The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett: In "the World of Actual Literature"

Description

A reading of Burnett's novels in the context of the changing literary field in England and the United States Frances Hodgson Burnett is remembered today as the author of the children's classic The Secret Garden, but in her lifetime she had a long and successful career as a novelist, dramatist and writer of children's stories. Of high literary quality, her novels covered a range of genres, including industrial novels, American-themed social novels, historical novels, transatlantic novels and post-World War I novels. The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett reads her novels in the context of the changing literary field in England and the United States in the years between the death of George Eliot in 1880 through to the Great War. Read as a body of literary fiction in relation to Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and T. S. Eliot among others, and read in the context of literary realism, historical fiction, the sensation novel and so on, Burnett's novels constitute an important thread that chronicles the changing contexts and forms of English and American fiction from the end of the Victorian period to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

Thomas Recchio is professor of English, emeritus at the University of Connecticut, USA. He is the author of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford: A Publishing History (2009) and the editor of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (2008). Recchio has published widely in Victorian studies.

"Recchio's book on Frances Hodgson Burnett is an excellent example of a popular woman writer reclaimed in the twenty-first century for her generically varied, financially successful and still relevant fiction. This book is a must for anyone interested in women's writing, Victorian to modernist literary developments and First World War writing." -Janine Hatter, Programme Manager, PGTS, Doctoral College, University of Hull, UK With this literary reclamation of Burnett's novels, Thomas Recchio has made a significant contribution to nineteenth- and twentieth-century studies, persuasively arguing for the recognition of Frances Hodgson Burnett as a serious writer. One way in which The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett develops its in-depth analysis is by exploring intersecting threads of Burnett's life and career, thereby offering rich contexts in which to highlight her craft. - Ruth Y. Jenkins, The Lion and the Unicorn, Johns Hopkins University Press, Volume 44, Number 2, April 2020, pp. 213-215.