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Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett
Most people have heard of Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Secret Garden, but many of them are unaware that the same woman wrote both books, twenty-five years apart, and was considered one of the leading writers in America. Exposed to the extremes of poverty and wealth, she survived two broken marriages and the death of a son. On the surface her life was extremely successful, but happiness eluded her. This book looks at her life and work.
- GenresBiographyNonfiction
274 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
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About the author
Ann Thwaite
54 books27 followersAnn Thwaite is a British writer who is the author of five major biographies. AA Milne: His Life was the Whitbread Biography of the Year, 1990. Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape (Duff Cooper Prize, 1985) was described by John Carey as "magnificent - one of the finest literary biographies of our time". Glimpses of the Wonderful about the life of Edmund Gosse's father, Philip Henry Gosse, was picked out by D.J. Taylor in The Independent as one of the "Ten Best Biographies" ever. Her biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett was originally published as Waiting for the Party (1974) and reissued in 2020 with the title Beyond the Secret Garden, with a foreword by Jacqueline Wilson. Emily Tennyson, The Poet's Wife (1996) was reissued by Faber Finds for the Tennyson bicentenary in 2009.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 24, 2017
6/8/11
I am a life-long rereader of The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, but not generally a fan of biographies, and so was somewhat doubtful when I picked up this life of Frances Hodgson Burnett at a price too cheap to resist, thinking it might be something of a slog. Happily though, I found the prose to be brisk and engaging, and Burnett's life is as interesting as any novel, more so than many! Her impoverished (but apparently somewhat genteel) family moved from the slums of Manchester to rural Tennessee when she was fourteen. By the time she was twenty she was orphaned and supporting her siblings with her writing, and not long after, with the publication of her first novel, That Lass O'Lowrie's, she was considered a rising literary light. World-wide fame (and some derision) followed the publication of Little Lord Fauntleroy, the first of her major works for children for which she is now best known. In the midst of all this, she had two unhappy marriages, two sons (one of whom she lost at fifteen), scads of literary friends, many and various legal and financial tangles, and far too many trans-Atlantic crossings to keep track of.
Reading this, I often had a sense that Thwaite was skimming the surface of Burnett's life; I didn't get a sense that I actually knew her. Whether this is Thwaite's fault, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's just a reflection of Burnett's character. The early chapters lean heavily on Burnett's own memoir The One I Knew the Best of All which may well be a self-mythologizing work. The snippets of letters that Thwaite quotes from the early years of Burnett's career reveal a strong will and likable gleams of humor. But in later years, her letters are almost embarrassing in their self-conscious perkiness and self-romanticizing. Her son Vivian's biography of his mother is entitled The Romantick Lady, which one assumes is how she liked to perceive herself, coy archaic spelling and all. Still, sometimes I felt that she may have been so sincere in her affectations that they ceased to be affected (I've known people like that in real life). It's hard to judge.
I also have an assortment of smaller quibbles. Thwaite relies a little heavily on the slightly vague theme of "waiting for the party" -- a party, which never quite materializes, or inevitably disappoints -- to give the book structure. She devotes rather too many pages to a catalog of polite notes from Henry James (at one point they were relatively close neighbors in England) declining invitations. She also has an odd penchant for dropping unattributed Daisy Ashford quotations into her narrative. I personally appreciated them because I got the references, but other readers who are not lucky enough to have giggled over
The Young Visiters: Or, Mr Salteena's Plan might well be baffled.
Still, I did enjoy the book, and would rate it 3.5 stars if I could. Thwaite has got me much more interested in trying some of Burnett's fiction for adults than I was before. However, I doubt I'll ever be brave enough to try Fauntleroy, even though Thwaite (somewhat apologetically) insists that underneath the sentimentality, it's really quite a good story.
I am a life-long rereader of The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, but not generally a fan of biographies, and so was somewhat doubtful when I picked up this life of Frances Hodgson Burnett at a price too cheap to resist, thinking it might be something of a slog. Happily though, I found the prose to be brisk and engaging, and Burnett's life is as interesting as any novel, more so than many! Her impoverished (but apparently somewhat genteel) family moved from the slums of Manchester to rural Tennessee when she was fourteen. By the time she was twenty she was orphaned and supporting her siblings with her writing, and not long after, with the publication of her first novel, That Lass O'Lowrie's, she was considered a rising literary light. World-wide fame (and some derision) followed the publication of Little Lord Fauntleroy, the first of her major works for children for which she is now best known. In the midst of all this, she had two unhappy marriages, two sons (one of whom she lost at fifteen), scads of literary friends, many and various legal and financial tangles, and far too many trans-Atlantic crossings to keep track of.
