by Ann Thwaite
Perhaps next summer she would return. In the meantime for the winter she rented “a modest little house” at 105 Madison Avenue, New York, to finish off her plays and be on hand for their productions. An interviewer, disguised as Mile Manhattan, visited her from the Sunday Telegraph and was admitted by “a solemn and literary-looking butler”. She noted the grand piano and the bookcases full of Ruskin, Balzac, Addison, Gibbon, the Lake Poets. “All look equally well thumbed,” wrote Mile Manhattan, but they may well have been somebody else’s thumbs, for the bookshelves of rented houses are often full. Frances received the interviewer in a pretty bed-chamber. Senator Depew had apparently once described her as “a woman with a man’s intellect” but the journalist found her totally feminine, “a warmly womanly creature”. She had, she said, “a wonderfully interesting face with deep eyes of that rare shade of dark violet blue which grows black and hazel and azure with the shifting emotions of the mind behind them”. A rare shade indeed.
Maude Adams, the star of the new play, The Pretty Sister of José, was equally fascinating. She was known to be an “elusive ascetic”. She had recently returned from a trip abroad which had included a visit to the Holy Land, crossing the desert by camel, living in a tent for several weeks near the pyramids, a sojourn in a French nunnery, and a stay in London with J. M. Barrie. She had not appeared in a theatre for nineteen months and she was, according to the New York Telegraph, “by far and away the most popular female star on the American stage today”. When Frances’ play opened at Wieting Opera House, Syracuse, on 15th October 1903 two thousand people gave it “a rapturous and uproarious welcome”. Some critics even went so far as to say it was “the most artistic of Mrs Burnett’s works”. Only one realized the “utter absence of anything approaching Spanish atmosphere and temperament”.
The first night in New York was at the Empire Theater on 10th November. “It was one of those nights that are not soon forgotten,” wrote the New York World. “For an hour before the curtain went up, Broadway was packed with teams and pedestrians and it was necessary to employ a special force of policemen to keep the carriages in line and the cars moving.”
On 25th January 1904, That Man and I, the play derived from In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim, opened at the Savoy Theater, New York. It was her third New York production within a year. Frances was not happy about it. There was not much about the reception of That Man and I to make her happy. “The play is dreary,” one paper said, “the acting drearier still.” “It is fascinating to write plays but bitterly disappointing to see them acted,” she told a reporter from the New York Herald, who had dubbed her “The Lightning Playwright”. She admitted she had written That Man and I in two weeks, “always in the morning, I rest in the afternoon and talk to my friends in the evening”. She said that the most important thing “we can do is try to be happy and make others happy”. She did not seem bitter or disappointed. She smiled at him. “When she smiles,” the reporter commented, “it is the best natured, pleasantest face in the world. You feel sure she is your friend.” “Do you dictate?” he asked. “Never. I could not possibly do it. There is a typewriter in the house on which my manuscript is copied but I write it all out myself.”
A few days before she had at last found time to write a long generous letter to her friend, Kate Douglas Wiggin, praising Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. “The normal spirit and good cheer of her are adorable.” It’s interesting to notice that the Rebecca books, like Fauntleroy and Sara Crewe and later The Secret Garden, were read as much by adults as by children—Mark Twain wrote praising Rebecca, and so did Jack London from his headquarters with the Japanese Army in Manchuria—and this was also true, of course, of The Wind in the Willows and Winnie-the-Pooh. It seems that children’s literature, that great twentieth-century growth area of publishing, in erecting its own complex structure, its separate children’s book editors and librarians and review journals, has cut itself off from the possibility of being read and enjoyed “by young and old alike” as these books were. It is sad, because many people who have rejected the modern novel could find much enjoyment in the descendants of The Secret Garden and The Wind in the Willows, in books like Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce and The Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban.
