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Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden. By Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 2004
A first-rate biography requires a fascinating life told with a storyteller's skill. Gerzina provides both in this compelling new biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett. It's unclear why Gerzina chose to subtitle the book by highlighting the "unexpected" aspects of Burnett's life, for while her contemporaries (and Burnett herself), would have been surprised to see her lasting fame rest on The secret Garden and A Little Princess, rather than the sensationally popular Little Lord Fauntleroy or her many acclaimed novels for adults, the basic outline of Burnett's life and legacy is familiar to the many readers of Ann Thwaite's equally readable biography of Burnett, Waiting/or the Party, published in 1991.
At times, particularly in the earlier chapters, the two books seem overly similar, with Gerzina merely providing a somewhat longer and more embroidered account of the identical material offered by Thwaite. For example, in the chapter on the first years of her marriage to Swan Burnett, both authors quote a miserably hot and pregnant Frances as "lying on the bed in the loosest and thinnest of wrappers fanning with a palm leaf fan & panting & longing for rain." Both quote all seven stanzas of an unpublished poem suggesting suicidal thoughts, beginning with the ominous line, "When I am dead & lie before you low." Both describe young Lionel's amusing play with his little doll named Gutter. Those turning to Gerzina's biography after a recent reading or re-reading of Thwaite's may find themselves thinking, "Where have I read these very lines before?"
However, Gerzina's biography is considerably more substantial, more scholarly, and more fully realized than Thwaite's. Thwaite focuses on the single theme...