Reading this, I often had a sense that Thwaite was skimming the surface of Burnett's life; I didn't get a sense that I actually knew her. Whether this is Thwaite's fault, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's just a reflection of Burnett's character. The early chapters lean heavily on Burnett's own memoir The One I Knew the Best of All which may well be a self-mythologizing work. The snippets of letters that Thwaite quotes from the early years of Burnett's career reveal a strong will and likable gleams of humor. But in later years, her letters are almost embarrassing in their self-conscious perkiness and self-romanticizing. Her son Vivian's biography of his mother is entitled The Romantick Lady, which one assumes is how she liked to perceive herself, coy archaic spelling and all. Still, sometimes I felt that she may have been so sincere in her affectations that they ceased to be affected (I've known people like that in real life). It's hard to judge.
I also have an assortment of smaller quibbles. Thwaite relies a little heavily on the slightly vague theme of "waiting for the party" -- a party, which never quite materializes, or inevitably disappoints -- to give the book structure. She devotes rather too many pages to a catalog of polite notes from Henry James (at one point they were relatively close neighbors in England) declining invitations. She also has an odd penchant for dropping unattributed Daisy Ashford quotations into her narrative. I personally appreciated them because I got the references, but other readers who are not lucky enough to have giggled over
The Young Visiters: Or, Mr Salteena's Plan might well be baffled.
Still, I did enjoy the book, and would rate it 3.5 stars if I could. Thwaite has got me much more interested in trying some of Burnett's fiction for adults than I was before. However, I doubt I'll ever be brave enough to try Fauntleroy, even though Thwaite (somewhat apologetically) insists that underneath the sentimentality, it's really quite a good story.
May 21, 2011
Not always an easy or interesting read, but that is the biographer's -- and not the subject's -- fault. (In defense of the biographer, most of her primary sources were personal letters -- and the letter-writing style of Victorians tended to be a bit flowery, not to mention that all letters are full of inconsequential things.)
Despite the enduring popularity of The Secret Garden -- one of THE most perfect children's books, in my opinion -- I didn't quite realize what a popular and prolific writer Burnett had been in her very long heyday. Her own rags-to-riches story is every bit as interesting -- and sometimes improbable -- as that of any of her heroines. Just the fact that her family emigrated from Manchester to Knoxville, Tennessee (at the very end of the Civil War) boggles the mind. As does the fact that she sold her first story at the age of 18, and never stopped writing until the end of her eventful, well-travelled life. She was the middle child of five children; she came from a lower middle-class family, and her father died when she was three. There was absolutely no reason that she should have been such an extraordinary person, and yet she did have an extraordinary imagination. Also, she was one of those rare people who never really forgot how she thought and felt when a child.
Despite the enduring popularity of The Secret Garden -- one of THE most perfect children's books, in my opinion -- I didn't quite realize what a popular and prolific writer Burnett had been in her very long heyday. Her own rags-to-riches story is every bit as interesting -- and sometimes improbable -- as that of any of her heroines. Just the fact that her family emigrated from Manchester to Knoxville, Tennessee (at the very end of the Civil War) boggles the mind. As does the fact that she sold her first story at the age of 18, and never stopped writing until the end of her eventful, well-travelled life. She was the middle child of five children; she came from a lower middle-class family, and her father died when she was three. There was absolutely no reason that she should have been such an extraordinary person, and yet she did have an extraordinary imagination. Also, she was one of those rare people who never really forgot how she thought and felt when a child.
December 31, 2018
F. H. Burnett is still an enormously influential writer, better known now for two or three children's books than for her adult fiction. Many of us grew up reading A Little Princess andThe Secret Garden and wishing we could go there. Her other famous children's classic Little Lord Fauntleroy is, like Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, one of those books that people feel they should read, and often pretend to have read without actually doing so. (Anyone who has actually read either of those books can out the poseurs in a heartbeat.)
I have wanted to read Thwaite's book since I heard about it when it first came out, but even in the seventies it was unobtainable where I lived. I always loved the fact that the author's name is the same as the name of the village near the manor where Mary Lennox made her secret garden.