One of the people behind That Man and I was an Englishman called R. A. Stanley. Frances found herself promising to collaborate with him in order to make up for money he had apparently lost on the English production of A Little Princess. She went to Asheville, North Carolina, to work with him. She had some extraordinary idea, reminiscent of the old Lady of Quality, that Maude Adams might be induced to play “a mysterious highwayman attired in white”, who would turn out to be a sort of female Robin Hood. In March 1904 this play, Judy O’Hara, was finished, though it seems never to have been produced. Frohman turned it down, perhaps, Frances persuaded herself, merely because “he did not want Miss Adams to do a thing with a brogue”.
This same month that the play was finished, Swan Burnett took as his second wife an old family friend, Margaret Brady. Frances left New York and travelled in Italy, still with the Stanleys: Florence, Venice, Milan, Corao. She thought it “the most adorable country in the world”. In June she was back at Maytham Hall and the welcome she had from Rolvenden must have come up to her happiest hopes. As the carriage bringing her from the station drove by, people stood at their gates to see her. “Nice old Mr Stedman had worked a motto in leaves on a sort of banner scroll, ‘Welcome home to Maytham’, which was hung over the hall door. He had also sent up a beautiful decorated cake with WELCOME on it.” She felt she had really come home.
It was a marvellous summer. The Rose Garden was “full of leaping cascades of roses”. The only problem was to remember which of the two footmen was Philip and which was William. “When one thinks one is speaking to Willip, he turns out to be Philliam.” Maytham was not spoilt by memories: “all the past tragedy has melted into nothingness . . . It has been so perfect to return after an absence and find more roses and more friends to welcome me.” Friends and acquaintances came all through the summer. After the activity of the previous months (she had also finished the dramatization of The Making of the Marchioness and called it Glenpeffer), it was delightful to bask in the sun with congenial company. The Hepworth Dixon sisters were there a great deal of the time, and Rosamund and Kenneth Campbell, and so were her own sister Edith and her husband, Frank Jordan. Other people came and went. One of them was Ellen Terry, who drove over from Small Hythe. She saw the grassy slope between the terrace, where they were walking, and the lawn. “What a lovely place to roll down!” she said, and immediately did so. In her brown gown and brown cloak, she resembled a long brown German cigar.
Ella Hepworth Dixon brought William Heinemann down (“complete with one of those curious new-fangled high-power motor-cars”) and it was as a direct result of this visit, which developed into friendship, that Heinemann later published a number of Frances’ novels, including The Secret Garden. Another guest, Poulteney Bigelow, recalled Frances’ conversation at this time as “a cascade of intellectual scintillation . . . One feature of her talking impressed me in particular—never did I hear her speak unkindly of rival writers—of unfair critics—even of publishers!” “Not a cloud has crossed my summer,” Frances wrote to Kitty Hall, “or a single thing happened to disturb it. Never was I so glad of anything as I am that I came to Maytham just at this particular time.”
The only hint of a cloud is in a letter written this September to Frances by the wife of the Vicar, as she and her family prepared to leave Rolvenden: “Circumstances have kept the Hall and Vicarage apart, but the memory of the first old days lingers. I sometimes think perhaps I might have been a truer friend than I was. We may meet again some day, but my husband and I send you our earnest wishes for your future, both in this life and in the life to come.”
They had accepted Frances in 1898, divorced though she was, but they could not accept her remarriage, nor her new state as a woman separated from
her second husband. There must have been others who felt as they did. But there were plenty who didn’t “Eight or ten people came in to tea and we have been very gay,” she wrote to Vivian.
It was one of the happiest summers of her life, though Vivian was not there and though she was beginning to worry about money again. “I shall be very poor soon if I do not complete that ‘brilliant work’ or place some plays.” The Shuttle, unfinished, still weighed on her mind. She could not look at it yet, not at Maytham anyway. And neither Judy O’Hara nor Glenpeffer had found producers. But at least she was in the right mood to write A Little Princess. On 22nd September, she reported to Vivian, she was writing two thousand words a morning “with lightning rapidity . . . The story tells itself so well and with such nice things in it that it will reach the new race of children like a new big fat book.” She planned a preface to explain that A Little Princess is like the bits in a letter you didn’t remember to tell. “I should not like the book to be published under the false pretence of being entirely new . . . This place is so good for work. Nothing is like the Rose Garden. I have been writing there for some time and I could almost weep because the air is just a little autumny and hints that I cannot write amongst roses much longer. But the golden days go on and on as I never saw them in England before. Never never was such a summer—” Not since 1901, anyway.
