Beyond the Secret Garden

by Ann Thwaite

  Frances had the sense to let such suffering put her own troubles in perspective. Rolvenden seemed full of the dead and dying that year—old Mrs Weybourne, speaking of Frances on her deathbed; “dear little old Miss Wells”, dying of cancer in her white, white little room. After all, Frances did have her writing, and visitors were some protection. “People are coming to stay tomorrow. I shall keep visitors in the house,” she ended one letter to Edith. And there was always the possibility of escape. “Sometime you and I may have to live in California together.” She would not let Stephen cut her off from her family and friends as he seemed, in his darkest moods, to want to do. “I told him,” Frances wrote to Edith, “I would not let him cut people off from me—I said I would call on a few of my men friends—. . . Kenneth [Campbell], Henry James etc. to talk the situation over with him—that the matter must be decided. He was mad with fury but I think he saw I meant what I said . . . He threatened that he would drive me from Maytham . . .” The inclusion of Henry James’ name is interesting. Obviously Frances felt she knew him intimately, to ask such a thing of him. Equally obviously she did not really know him. James, who later could not bear to have his old friend, Violet Hunt, to stay when she was involved in the Ford Madox Hueffer divorce suit, for fear of having to hear about her “private affairs”, would certainly not have been the man to help bring Stephen to his senses.

  The situation was, of course, making Frances feel ill—and it did not help that she knew she must not be ill, that she had to write, to earn the money she seemed to need in ever-increasing quantities. She wrote to Vivian the following February: “I am trying to lay aside a capital which can be relied on to bring me a thousand pounds a year”—but it was so much easier to spend than to save. In September 1900, she was “bowled over by an attack of heart failure”. It stopped her writing for several weeks. It was just as well the Century had not begun to serialize The Shuttle before she had finished it “If I had tried to do the thing, I should now,” she wrote to Richard Gilder, “have been decently interred in some unpleasant cemetery and my readers would have been rending their garments, because they could never know how it worked itself out . . . I will send you some more presently. Yesterday I left Bettina [Rosalie Vanderpoel’s sister] in the train on her way to pay a visit to Stornham . . . I am waiting breathlessly for tomorrow when she will reach Stornham and I shall discover what she finds there and how she finds it. I don’t know this morning—except in that nebulous way . . .”

  When she was ill, and unhappier than ever, she received a letter written by Vivian from his father’s house in Washington. On the envelope, she wrote “A dear dear letter written to me at my darkest hour”. “Dearest,” Vivian wrote, using the old childhood name, “Don’t ever think that for a moment in the troubles you are having my heart has ever left you.” He raged that she had felt it necessary “to take the gall, the bitter lees”. To what things her idealism had led her. “If you need me to help you or shield you, I am at your call.” But he felt cut off and separated from her. “Because [Stephen] is the head of your house, and because he has shown himself my enemy more than once, it would be both a task and a risk for me to sleep under the same roof with him and you. So it is that I find myself . . . thrust into my father’s arms by you.” Vivian wrote that he had attempted not to take sides in the quarrel between his parents and he still will not let his father talk about his mother, but he feels he has lost his mother. His father had been ill, but was making a complete recovery. “If the Fates had robbed me of him too, it would have been too much for me to bear . . . You must think of me, dearest, as wishing always to give you as much help and comfort in this unhappy time as it is in my power to.”

  Frances was quick to assure him that her new marriage made no difference to their relationship. “Above all things you are to remember that you come before all else on earth to me. I do not care twopence for the rest. You are my child. I have never had a husband, God knows . . . These last years have been awful things for me. Could you have believed that I could ever hate a creature and wish him ill? What I have to struggle with now are these surging waves of awful hate which sweep over me in my own despite. They are not like me.”

  Frances could not stand the thought of a winter at Maytham, cut off, shut up with Stephen. In November she rented 48 Charles Street, off Berkeley Square, a house belonging to Lord Burghclere. It was a delightful house and it helped a great deal. “I never dreamed it could be possible to like another person’s house as I like this.” The walls were covered in old prints; there were superb pieces of antique furniture. “I can construct Lady Winifred and her husband from their books, their pictures and their perfect taste.” The great dining-room was particularly superb, with panelled walls of carved white wood, family portraits and gold chairs, covered with crimson brocade. “It is really too huge and imposing to sit in over one’s meals so we have taken the morning room for our daily bread . . .”

  Things were much better at Charles Street. For one thing, Edith had arrived from Washington. “The comfort and pleasure of having her with me are more than I can describe.” And Stephen was behaving “quite amiably and nicely”. His self-esteem had been helped by the very favourable reviews of the book pretending to be by his dog Hett A Thoroughbred Mongrel was sub-titled “the tale of a dog, told by a dog, to lovers of dogs”. England being a nation of dog-lovers, it had “excellent notices”, according to Frances, and sold extremely well. It remained in print for many years, the eighth edition being published in 1913, the year before Stephen’s death. The dog became so celebrated that she herself was given an obituary in the Animals’ Guardian, which later appeared as an addendum to the book.