It's a good biography, with overtones of "post-graduate work", but without the many footnotes that would place it in the category of academia. However, for the modern reader some of Thwaite's attitudes toward Burnett the woman (as distinguished from the author) were surprising. She can be startlingly catty about her subject when least expected. Thwaite does refer to Burnett's modern approach to women etc. but never uses the word "feminist", though the women's movement was gathering momentum and force at the time of writing. Marghanita Laski looms over the text like a Svengali figure for some odd reason that is never explained, as if her opinions of Burnett's work were the definitive word on the subject--that, and the odd mention that "Phillip Larkin liked it." So? As Laski is on the way to being a forgotten author today, I wondered why her opinions carried such weight; a footnote there would have been useful. Another oddness was the inclusion of a "Dates and Places" appendix that served absolutely no purpose that I could see. As a timeline it's useless as there is nothing to tie it into events. It is literally a list: 1844, New York (or whatever).
I wondered more than once how different this book would be if it had been written today. Certainly her editor/academic advisor would have stopped her making sweeping statements of this kind: "People tend to act in the way that is expected of them." In certain settings, yes, but certainly not always. There is more than one statement of this kind, a propos of pretty much nothing.
That said, I did devour it in a surprisingly short time and feel the urge to go on a Burnett fiction binge, which is always good. Many of her books can be found online at Project Gutenberg and other public domain sources.
I have wanted to read Thwaite's book since I heard about it when it first came out, but even in the seventies it was unobtainable where I lived. I always loved the fact that the author's name is the same as the name of the village near the manor where Mary Lennox made her secret garden.
It's a good biography, with overtones of "post-graduate work", but without the many footnotes that would place it in the category of academia. However, for the modern reader some of Thwaite's attitudes toward Burnett the woman (as distinguished from the author) were surprising. She can be startlingly catty about her subject when least expected. Thwaite does refer to Burnett's modern approach to women etc. but never uses the word "feminist", though the women's movement was gathering momentum and force at the time of writing. Marghanita Laski looms over the text like a Svengali figure for some odd reason that is never explained, as if her opinions of Burnett's work were the definitive word on the subject--that, and the odd mention that "Phillip Larkin liked it." So? As Laski is on the way to being a forgotten author today, I wondered why her opinions carried such weight; a footnote there would have been useful. Another oddness was the inclusion of a "Dates and Places" appendix that served absolutely no purpose that I could see. As a timeline it's useless as there is nothing to tie it into events. It is literally a list: 1844, New York (or whatever).
I wondered more than once how different this book would be if it had been written today. Certainly her editor/academic advisor would have stopped her making sweeping statements of this kind: "People tend to act in the way that is expected of them." In certain settings, yes, but certainly not always. There is more than one statement of this kind, a propos of pretty much nothing.
That said, I did devour it in a surprisingly short time and feel the urge to go on a Burnett fiction binge, which is always good. Many of her books can be found online at Project Gutenberg and other public domain sources.
May 11, 2024
I enjoyed this biography very much. It's the third work of Ann Thwaite's I have read, and I trust her. Her interpretation of the woman at the heart of the book is one I do believe in, though she was a big surprise to me. I can't think what I imagined to be the life of the author of A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, both magical books to me, but it certainly wasn't what I found. How had I gone through my entire life loving these books and knowing effectively NOTHING about their author?
For a start, I had always assumed Frances Hodgson Burnett was a children's author. Little Lord Fauntleroy is also a children's book, of course, though it's one I don't think I ever read, for some reason. (I really must remedy that now.) But although she loved children, Burnett spent most of her life writing adult fiction. And how she worked! She was a best-seller in her time, and trod a shadowy line between literary fiction and pot-boiler. She could write compellingly. She could hold a reader's attention, whatever age that reader was, apparently. She could tell a story, and she never ran out of stories to tell.
And meanwhile, her own life unfolded in a way that was anything but conventional. She knew Henry James (although according to Ann Thwaite not as well as she might have liked) and she reminds me of one of his heroines, fatally flawed, charismatic and yet never less than interesting. She voyaged across Europe. She lived in both England and America, and somehow belonged to both. She had huge ideas. She made two disastrous marriages. She had character. When she loved, she did it whole-heartedly, though it would appear that she was never whole-heartedly in love. Life disappointed her but she kept working at it, and kept working at her image of her own good self.
