by Ann Thwaite
Pamela and Margery Maude were the daughters of Cyril Maude and Winifred Emery, the actors. Winifred had played Dearest in Little Lord Fauntleroy and Stephen had appeared with them in Sowing the Wind at the Comedy Theatre in 1893. There was some question that Cyril Maude might put on a dramatized version of The Making of a Marchioness. It seemed to Frances, working on her plan to “keep visitors in the house”, an excellent idea to have the children to stay. Stephen would never make scenes in front of children. Inviting the small girls originally as protection, Frances came to revel in their visit. They were “two of the most lovable and wonderful children I ever knew”. They had imaginations just like hers. They had a perfect passion for acting and gave “wonderful little performances in the billiard room every evening”. The highlight was when Pamela took the part of Little Lord Fauntleroy. She described this and other delights of the holiday in a letter to her parents:
Darling Dad & Mum
Yesterday I dressed up as Little Lord Fauntleroy. Mrs Townesend said she would like to see us play it. So I was Cedric and after Mrs Townesend said I was the best little Lord Fauntleroy she had had & she wished I could play it in London, was not that nice!!!
It was the real suit that Mrs Townesend’s little boy had (Vivian) it was brown velvet with lace cufs & collers & a yellow silk sach with my hair loose.
Yesterday we went into a wood called The Primrose World & dug up primroses & I got four scractches & Margery got 3 or 2 . . . To day we went to Bodiam Castle & it was great fun. We had lounchen out of doors we had cutlets & peas & carrots then for pudding orange jelly, then after pudding, we had little cakes. Mrs Townesend when comming back she told us fairy stories all the way back. They were lovely.
Your loving Pam
Seventy years later, reading Marghanita Laski’s brief study of Mrs Burnett, Pamela Maude was moved to protest that she was not conceited, she was not offensively whimsical: “When we stepped into the Fairy Tree and she read us Sara Crewe, she seemed to be completely forgetful of herself . . . What Marghanita Laski has not brought out—how could she, not having known her?—was her complete stepping into another world, the world of her imagination, which she was able to make real to others. She was not ‘bogus’, not vulgar.” Children do detect insincerity, they are generally suspicious of adults who try to endear themselves by behaving as children. But they recognize kindred spirits—“She saw things in the same way as ourselves.” It is obvious from the books that she did, indeed, that the child’s eye view was natural to her. But it is pleasant to know that she could share things not only with her readers but with children face to face. It was perhaps this reading aloud of Sara Crewe which made Frances see how she could dramatize it.
Frances was at this time working on a sequel to The Making of a Marchioness, which Smith and Elder, its English publisher, wanted in order to make the book a reasonable size. There was also The Shuttle to finish, but Frances did not begrudge any of the time she spent with the children, even when they, not she, were the centre of the stage. When they had gone, the book was finished. “As in the first story, wildly romantic things happened to unromantic persons, in the second wildly melodramatic things will happen to undramatic persons. I think it is all right. It is to be called The Methods of Lady Walderhurst.” It is “all right” but not much more. Emily Fox-Seton, so admirable in the first book, becomes merely irritating in her Patient Grizelda rôle in this one.
Vivian was as ever in Frances’ mind. She worried about him constantly and wished they were living their lives together. She worried that he was working too hard (“a man who is counted of value in a newspaper office is obliged to do three men’s work”), that he was not getting enough sleep, that he should see more of Europe, that he needed a new piano and new summer clothes and that he was beginning to go bald. For this last anxiety, she recommended “one part of ordinary blistering fluid to ten of Petrole-Hahn”. Most of her other anxieties would be stilled if he could take a holiday in Europe: “I will give it to you of course and it might be useful to you as well as ornamental.”
