6)īy 1853, young Frances, although only four years old, was already an avid reader. According to Burnett, her mother, Eliza Boond Hodgson, was a great admirer of Harriet Martineau, 5) sometime friend of Charlotte Brontë. Her father, Edwin Hodgson, was a Manchester businessman who, like Patrick Brontë, wrote small prose pieces, poetry, and many letters to local newspapers under the pseudonyms "Pro Bono Publico," "Cives" and "Irate Citizen." 3) He may also have been, although this has as yet to be confirmed, a kinsman of William Hodgson, 4) Reverend Patrick's curate from 1836−7. Connections between Burnett and the Brontësįrances Hodgson Burnett was born in Manchester, some twenty−six miles, as the crow flies, from Haworth, on 24 November 1849, two years after the publication of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Agnes Grey, and some eight years before the posthumous publication (1857) of The Professor. This article seeks to examine the connection between Burnett and Brontë, and to identify particular aspects of setting, plot, character, language and symbolism in Burnett's novel which appear to have been inspired by the earlier template of Wuthering Heights, as well as instances where the later novel differs from Brontë's work. 2) Burnett, herself, seems to point to a connection between the two books through an insistence in her text on the verbal link word "wuthering." 36) Her principal character, Mary Lennox, is fascinated by the word and its meaning, and such an emphasis might be considered at least one explicit authorial pointer to the title of Brontë's earlier work. The fact that she was writing for children necessitated for her a softening of Brontë's sterner fictional imperatives and led Burnett to the image of the hidden garden as a sanctuary protected from the grimmer grandeur of Brontë's Yorkshire moors. A detailed examination of this work seems to demonstrate in its text a close reading of Wuthering Heights and certain similarities between the two books, particularly in the characters and their relationships with each other, indicate that Burnett may indeed have been influenced by the earlier work. In 1910, sixty−three years after the book's publication, Burnett published a story for children, entitled, The Secret Garden. English children's author, Frances Hodgson Burnett, was two years old 1) when Emily Brontë's novel, Wuthering Heights, was published in 1847, shocking critics, the public and her sister, Charlotte.
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