Thomas Recchio

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.

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.

Tracing the publishing history of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford from its initial 1851-53 serialization in Dickens's Household Words through its numerous editions and adaptations, Thomas Recchio focuses especially on how the text has been deployed to support ideas related to nation and national identity. Recchio maps Cranford's nineteenth-century reception in Britain and the United States through illustrated editions in England dating from 1864 and their subsequent re-publication in the United States, US school editions in the first two decades of the twentieth century, dramatic adaptations from 1899 to 2007, and Anglo-American literary criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Making extensive use of primary materials, Recchio considers Cranford within the context of the Victorian periodical press, contemporary reviews, theories of text and word relationships in illustrated books, community theater, and digital media. In addition to being a detailed publishing history that emphasizes the material forms of the book and its adaptations, Recchio's book is a narrative of Cranford's evolution from an auto-ethnography of a receding mid-Victorian English way of life to a novel that was deployed as a maternal model to define an American sensibility for early twentieth-century Mediterranean and Eastern European immigrants. While focusing on one novel, Recchio offers a convincing micro-history of the way English literature was positioned in England and the United States to support an Anglo-centric cultural project, to resist the emergence of multicultural societies, and to ensure an unchanging notion of a stable English culture on both sides of the Atlantic.