Vivian was in Paris in July and Frances longed for him to come to Maytham. She was filling the house with guests and the plan was succeeding. On 22nd July she was awhirl with preparations for a cricket-match and house-party the following week. “It will be the greatest fun. We shall have about twenty-five people staying in the house—a band—and tea on the field and all our county neighbours looking on . . . Lord Maitland (who is playing in our eleven) can only come on Saturday morning as he is to be hung over with medals by the King on Friday. So you see you will be in time for the match if you get in by 11.39 when he does. I should not ask you to come if I did not know you would find all will go well. This of course will be an excellent time to arrive—in the midst of a big house party and I want you very much.” But none of Frances’ persuasions (“You have never enjoyed yourself in your life as you will if you come now . . . You and Lord Maitland will have so much to say to each other of photography”), nor anything else, could make Vivian be his “stepfather’s guest”. Frances said he must not talk like that: “You have no stepfather in the ordinary sense. Stephen is only Stephen to you and so long as he is perfectly nice the best thing you can do for me is to act as if nothing had really changed.”
And, amazingly, Stephen was being “perfectly nice”. He fell in with Frances’ plans for the cricket-party with enthusiasm and “worked like a Trojan to make people comfortable”. Everything went smoothly, even the problem of giving “nine or ten men baths enough after cricket and tennis and Bumble Puppy”. There were forty people in the house, counting the servants. It was more complicated than producing a play. Was this the Party she had been waiting for all her life? If only Vivian had come . . . If only, every time she looked at Stephen’s face, she did not see, in spite of its temporary calm, the ugly passions and demands and sneers . . . At least, her guests seemed to be happy: “Everyone went away—as people always leave Maytham—longing to be asked to come again.”
She and Edith left Maytham themselves after the party and met Vivian in London. Later the three of them travelled to Holland and Belgium together. And in December, they sailed on the Minnehaha to America. “At no period of her life,” Vivian recorded, had Frances “been in so nervous a condition. The task of keeping the surface of things at Maytham smooth while struggling with the temperament of Stephen had brought her to the last frayed edge of her endurance.” She took refuge at the Riverside Sanatorium at Fishkill-on-Hudson. She was as usual feeling short of money and was glad to have an advance from Scribner’s on the royalty cheque of 1,951.21, not really due until June. The story was put out for the papers that she was forced to rest as a result of overwork. “She is suffering from the effects of too constant application to literary work and is being treated for neuritis.” “My suffering,” Frances was reported to have said, “makes it impossible for me to work hard at present. I am glad of the chance to rest but I deplore the cause.”
The real cause, Stephen, crossed the Atlantic and went to see her at the Sanatorium in April; and there she found the courage, apparently, to tell him he could say what he liked about her, she was not going to live with him again. Did she in fact buy him off? Did she agree to let him have her English royalties in spite of the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882? It seems likely. But at least he made a real attempt to find work. On the front page of the stage paper the Era of 20th December 1902, among the columns and columns of actors and actresses making known their availability, there appears an advertisement put in by Stephen:
Mr Will Dennis
Address Stephen Townesend
5 Crown Office Row
Inner Temple.
By this time, of course, Frances was much recovered. Everything was settled. She knew where she was. Dr Whilinell’s treatment had been excellent and a summer of working quietly in a cottage at East Hampton on Long Island had completed the cure. It cheered her to know from letters how much she was missed at Rolvenden. “If I heard you were a
t Maytham Hall,” wrote someone called Mary Snood, “I would come directly for the happiness of seeing you once more.” It also cheered her when her new play, so speedily written that summer, opened on 20th December 1902, at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London, under the management of Seymour Hicks, with Beatrice Terry as Sara Crewe. It was at first called in England A Little Unfairy Princess. Franklin Fyles wrote in the Mail & Express of 15th January 1903, just before it transferred to Terry’s theatre: “Mrs Burnett has attempted to duplicate the success of her Little Lord Fauntleroy and in my opinion she has done it.”
