Gretchen Gerzina – Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unpredictable Life of the author of The Secret Garden

The MA I am a’studyin’ for is in Life Writing, which means next year I will be writing une dissertation originale et enorme on someone who may or may not be famous but certainly must be incredible and inspiring. If you are going to spend months and months obsessing about a person and stalking their dead bones in letters and libraries across the land, then you’d better be mind-boggled by their interestingness to start out with. Inevitably by the end, you’ll probably hate both them and yourself. This is how learning works.

So I am constantly on the lookout for potential people to be writing on, and when I read The Heroine’s Bookshelf earlier this year, I had a ding! ding! ding! moment of FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. She is the author of The Secret Garden, a book which I mostly love for its Yorkshire dialect. (I believe, though I cannot check this because my books are still in boxes, that the expression ‘aye, that they mun, and they munnot lose no time about it’ appears. This is brilliant and I am hoping it is not a false memory). Also, A Little Princess! Ah, the heart-wrenchingness. And the happy ending. This is a lady I could spend some time with.

Unfortunately, as is now clear, this book has already been written and does not need me to be writing it. However, at least I get to read it. And blimey.

It SEEMS like FHB would be all straitlaced petticoats and sentimental cheese and drawing rooms and other buttoned up Victorian stereotypes. In fact, she is everything you would not expect. She’s not even English! Or rather, she was, but emigrated as a teenager to Knoxville, Tennessee, of all places. She is not even a children’s author! Or not really. She was famous as a grown up writer in the sort of Elizabeth Gaskell mould before she even started on Little Lord Fauntleroy which was the Harry Potter of its day, except with lacy collars instead of wands. And while she seems like Mrs Victorian Middle-Class, her life in Knoxville was poor to the point of almost starving; and she never forgot it.

As you can tell by all these ‘or rathers’ and ‘not reallys,’ FHB is a lady of many layers. She is both adventuresome and obsessed with respectability. Her first marriage is not so much unhappy as semi-detached and oddly enough, gives her a sort of freedom she wouldn’t be able to have as a single girl. She can hang out with all kinds of men without her reputation being sullied. She loses a son to TB and battles with depression. And all the time she writes and writes and writes like a woman possessed. The stories literally pour out of her, and when there aren’t stories, there are plays and adaptations and articles.

Perhaps what is most interesting though is the sense that THERE IS MUCH MORE GOING ON THAN MEETS THE EYE. Her second marriage is utterly bizarre. There are strong hints that she only married this crazy emotional bully because he was threatening to expose some scandalous past misbehaviour. (Note to readers. Marrying your blackmailer: never going to work). Despite all the lovely morality of books like The Secret Garden, later generations of her family went from being vaguely embarrassed about her to positively scandalised, referring to her as That Woman. (Ungrateful beasts. It was her money that put you in the upper classes and gave you the position from which you can be snobby). But what was it all about? We’ll never know.

Because of the not-knowing, this book ends up being quite frustrating, though you can’t blame Gerzina for lack of evidence. It can be a confusing read though: Frances is constantly travelling across the Atlantic so you are never quite sure where she is or what year it is. And the extended family is a spiderweb of hangers on, half of whom are called Edith. For me, the story was better than the book.

But I definitely want to read The Secret Garden again, complete with terrible Yorkshire accent.

And should any of you have any good ideas for biographies you would like to read that have not yet been written, please let me know.