  Stephen was in more demand as a lecturer for the Anti-Vivisection Society. “If he continues to be sane and perseveres in his intention to get work of one kind or another—perhaps I may grow quieter in mind,” Frances wrote to Vivian. The anti-vivisection work brought some pleasant contacts. The American Countess of Portsmouth was a kindred spirit. She wrote to invite them to stay and said, “What would the world be without children, animals and flowers?” She was at the time “much absorbed in the starting of our Anti-Vivisection Hospital”.

  In December 1900, Frances sounds almost her old self. She was back into the pattern of her life at Portland Place: “I am devoting my mornings to my book (The Shuttle) and the rest of the day to the keeping in working order the wonderful complicated machinery of life . . . In each hour of my life I have quite 120 things to do.” She was seeing a great many people. The dining-room was perfect for dinner parties. (“Society is charming if you arrange it your own way,” she decided, “not if you are obliged to let it rush you about.”) One of her guests was T. P. O’Connor, the Irish Member of Parliament, whom she had first met at Lord Crewe’s. She discussed Vivian’s career with him. “If he wants to come here, I could get him in with the Harmsworths directly,” O’Connor said. “Though the amiable things even the most genuine and influential persons say may be safely discounted—because even influence has circumstance to deal with,” Frances wrote to Vivian, she wanted him to take the idea seriously. “You have international education and international qualities and they have international enterprise. This is the hour of international things.” But she did not wish him to come to England to make his career just to please her. “Perhaps America promises and attracts you more.”

  It was nearly Christmas and she was enjoying choosing unusual presents for the servants at Maytham. “I am giving my second gardener music. I discovered the simple bucolic creature played vaguely at the violin. I guess that new music must be a yearning and impossible on under-gardener’s wages . . .” After Christmas, the entire household in Charles Street went down with influenza, “Still I have done an amazing amount of work in the days I have not been propped up by pillows.” Sometimes she wrote even in bed; she produced an article, a rare thing for her, for newspaper syndication. It was about Queen Victoria: “The Queen fell ill—all the world seemed to pause . . . and I was s
o full of that one woman.” She died on 22nd January. Frances, like the vast majority of Victoria’s subjects, had never known a time when she was not on the throne. She watched the funeral procession, perhaps a little consoled by the fact that she had been paid forty pounds for work that had taken her two mornings; she immediately sent a hundred dollars to Vivian to buy himself a new dress suit and some “fine linen”.

  Frances had put aside The Shuttle, which was becoming a very big book and would not be finished for many months, in order to supply something to the Century, which had already advertised a new Frances Hodgson Burnett story. She wrote The Making of a Marchioness in less than two weeks. In England it appeared in the Cornhill. This brief book has claims to be the best novel Frances wrote. “The little American tale-tellers (I mean the two or three women) become impossible to me the moment they lengthen,” Henry James wrote to W. D. Howells early in 1902. And many people would agree with him and find impossibly long-winded and drawn-out such books as Through One Administration, In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim and The Shuttle, and the later T. Tembarom and The Head of the House of Coombe. They all run to more than four hundred pages of close print.

  The Making of a Marchioness, even when printed with its sequel, is a much more digestible length. Marghanita Laski wrote an attractive introduction to a re-issue of the book (1967). She calls The Shuttle “poor man’s James”, a reasonable comment, and goes on to quote Frances’ own description of the shorter book:

  This is such a dear thing, I can’t tell you how I enjoyed writing it. It is a study of a type and in an atmosphere I know so well. It is called The Making of a Marchioness and it is a picture of a nice, simple, sweet prosaic soul who arrives at a good fortune almost comic because it is in a sense so incongruous. Its heroine is a sort of Cinderella—a solid, kind, unselfish creature—with big feet instead of little ones. Her name is Emily Fox-Seton and I absolutely love her—as you will . . . The cleverness of the thing (I know it is clever) lies in the studies of character and the way in which the most wildly romantic situation is made compatible with perfectly everyday and unromantic people and things.

  Marghanita Laski comments:

  She is right. The book is “a dear thing”. But apart from its charm and deft storytelling, it is, far more than Mrs Hodgson Burnett could have realised, a cruel revelation of the nature of Edwardian high society.

  She knew, of course, as an American, that this society had faults. Their castigation and often correction by nobler transatlantic cousins was her most usual theme. What she could not have known was how very nasty it would, half a century later, appear.

  This is . . . the best novel Mrs Hodgson Burnett wrote, and good at the level she intended, that of the fairy story diluted with unromantic realism. But it is, in today’s light, a more interesting novel than she could have known it would become, for she could never have supposed its realism to be as harsh as we now perceive it to be.