There were pleasant distractions. Kenneth Campbell’s valet was an astrologer and also a motor cyclist. He and Kenneth spent long hours on the coach-house floor soaked in petrol. After the hours of hard labour, the machines “are pronounced absolutely perfect—absolutely—and they start to go to Tunbridge Wells or Eastbourne and break down at the Lodge gates”. Frances’ horoscope told her “that the most brilliant work of [her] life was now to be done”. It was a nice thought.
On 4th November 1904 Frances sent Scribner’s the final chapters of A Little Princess. “I wish I was a child and had not read it or seen the play.” She knew the joy in store for such children. But it would not be out in time for Christmas. New methods were coming in: “In the case of children’s books,” Charles Scribner wrote, “the machinery of publication has become very elaborate and the booksellers place their orders long in advance. The travellers go out with their sample copies in July.” Scribner had another attempt at persuading Frances to admit that he was as “enterprising” as any of the younger publishers. He hoped she would be disposed to consider them “when making arrangements for any new work”.
Scribner did get Frances’ next book, The Dawn of a Tomorrow, but it was the last he published, although she was to write seventeen more in the last twenty years of her life. The new book seems to have had its origin in a dense fog, which held her ship at Liverpool in December that year. She began it in New York during the four months she was in America. She was much entertained during this period but did not always make a good impression. At the Underwood Johnsons—he was later to be American Ambassador in Rome—she met the Findlater sisters, popular Scottish writers, middle-aged spinsters, at this time on a visit to the States. Mary Findlater took an instant dislike to Frances and described her in her diary as “a short, grossly fat woman, with an evil eye, dyed hair dressed low and tied with ribbons, a dirty crushed white gown, very décolletée”. Miss Findlater was inclined to suffer, according to her biographer, from “black moods and destructive criticism and disgust”, and Frances was not the only one similarly described. A singer, Miss Kitty Cheatham, was “dressed in soiled white net” with “a huge head of yellow hair”. One feels that it must have been their talents and their life styles, not just their hairstyles and their clothes, that Miss Findlater objected to.
Fortunately Frances had no idea what had gone into Miss Findlater’s diary. She would have been horrified at the reference to her dress. “Mrs Burnett is noted for her charming gowns,” said a newspaper columnist, praising “the pale blue panne velvet affair” she wore to the Lyceum one night. And Vivian called dressing up her “indoor sport”. She loved clothes, particularly “clinging, trailing chiffon things with miles of lace on them”. Her nickname, Fluffy, was still in use: it had little to do with her character and much to do with her taste in clothes.
There was nothing frivolous about her attitude to work. Now she was working enthusiastically on The Dawn of a Tomorrow, encouraged by E. L. Burlingame’s reception of the first part. “We know how anxious Scribner’s were to keep Frances on their list and it would be interesting to have Burlingame’s frank comments to Charles Scribner. To Frances, he wrote on 1st May 1905: “It continues to seem to me one of the most interesting of all you have undertaken.” She was on the Atlantic by then. On 10th July the book was finished at Maytham and she despatched it with this letter to Burlingame:
I send you the story. It has not written itself rapidly because it has written itself strangely in spite of me and I have argued with myself saying continually “No. I can’t say what I think of that. The time is not ripe enough.” But it had to be done in this way and no other. If it does not suit your particular purpose do not mind telling me so—not in the least. Out of all the propositions and argument of the New Thought the things said in this story are what I believe—not what I have been able perfectly to relate to, but what I believe. Harold Warne came down to Maytham a few days ago and my experience with him with regard to this manuscript was a great surprise to me . . . I did not think he could possibly care about it. You see, I have not known him intimately and I imagined he was the kind of purely business man, who would start back at the mere idea of a thing so unlike all that is conventional . . . Singularly enough a mere chance brought the topic forward and, more singular still, I saw he was extraordinarily interested. He almost lost his lunch and his train in his eagerness. He went away with the manuscript in his valise and plans for having designed and sent to me a model for the book he hoped to make of it . . . He said “it seems to me, Mrs Burnett, that you have come upon one of your great subjects—like Fauntleroy.” I wonder. I know the subject is great—I have no doubt of that—I only wonder how the public will see it.
