Hearts and Hearths
Anne Sebba ponders some mysteries – or coincidences – that link the adult experiences of Frances Hodgson Burnett with the lives of American women who came to Britain in search of marriage in her newly reissued 1907 novel The Shuttle.
A hundred years ago Frances Hodgson Burnett, the well-known children’s author, published a hard-hitting novel for adults about an unhappy transatlantic marriage. It was called The Shuttle, a reference to the numerous steamships that for over fifty years had been carrying rich American women to the Old World in search of Old World customs, clothes and culture but also of Old World husbands and houses. The ship on which the fictional Vanderpoel sisters, Rosalie and Bettina travelled, sailed between ‘a gulf broader and deeper’ than the thousands of miles of sea it crossed.
These travels were a new version of the Grand Tour, only now for girls, usually accompanied by their parents. The journeys were not without danger and Katherine Ledoux, in Ocean Notes for Ladies (1877), advised her readers to dress sensibly and respectably as ‘accidents too and loss of life are possible at sea and I have always felt that a body washed ashore in good clothes would receive more respect and kinder care than if dressed in those only fit for the rag bag.’
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