  It is a measure of the real joy Frances had in writing, in storytelling, that she could find such happiness in producing this book, even at this particularly unhappy period of her life. Her gifts made it possible for her to escape for hours on end from the intolerable pressures of real life. Stephen seemed no longer quite so intent on tormenting her, but things were difficult enough. At times, he seemed to have forgotten his summer behaviour. “Why can’t you trust me? Why can’t you love me?” he would ask, again and again. And Frances could only gaze at him, amazed, and wish she could forget. She found it best to speak to him as little as possible. But it was not easy to live with him. She wondered how long she could go on with this grotesque marriage. She felt powerless in the face of what George Eliot had called “the dreadful vitality of deeds”. What she had done lived and acted apart from her will. She could not rewrite her own story, erasing without trace the passages she did not like.

  At least Stephen was still dealing with disagreeable business matters. On 5th March 1901, he broke the news to Scribner’s “that Mrs Townesend has decided (entirely on her own initiative) to place the production, [of The Making of a Marchioness] in the hands of a New York firm, which has agreed to give it a greater advertising push than it would pay an established firm to accord it”. Scribner was horrified. He knew it was too late to have The Making of a Marchioness but he was determined The Shuttle “should not go from us”. Had they not sold more than one hundred thousand copies of The De Willoughby Claim? Stokes could make no similar boast. There was a royalty cheque for five thousand three hundred and seventy dollars due in June. How could she complain? On his next visit to London, Scribner rushed down to Maytham to see Frances. It was an embarrassing visit. He had lost the larger book as well. “After hearing my fate I fear that I must have been a very dull guest.” It was a blow to be repeated later by the desertion of Edith Wharton, who was to leave her old publisher on being offered a bigger advance by D. Appleton and Co. Fortunately for Scribner he had at last secured Henry James, whom he had long wanted to publish.

  Frances and Stephen had returned to Maytham at the end of March with a new acquisition, a pianola, to distract them. Frances wrote pages to Vivian about this pianola, as if to convince her musical son that it was neither an extravagance nor merely a mechanical contraption. “Lord Borthwick—who has a musical passion”—was apparently as impressed as she was when they first heard it at the house of Mr Ashton-Jonson, who wrote on Wagner. “It is really wonderful—not entirely mechanical. Though anyone can make it strike the notes, one must practise and know and love the music before one can make it express itself.” Paderewski had two. “He uses them as a means of enjoying music too abstruse for concert-room taste and so difficult as to require too much practise to allow of his giving the time to it.”

  Stephen spent a great deal of time that spring playing on the pianola in the billiard room. Pamela Maude, who stayed at Maytham in April and May of that year with her sister, has vivid memories of them both. “We felt a queer sort of sympathy for Mr Townesend—his silences and his pianola playing. He seemed so alone. He always seemed to be alone. I can’t remember them ever speaking to each other.” As for Frances, the children were rather disappointed that she was “stout, stocky and dressed in white”. She took to her bed with “headaches” and wore a red wig and was not at all like Fauntleroy’s Dearest, but she did see “things in the same way as ourselves”.

  Pamela Maude was not quite eight at the time but I trust her memory completely. Nearly everything she records in her short memoir of the visit in her book Worlds Away is confirmed by Frances’ own letters of the period to which Pamela did not have access when she wrote. “Never shall I forget—and never will they,” Frances wrote to Vivian, “a day we spent in the ruins of Bodiam Castle.” And they never did. Frances knew how to make a day memorable for children. She told them stories of life in ancient castles, of knights and ladies and palmers and minstrels: “We were twelfth-century ladies all day . . . the day was a perfect thing and I can imagine what a picture it will always remain in those children’s minds. Every day was perfect for them in one way or another.” It was an extraordinary spring, that was to go on into an extraordinary summer. As James put it, “4 or 5 months from April of almost merciless fine weather—a rainlessness absolute and without precedent”.

  The brilliant days gave endless time for exploring and acting, gathering primroses, listening to stories and playing with a pet lamb. The primroses were later to appear in Frances’ story The Spring Cleaning, in which Queen Crosspatch and her Green Workers set to with hot-water bottles, delvers and tuggers to make sure the primroses are not late for a young London flower girl to sell on Primrose Day. The pet lamb nuzzled and butted its tight-curled head into the sides of the Maude children just as Dickon’s lamb nuzzles Colin in The Secret Garden. Its bleat reminded the children—Margery was then twelve—of Gerald Lawrence, one of their favourite actors. Lawrence had recently appeared in the unsuccessful English production of A Lady of Quality. He was a close friend of Stephen’s and it was to
him, when he died in May 1914, that Stephen entrusted the letters he had received from Frances. “Make such use of them,” he was to say in his will, “as may be in any way helpful in the defence of my character and reputation.” But these letters seem to be lost and none of his, apart from those to Scribner’s, appear to have survived. There is no evidence for the defence of Stephen.