She felt it was part of “the new wave which is swelling upon the century’s shore.” Even the English bishops (“whom one thought no new thing could move”) and stubborn medical men were being infected by it, this knowledge of the new power of the mind. In Vienna, Freud was soon to celebrate his fiftieth birthday and his findings and those of other psychologists were at last becoming more generally accepted.
Frances said that if there was “the remotest chance of The Dawn of a Tomorrow becoming to be the ordinary ‘religious story’, I should be inclined to cast it to the flames. It is something wholly different.” Actually, of course, Frances never cast anything into the flames; everything had found a market since she was a girl of eighteen. But using this image suggests how strongly she wanted to avoid being labelled as a conventional religious writer. In fact there is nothing particularly shocking about the book. The Bookman reviewer was able to describe it as “a simple, old-fashioned miracle play set forth in modern London”. It is a story of redemption found by a rich man among beggars, thieves and prostitutes through the faith of a child called Glad.
Sir Oliver Holt had known no happiness in life: “Success brought greater wealth every day without stirring a pulse of pleasure, even in triumph.” He goes out in the fog to buy a pistol to kill himself and finds himself saved from his own despair by doing things for others. The religion is a belief in Goodness, “knowing no doctrine, knowing no church”, in an acceptance that the possibility of the kingdom of heaven is within ourselves. The book is not as trite as this makes it sound. The atmosphere of the fog-bound London of seventy years ago is excellent—“the halos about the street lamps, the flares of torches stuck up over coster barrows”. It is full of vivid circumstantial details. Frances knew these London courts from her visiting for the Invalid Children’s Aid Association. Glad’s cheerful Cockney optimism is convincing.
The following January, Frances, back in New York, wrote to Scribner: �
�The story is, I find, making an extraordinary impression. People call me up on the telephone to talk about it and the notes I receive, and the things said by people, are not in the usual vein. There is an intensity in the feeling about it. A person who is passing through trouble came to me and said ‘You saved my life the other day . . .’ and a tired school teacher said ‘it made me pluck up heart again—it actually did.’ ” Frances was annoyed that Scribner did not take advantage of the interest aroused by the magazine publication of the story and follow it immediately with the book. It may have been this failure which caused Frances finally, after nearly thirty years and twenty-two Scribner books, to break her connection with the firm. “I am afraid what might have been an unusual interest has frittered away,” she said sadly.
A few days later there was news that stirred painful memories. Swan Burnett was dead. Vivian had gone down to Washington and Frances wrote to him to assure him that she was “only feeling the tenderest things for the one who has got free. He has got free. He sees now the reasons for all the mistakes we made and sees they are not such great things after all. I keep thinking of him as he was when he was a boy, years younger than you . . . if souls do meet each other, who would meet him first but Lionel.”
In the summer, Frances was back at Maytham, wrestling with the final stages of the reluctant Shuttle. She was worried too by rare news from her youngest sister, Edwina, in California, She had suffered in the great San Francisco earthquake: “The windmill I gave her, her stable and her buggy have all been smashed and she had heard no news of Francis, his wife and baby . . . My contributions to San Francisco will have to be made to my own relations . . . I shall have to renew things. It breaks one’s heart to think of them.”
Frances’ mood was not improved by a copy of Munseys Magazine which arrived with an illustrated article on the literary women of the day. She wrote to Vivian protesting: “Never have I seen anything as monstrous as the thing Munsey drew from your picture of me—and I have seen monstrous things in my time . . . Your photograph was not flattering but the ‘drawing’ is that of an elderly, battered and drunken Irish cook with a bottle nose and deep cuts in her cheeks. It is a thing so coarse and revolting that it is bad business. I have not a doubt that it has absolutely injured me, and lowered my market value by thousands a year . . .”