The New York production (without “Un-fairy” in the title) opened at almost the same time. She and Vivian were living that winter in a house on West 87th Street. It was convenient for Vivian, who was now working for a book-publishing firm connected with McClure’s Magazine. It was also convenient for Frances to help rehearse the new play. It opened at the Criterion Theater, New York on 14th January 1903. Millie James played Sara: “Dainty, winsome and lovable,” said the papers. “She drew from the part funds of pathos and gladness.” Clara, one of the schoolgirl bullies, was played by Pauline Chase, who was later to be Barrie’s favourite Peter Pan. The production drew a great deal of admiration: “Such minor faults as exist are a thousand times over-balanced by the beauties of the piece.” For critics, in those days, were not afraid to say “we are all children—all of us. And we are ready to feel once more the keen delights and exquisite griefs of the days that are gone.” They were prepared to admit their pleasure that A Little Princess “took from their nostrils the reek of the problem play and the stench of the French farce”. Strong men found themselves with lumps in their throats; women and children wept. It was indeed the success of Fauntleroy all over again. “Sara Crewe, like the famous boy, appeals to old and young alike,” wrote one critic, and Millie James’ clothes drew attention to the parallel. At the first performance, Frances smiled and bowed. “I just want to say that I thank you all, my dear children, for coming to the party.” This was the Party certainly, and it was not over in a single evening but went on and on.
Facing the house on West 87th Street, there were some boarded-up houses, the basements occupied by caretaker families. Frances sometimes saw a child playing by herself on the side-walk in front of the house opposite. This child became Judith and her strange story, In the Closed Room, has already been referred to at the time of Lionel’s death. It was published by McClure’s as a very pretty illustrated “gift book” for Christmas 1904. The Dial called it “a story of spiritual and mystical significance, of true literary value”. It shows how much Frances was still obsessed by Lionel’s death fourteen years earlier.
Not long before, worrying about Vivian’s health, she had written to him, “You shall not be killed as Lionel was. I will not have it—I will not have it.” Lionel was gone from this world but she never felt he was very far away. She could never put him out of her mind. Writing a letter of sympathy to an old friend, Emma Anderson, Frances once put her feelings like this:
They have not gone away from you—those who loved you every hour of their lives. They are close to you—they are a guard around you—they are talking to you—listening to you—taking care of you as you took care of them . . . When Lionel went away, I know my soul was saved by things he surely said to me when I could bear no more . . . I am not thinking of your dearests as conventional angels with flapping wings or as spiritualistic creatures, lifting tables and throwing cushions about—I am thinking of them as real—real—as themselves.
Years later, Frances was to use her conviction about an after-life most vividly in The White People, with its haunting account of an encounter on a train journey. The girl Ysobel notices a mother in mourning enter her railway carriage. Clutching at her skirts and clamouring for attention, but totally ignored, is a pale child. Ysobel is distressed that the mother weeping for the dead ignores the living. It is only much later she realizes that the pale child at the mother’s side was in fact the dead one, and only she could see it.
There is another passage in this book which was “a real thing. It was a wonderful dream—No, I cannot believe it was a dream—which I myself passed through and which . . . made the greatest difference in my life and in my feelings about those we can no longer see with human eyes.” This passage is Ysobel’s experience “out on the hillside”. It was nothing less than a glimpse of heaven. “The difficulty is that there are no earthly words to tell it,” Frances’ experiences appealed particularly to those, and there were many, who questioned conventional religion but disliked the trappings of psychical research, the automatic writing, the spirit photography, the atmosphere of seances, the necessity for mediums.