Her biographer, in this volume, is not as entertaining a writer as Frances Hodgson Burnett herself. But Ann Thwaite is scrupulously faithful to her subject and her style is never less than engaging, well-informed and authoritative. I learned a great deal from reading it, and that learning was most enjoyable.
For a start, I had always assumed Frances Hodgson Burnett was a children's author. Little Lord Fauntleroy is also a children's book, of course, though it's one I don't think I ever read, for some reason. (I really must remedy that now.) But although she loved children, Burnett spent most of her life writing adult fiction. And how she worked! She was a best-seller in her time, and trod a shadowy line between literary fiction and pot-boiler. She could write compellingly. She could hold a reader's attention, whatever age that reader was, apparently. She could tell a story, and she never ran out of stories to tell.
And meanwhile, her own life unfolded in a way that was anything but conventional. She knew Henry James (although according to Ann Thwaite not as well as she might have liked) and she reminds me of one of his heroines, fatally flawed, charismatic and yet never less than interesting. She voyaged across Europe. She lived in both England and America, and somehow belonged to both. She had huge ideas. She made two disastrous marriages. She had character. When she loved, she did it whole-heartedly, though it would appear that she was never whole-heartedly in love. Life disappointed her but she kept working at it, and kept working at her image of her own good self.
Her biographer, in this volume, is not as entertaining a writer as Frances Hodgson Burnett herself. But Ann Thwaite is scrupulously faithful to her subject and her style is never less than engaging, well-informed and authoritative. I learned a great deal from reading it, and that learning was most enjoyable.
January 15, 2020
Ann Thwaite has written a marvelous biography. I enjoyed this book so much, for its writing and its subject. It begins in Manchester, England, during the hard times, then moves with Frances to Civil War America, Washington and Gilded Age New York, London apartments, Italy, English country houses, and finally right here to Long Island. FHB moved in the same literary circle in America as the women illustrators and engravers in my book "Art Work." And like them, she was extremely famous in her day, for a huge number of works, and relatively unknown today. Thwaite gave her a well-rounded character, as an overbearing extremely loving mother, an inspired storyteller, a woman of frivolity and intellect, an unhappy wife, a lover of children and gardens, and simply an interesting person to be around. I was sad when, as in all biographies, she died, sad the story of her life was over. I look forward to reading some of the books she wrote that I had never heard of, as well as rereading The Secret Garden, and reading Little Lord Fauntleroy for the first time!
June 14, 2021
I think the author did a fine job of handling the life story of a famous, sometimes misunderstood woman with an even hand. While others have apparently written about Ms. Burnett with either slavish adoration or caustic spite, Thwaite seems to have gathered her primary sources to tell the story as faithfully as possible through the eyes of the celebrated storyteller herself, adding the viewpoints of those she loved and who loved her. And I really must read Little Lord Fauntleroy, just to see what all the fuss was about--sounds more interesting than modern press has allowed.
April 1, 2020
This book is information I've wanted to read for years, but I'm a bit on the fluffy side myself, so it really wouldn't have occurred to me to look for a biography until my sister got a hold of it. I know how to classify the information I have picked up about Fluffy now, and I see that she was a delightfully human girl, like me...I think the two of us might get along, unless we might actually aggravate each other in the ways we're so alike.
November 12, 2013
From reading Little Princess and Secret Garden, you'd think FHB was a daughter of the Raj, but she was born in Manchester. Young Frances was, of course, a born storyteller, intelligent, precocious, with a way about her, and a love of play. Ann Thwaite has some good anecdotes and plenty of details about Manchester, the mills, the desperate poverty, and the middle-class one high step removed from the poor, until the American Civil War stopped the South from sending slave-grown cotton to supply the British textile industry. Frances' mother immigrated the family to Tennessee, and FHB spent her teen years in genteel poverty. At eighteen, she sent her first stories to the magazines as "my object is renumeration." She quickly became one of the top authors in Godey's Lady Book and her family went from poor to an uneasy middle class. She eventually married the man who'd been courting her for seven years; she shouldn't have. They went to Paris so he could study medicine, and she supported the family by her writing while raising their sons, Lionel and Vivian. The family struggled, but her novels were picking up steam. A few years later, when they were back in the States, Frances was in her early thirties and hailed as one of the best literary authors in America, along with Henry James and some people we've never heard of. FHB and James became friends later, and at one point lived in country houses only ten miles apart, but Ms. Thwaite believes the friendship was rather one-sided; James was better at sending excuses than invitations. In D.C., FHB wrote a Washington novel (who knew?) and plenty of other things. With a marriage swirling the drain, FHB visited, and then moved, back to England.
