townsend’s family is said to have some swell connections on the other side of the water. Personally he is a reserved young man who purposely or unknowingly impresses those who meet him casually with a sense of his keen regard for himself.
Three weeks later, the New York Telegraph carried a photograph of Frances with a small denial: “Despite rumours of remarriage, Mrs Burnett declares she will not again commit matrimony.” She did not, of course, correct the ages mentioned by the Telegraph. She was indeed ten years older than Stephen, but she was now forty-eight. It was twelve years since she had first been attracted by his nice eyes.
It was as well Frances had her new country house to take her mind off her American reputation, which had not been helped by a revival at the Castle Theater of Esmeralda. Seventeen years before, it had held the stage an entire year at the old Madison Square Theater. Now it was seen to be “over-sentimental” and “colorless” and only welcome as an antidote to current “mechanical sensationalism”. Frances’ brain was in “a gruesomely overstrained condition”. It badly needed a diversion. The first mention of Maytham Hall was in the same letter to Vivian that told him about the divorce proceedings. She wrote from Portland Place: I think I am going to take a place called Maytham Hall, Rolvenden. It is a charming place with a nicely timbered park and a beautiful old walled
kitchen garden. The house is excellent—panelled square hall, library, billiard room, morning room, smoking room, drawing room and dining rooms, seventeen or eighteen bedrooms, stables, two entrance lodges to the park and a square tower on the roof, from which we can see the English Channel.”
“People’s houses are always like them,” Frances had once written. How splendid to be like Maytham: hospitable, welcoming, rich, important. Its external façade might be somewhat commonplace and modern—the old house had been partly destroyed by fire in 1893—but the brick walls of the gardens, leaning and lichen-covered, evidently belonged to the period of the original Hall, begun in 1721, and so did many of the outbuildings, the bakeries, piggeries, dairy, stables and so on. Immense trees, broad-flagged walks, a croquet lawn and talk of underground smugglers’ passages amply compensated for the mock Tudor timbering on the three gables.
There is no doubt that Frances saw Maytham as much more than a pleasant house. It was to be an ideal base for giving, for being the sort of person she wanted to be, Fairy Godmother, admired writer. She relished the idea of the rôle that went with the house—Lady of the Manor, distributor of charity, cynosure of all eyes. Sitting and writing in the Rose Garden she would make from that walled kitchen garden, she would be not a mere pen-driving machine, but a much more romantic sort of writer, inspired and surrounded by roses, not bills to be paid.
English village life was deeply attractive to Frances. Later she was to write in The Shuttle of the allure of “a manor house reigning over an old English village and over villagers in possible smock frocks . . .” She thought that “the most ordinary little anecdotes in which vicarages, game keepers and dowagers figured” were bound to be exciting. For years she had had “a vague unexpressed yearning” for “sweet green lanes, broad acres rich with centuries of nourishment and care; grey church towers, red roofs and village children playing before cottage doors”. “I believe I shall love this life,” she wrote to Vivian.