In the summer of 1903, Frances returned to East Hampton, renting a cottage called Dune Crest. It was there In the Closed Room was written: ten thousand words in four days, which brought in a thousand dollars for the magazine rights alone. Then Frances turned back once again to The Shuttle. She had begun it in the summer of 1900 and it was not finally finished until the autumn of 1906. This book was a real labour to her; the pen-driving machine refused to function in its usual smooth professional way. The material (that “fresh, unused material” she had been urged to acquire as long ago as 1889 by the Literary News) was intractable. The struggles continued right to the end. “I have been thinking of nothing but the book,” she wrote to Kitty Hall in August 1906, “which has not been rushing headlong as sanguine Vivian thinks. It has definitely hung back because it knows it ought to be finished by September. It simply holds on to each obstacle it is dragged past and screams and kicks up its heels and tries to dig its toes into the ground at the same time. That is difficult, of course, but it is devil enough to accomplish it. For one thing, you see, it knows it can’t have as much room as it wants, because it has to be serialized, and if I gave it all the room it wanted, the Century would be brimming over. But, grinding my teeth, I push it along, holding on to its collar and kicking it on the shin at intervals. What I say is—between me teeth—‘You won’t, eh? Well, we’ll see which of us two is the master.’ That isn’t joy, you know. If the serialization could have been kept from it I dare say it would have given in long ago. But I just let my tongue slip in its presence one day—it always is present, you know, and it has behaved like the D—— ever since. Stories are that there ’eadstrong.”
Frances was able to joke about it but part of the problem, back in 1903, was that so much of the material was too near the knuckle; Sir Nigel Anstruthers was Stephen writ large, distorted, exaggerated, but still Stephen, and as Frances described Rosalie’s sufferings (so different from her own, as Rosalie was so different, but so imaginable), her pen faltered. She was glad of any excuse to put The Shuttle down and turn to other things. On these other things, that summer of 1903, the pen-driving machine was working with incredible efficiency. There were all sorts of proposals. E. L. Burlingame of Scribner’s had an attractive suggestion. He wanted Frances to produce a new longer version of Sara Crewe, which Scribner’s had originally published in 1888, incorporating the new material she had used in the play A Little Princess. Naturally he wanted it quickly. The play was still running and Christmas sales would be splendid. His letter arrived to find Frances already committed to two dramatizations. Charles Frohman was interested in producing a play of the 1889 Spanish novelette The Pretty Sister of José, as a vehicle for his star Maude Adams. And an actor, Robert Hilliard, was keen to appear as De Willoughby. Frances’ letters to Burlingame written from East Hampton in July give a good idea of her impressive mental energy even when she was not well.
I have been obliged to spend much time lying down on account of being possessed of a devil which a distinguished physician has now pronounced to be not neuritis but osteoperinestitch. Do not quail. I did not. But for this polysyllabic trifle I am in glowing health—but the trifle itself was by the Inquisition invented, I think . . . To make a new book for the winter trade, you must know in advance when you can get it. I am just beginning a new play and another
comes after that. Sometimes things finish themselves like a whirlwind for me but one cannot be sure of two plays doing themselves in a month. If I were not in such an extraordinary mood about work, I could not think of touching anything after the work of the summer, but I think I might do this.
She asked when was the last possible date they wanted the book and was told the middle of September if it were to be on sale for Christmas. On 30th July she agreed to a two-thousand-dollar advance on a royalty of 12% for a book of sixty thousand words.
But it was too much to expect. The book, fortunately (for it must surely be a much better book for not having been rushed), was postponed. Frances could concentrate on the plays. She could also find time to remember her friends at Rolvenden. There are letters of August 1903 from John Stedman and Mary Snood in Rolvenden which give a very good idea of how far she had succeeded in making herself loved (“Just you give me time to make them adore me,” she had written to Vivian in 1898). John Stedman wrote to thank her for the cheque for Mrs Almond “to pay up her rent and one pound over to get herself a few comforts . . . She is most grateful to you for your kindness, does not know how to express her gratitude, says she never had such a kind friend as you have been to her, poor woman. She has been very sadly for some, little time . . . She gave me the enclosed fern frond and asked me if I would send it on to you. She hopes to be spared to see you again and we all hope to have the great pleasure of welcoming you back again to Maytham, it has not been the same place since you left” Everything was going wrong in Rolvenden: “The Hay and Corn both very much spoilt. Apples, Pears and Plums quite a failure.”
Mary Snood wrote, “You would like to hear the people exclaim when I talk about you coming home. ‘Do you think she really will come back to us?’ and when I answer I do indeed, it is sure to be, ‘Oh! I hope I may live to see her.’ ”