About halfway through Beyond the Secret Garden, I realized that I was reading a sort of biographical Old Yeller and Frances Hodgson Burnett wasn't going to live past the end of the book. Having written fifty-odd novels and a dozen plays and lived into her seventies, FHB provides enough biographical material that Ms. Thwaite can barely list the books, the places, the plays, the editors, the publishers, the successes, the company, the holidays in Italy. No book in BtSG gets more attention than Little Lord Fauntleroy, and that runs four pages, including Frances' insistences to the public that she understood: childhood is not as saccharine as it might appear in her novels. Ms. Thwaite prints a great letter about Lionel and Vivian hanging out windows and lighting fires and knocking over lamps when they weren't laying their heads on her knee and calling her "darling." Fauntleroy was a twist in FHB's career. Ann Thwaite uses the word "albatross." Before Fauntleroy, FHB was an accomplished adult novelist. After Fauntleroy, she struggled to reproduce the success, while separating her other books from Fauntleroy's reputation as cloying..
After the death of her son Lionel from galloping consumption, FHB was rarely happy, worked hard, loved her garden with more passion than anything but her children, and struggled to maintain her life and household on an author's wages. A Secret Garden and The Little Princess came late in her career, and garnered less praise than one would think considering they're now her best known works. Eventually she moved back to America and died in 1924. Beyond the Secret Garden is a great, but too short at 382 pages, for the amount of work that FHB created. Her best and worst adult novels (Making of a Marchioness and A Fair Barbarian; Lady of Quality) get little space. I am inspired to read more of her novels now, namely Through One Administration and T. Tembarom. One almost wants to get a Kindle to read one's Victorian novels more easily. But, other things in life...
http://surfeitofbooks.blogspot.com/20...
About halfway through Beyond the Secret Garden, I realized that I was reading a sort of biographical Old Yeller and Frances Hodgson Burnett wasn't going to live past the end of the book. Having written fifty-odd novels and a dozen plays and lived into her seventies, FHB provides enough biographical material that Ms. Thwaite can barely list the books, the places, the plays, the editors, the publishers, the successes, the company, the holidays in Italy. No book in BtSG gets more attention than Little Lord Fauntleroy, and that runs four pages, including Frances' insistences to the public that she understood: childhood is not as saccharine as it might appear in her novels. Ms. Thwaite prints a great letter about Lionel and Vivian hanging out windows and lighting fires and knocking over lamps when they weren't laying their heads on her knee and calling her "darling." Fauntleroy was a twist in FHB's career. Ann Thwaite uses the word "albatross." Before Fauntleroy, FHB was an accomplished adult novelist. After Fauntleroy, she struggled to reproduce the success, while separating her other books from Fauntleroy's reputation as cloying..
After the death of her son Lionel from galloping consumption, FHB was rarely happy, worked hard, loved her garden with more passion than anything but her children, and struggled to maintain her life and household on an author's wages. A Secret Garden and The Little Princess came late in her career, and garnered less praise than one would think considering they're now her best known works. Eventually she moved back to America and died in 1924. Beyond the Secret Garden is a great, but too short at 382 pages, for the amount of work that FHB created. Her best and worst adult novels (Making of a Marchioness and A Fair Barbarian; Lady of Quality) get little space. I am inspired to read more of her novels now, namely Through One Administration and T. Tembarom. One almost wants to get a Kindle to read one's Victorian novels more easily. But, other things in life...
http://surfeitofbooks.blogspot.com/20...
January 28, 2013
I first became interested when I found out FHB lived in Tennessee as a young adult - not far from where I live! I was surprised by her gilded era lifestyle and openness, living ahead of her time. The writing sometimes left me unfulfilled, (I was between 3 & 4 stars - 3 1/2), but on the whole a surprising and enjoyable book.
January 25, 2009
This was the 2nd biography I read - perhaps less facts because it was written earlier but more informative, personal and easier to read. This woman single-handedly changed copyright laws, was esteemed by great authors of the day and few know her name - but her books continue on.
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