The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1906)

I love Victorian/Edwardian novels and children's literature, and in Frances Hodgson Burnett I have the intersection of both loves. I remember reading A Little Princess for the first time at age 8 or 9 with breathless wonder and delight, and re-read it, plus The Secret Garden and The Lost Prince, many times over and over. I didn't even know that FHB wrote novels for adults, too, until fairly recently. I'd like to call attention to one of those novels.

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The Shuttle's plot was sparked by the late 19th-century phenomenon of rich American women marrying titled but poorer Englishmen. The title refers to the threads of relationship between England and America, woven by the hand of Fate, no less. Here, American Rosalie Vanderpoel, young, sheltered and naive, too hastily marries Englishman Sir Nigel Anstruthers, who wastes no time in bringing her to his ancestral home of Stornham Court in Kent. There, he breaks her down and isolates her from her family. Twelve years later, her younger sister Bettina--called Betty--comes of age and goes to England to rescue her. Betty is the heroine of this novel, blessed with all the virtues of beauty, intelligence, and character. Most of all she possesses a particularly American good, practical business sense.

The most satisfying parts of this novel are those when Betty, taking advantage of Nigel's temporary absence (he's cavorting with his mistress on the Rivieria, on Rosalie's money), tranforms Stornham Court. She goes about this cleverly, with dispatch and good sense, using the bottomless Vanderpoel pockets--which has the additional advantage of providing employment to the dispirited villagers. It's a wonderful fantasy, kind of an Extreme Makeover, Estate Edition: it's an especially American fantasy of setting things right and making them work. (Burnett, though born in England, moved to America at age 16 and spent most of her life there.)

Meanwhile, Betty meets the impoverished aristocrat next door. Mount Dunstan is obviously a perfect match for her but he's proud (of course) and disdains American money...at least until the last chapter. Also meanwhile, Nigel returns and tries to make everyone as miserable as he possibly can. The rest of the novel, bar the odd vacationing American typewriter salesman subplot, features some entertaining sparring between Nigel and Betty, and a lovely moustache-twirling showdown between them in an abandoned cottage.

Here's Betty, on being left in the cottage with her sprained ankle while Nigel goes off to see to the horses before, we presume, coming back to rape her:

As she heard him walk down the path to the gate, Betty stood amazed at his lack of comprehension of her. "He thinks I will stay here. He absolutely thinks I will wait until he comes back," she whispered to the emptiness of the bare room.

I love that! No way is Betty going to just sit around, sprained ankle or not, and wait for her Ruin. Though too good to be true most of the time, Betty is fine company in this novel.

What's not so entertaining, though, are the many and repetitive passages about "the shuttle," the imaginary weaving back and forth of threads between England and America, with musings on American vs. English character, and further musings on (and on) about Life and Strength and Health. There's too much clumsy repetition of similar phrases too close together. The book could have benefited from a good editor.

Speaking of Life and Strength and Health, for FHB, healthy and holy (and underneath it, I think, sex, what with the spears and the moistening and bursting) are closely linked. Here's Betty in ecstatic mode; Kedgers is the head gardener:

"One is so close to Life in [a garden]—the stirring in the brown earth, the piercing through of green spears, that breaking of buds and pouring forth of scent! Why shouldn't one tremble, if one thinks? I have stood in a potting shed and watched Kedgers fill a shallow box with damp rich mould and scatter over it a thin layer of infinitesimal seeds; then he moistens them and carries them reverently to his altars in a greenhouse. The ledges in Kedgers' green-houses are altars. I think he offers prayers before them. Why not? I should. And when one comes to see them, the moist seeds are swelled to fulness, and when one comes again they are bursting. . . . And one is standing close to the Secret of the World! And why should not one prostrate one's self, breathing softly—and touching one's awed forehead to the earth?"

Betty's rehabilitation of the garden anticipates The Secret Garden in some ways; Rosalie's gradual recovery, like Colin's and Mary's, parallels the garden's. Also, Rosalie's son Ughtred (!!) is a hunchback like Colin's father and as Colin was feared to become. Both books have a lot of this semi-mystical talk about Life with a capital L. I like gardens too, but FHB handles all of this so much more effectively in The Secret Garden--and even that novel falls victim to the breathless over-rhapsodic.

It's interesting that the few FHB adult novels I've read have been significantly less well written than her novels for children. I wonder if in simplifying her language for children, FHB managed to control her tendency toward repetition and over-elaboration.

Persephone Books has reissued this in an attractive volume; I got my copy on eBay, a 1907 edition, but you can also read it for free thanks to Project Gutenberg.