Frances Hodgson Burnett
(1849–1924)
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, dramatised by Dave Simpson
Norwich Theatre Royal, 1996
Frances Eliza Hodgson was born in Cheetham Hill, a middle-class district of Manchester, on 24 November 1849. Her father was a prosperous dealer in brassware and similar goods to the merchant classes and he was able to provide a comfortable life for his wife and their five children. Compared to what was to come, Frances, or Fanny as she was called, would look back on this period as a time of great luxury.
Her father died when she was four, plunging the family into straitened circumstances. Her mother, although keen to carry on the business, was unable to devote adequate time to it as well as bring up the children. Since she also had little commercial aptitude, the firm soon went bankrupt, forcing the family to move. They ended up in Islington Square, a much less prosperous area, where they were to remain until Frances was 15.
The budding authoress’s immediate response to this disaster was to retreat deeper into her imagination to escape. With the indignation of a child she felt she had been unfairly deprived of what she had come to enjoy as hers by right, but, with the optimism of youth, managed to convince herself that it would all come good in the end. This was useful fuel to her invention, and he stories she began to write reflected both this bewilderment and resolve.
Her imagination had always been lively. Since the age of three she had been using material from the stories she read as inspiration for her games. The life she saw around her also stimulated her: there was, for example, a deserted garden in the house next door which must have stayed with her for years. an overgrown and neglected patch of ground beyond a fence, out of bounds, mysterious but tempting – this is exactly the kind of image which appeals to all young children and which would form the basis of her most popular book many years later.
She used to write in old notebooks belonging to her mother which recorded the minutiae of domestic transactions. This meant that her headlong, florid prose was often interrupted by the most mundane interpolations: Sir Marmaduke turned his anguished eyes upon her and cried in heart-wrung tones: “Ethelberta – my darling – oh, that it should be so! Onions 1d, Shoulder of Mutton 10s.”
In 1865 the family’s fortunes changed again, although not immediately for the better. An Uncle William, who had emigrated to America, invited the Hodgson family to join him in Tennessee. As there was now little to keep them in England they gratefully accepted, swapping wet, sooty Manchester for the wide rolling landscapes, green forests and distant hills of the Deep South. Fanny was instantly enthralled.
But if the move was uplifting to the spirit, the family’s financial prospects were worse than they had ever been. Food was frequently scarce and Fanny’s brothers found work hard to come by. In 1868 Fanny speculatively sent two of her short stories to a magazine. They were immediately accepted and published, her first works appear in print, and at a stroke, things began to change. She was 18 years old.
Encouraged by this initial success and evidently confident of her burgeoning talent, the young authoress continued to produce stories and, as her skill and reputation grew, editors began to seek her out. At this stage she was still writing for an adult readership, and would only start writing for children when she had a family of her own. Not that she had long to wait. In 1873 she married a Dr Swan Burnett, adding his surname to her own, as was the custom in the social circles to which she now aspired. The following year their first son, Lionel, was born, followed in 1876 by Vivian, the charming, well-mannered boy who would later become immortalised as Little Lord Fauntleroy. That same year Fanny’s first full-length novel, That Lass o’ Lowries, was published and so great was its success that she was able to move her family to Washington, the literary capital of the country.
Now safely established as a well-known author, at the centre of the literary coterie in her adopted country, and enjoying the lifestyle she had always been happiest with, Frances Hodgson Burnett continued to pour out a vast number of books for both adults and children. In 1886 she published Little Lord Fauntleroy, the first of several blockbusters which not only proved her biggest seller to date, but also became one of the most popular children’s books of its day. It and several of its successors were adapted not only for the stage but also for the screen – a process which is still going on today, the latest small-screen version of the story being broadcast by the BBC in 1995.
It was first filmed for the big screen in 1921 by United Artists with Mary Pickford in the roles of both the Little Lord and his mother, ‘Dearest’. This involved the first occasion where physical contact was filmed between two characters played by the same performer. (At one point Mary Pickford the youth is seen kissing Mary Pickford the mother on the cheek, and in another scene the former is seen to leap into the arms of the latter in a process shot that took fifteen hours to set up and employed the services of a camera weighing 2000 pounds. The complexities of such trick photography would be prodigious even today, especially when you consider the older character had to be nine inches taller than the younger!
Also in 1886 a story appeared called Sara Crewe which the authoress would later rewrite under the title A Little Princess, and this too was both staged and filmed. Shirley Temple (who else?) took the role in Fox’s 1939 film, her first in Technicolor, while the latest screen version has only just come out to great acclaim. The Secret Garden (1911) is considered by many of her fans to be Frances Hodgson Burnett’s best book, and the fact that it is still selling well today suggests that the vein of wish fulfilment she tapped all those years ago has a profound echo in hearts of children everywhere, no matter what age they live in.
The success of Litle Lord Fauntleroy enabled the authoress to tour Europe in style. She settled in England until the start of the new century, her marriage having ended in divorce, but in 1901 she returned to America to live until her death in 1924, dividing her time between Bermuda and Long Island and pursuing her interests in gardening, Christian Science and spiritualism. Unfortunately, although her literary reputation continued to grow, the same malign fate which had robbed her of her father at such an early age also dogged her into later life. Her eldest son died while only in his mid-teens, and although Frances Hodgson Burnett married second time, this union too was to end in divorce after just a couple of years.
Still she took comfort in the grandchildren that remained to her and continued writing right up until her death. Once driven to write for fame and fortune, now that she had both she continued to write for other reasons. What might they have been? The wish, perhaps, to find solace once more in the secret garden of her own imagination. As a girl, writing had helped her escape into a world she could control and explore at leisure. In her final years, she would find that solace once again and write it down for future generations.
PS
The attentive reader may notice that in this article I used the word ‘authoress’ when modern taste would probably prefer the more neutral ‘author’. Be that as it may, I don’t believe this was the form back in 1996 when the piece was written, and to adapt it merely to appease today’s prejudices would be unfaithful to the prose that I and – as far as I was aware – everyone else was using at the time.
In certain circumstances I can see the reasoning behind de-sexing certain terms. For instance, ‘chair’ instead of ‘chairman’ makes sense, the sex of the holder is immaterial, but a ‘manhole’ might as well stay a ‘manhole’ for all the difference it makes. ‘Firemen’ these days are by no means all males, so ‘firefighter’ is obviously the most logical alternative. But if you call for a nurse in a hospital and a person of the opposite sex to the one you were expecting shows up to remove your catheter, are you even allowed these days to feel surprised or shocked or upset or uncomfortable? Some people, without having a sexist bone in their body, might prefer one or the other for private and personal reasons. Maybe it shouldn’t make a difference, but sometimes, for some people, it does. And they have rights and feelings too.
I first became aware of this discrepancy when I heard Helen Mirren (I think it was) referring to herself as an actor. (Or should it be ‘themselves’? You see, once you start thinking about it you immediately start overthinking it.) But since it was Helen Mirren saying it, I realised this was a development I would do well to take seriously. The conclusion I came to was that I didn’t agree, but also that the world would not give a flying fuck what I thought, so I might as well keep thinking it.
It’s just that acting is surely one of those professions where the sex of the person taking on the role is at the very least pertinent. The casting director rings an agent: “Those six actors you sent.” “Yes, what about them?” “They’re all guys.” “That’s right.” “We’ll, they’re all wrong.” “How do you mean?” “They’re meant to be women.” “Why didn’t you say?” “Not allowed. Equity rules.” “Well, you’ll have to take that up with Equity, won’t you? I just follow instructions.” “But the film is set in a nunnery.” “Not my problem. Six actors you wanted, six actors you got.” “What am I going to do?” “Ask them nicely if they’ll shave their legs.”
I know the custom these days is to be colour-blind, and I hear they are even casting performers in their sixties and seventies as the young lovers in things like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, but I’d be interested to know why the hell. And Sarah Bernhardt playing Hamlet was probably not the first to cross-dress in the role, while these days we also have female Lears and Prosperos and who knows what. I’ve never managed to work out whether a female Lear means the rest of the cast have to swap sexes as well to make all the family dynamics work; is Cordelia, for instance a much-loved youngest son, or does the female actor playing the monarch simply say the words and nobody says anything about the fact she is meant to be a king rather than a queen? It all just sounds like stunt casting me, adding extra complication where none is required.
And I notice it’s all one way, pandering to the female performers so they can finally get their hands on some of the major roles that have been so far kept from by little more than centuries of convention. And it’s not even the classics. Recently there have been female remakes of the Ghostbusters film, Neil Simon wrote a women’s version of his hit comedy The Odd Couple, and there has even been a revival of Sondheim’s musical Company with a female lead taking the place of the original’s male Bobby. Didn’t even need to change his/her name, it was almost as if he’d planned it. (I’m joking, he was clever but not clairvoyant, and as far from being mercenary as any artist of the 20th century.) On the other hand, traffic the other way is practically non-existent. I have only ever seen one man playing Lady Bracknell, for instance, and it was disaster, a joke that was over in a moment and a drag on the play (no pun intended) for the rest of the evening.
As far as I’m concerned, you can have all the chairs and firefighters and nurses and surgeons and opticians and designers and charity workers and trombonists and flight attendants and bank managers you want, their ability to do their job has little if anything to do with their chromosomes. But leave the arts alone. Actors and actresses and authors and authoresses need to being their own instincts, their own life experiences, their own beings and souls and sensibilities with them to the work. The sexes are alike in many respects, but it’s the ways in which they differ that make the point. An actress in a suit seems as pointless as a man in a dress. Vive la différence.
