The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett was first published in 1907. Sir Nigel Anstruthers has travelled to New York from his impoverished estate in England, in the hope that he can bag a young and rich American wife, and he succeeds. Despite being arrogant and charmless, he manages to get Rosalie Vanderpoel to marry him, her father is a multi millionaire, but Rosalie is a quiet, meek young woman, the pretty one of the family, but she doesn’t have much in the way of brains, unlike her much younger sister Bettina. She can see right through Nigel and dislikes him intensely.
Roalie is whisked over to England by Nigel and she’s shocked at the poverty of Nigel’s estate, the place is falling apart. Nigel had expected to have control of Rosalie’s money when he married her, so he’s deeply disappointed when he realises that he doesn’t. Soon he’s abusing her and manipulating her and he even intercepts letters from her family in America, she’s completely isolated from them, they think that she has forgotten about them – and vice versa. Apparently this was something that the author had experienced herself in her second marriage.
This book is also about the differences between American and English society with the Americans tending to be held up as wonderfully ambitious go-getters, and the English mainly being so depressed that they can’t do anything for themselves. Time and time again the reader is hit over the head with the differences between the societies, it all got very wearing for me.
This book really should have been edited down, I found it quite tedious a lot of the time and I did think that it must have originally been published weekly in a magazine with the author being paid by the word, as Dickens was, but it seems that it wasn’t.
Apart from that I just couldn’t believe that very wealthy American parents would just wave goodbye to their beloved eldest daughter and not do anything about the lack of letters from her, for years and years. Thankfully Bettina rides to the rescue.
I had no idea that Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote this novel. How did you ever find it? I would be interested to see if anyone has written her biography. She was quite judgemental, but women of her class were, whether in the U.S. or England. They were all terrible snobs! I will have to read this, because your comments have made me very curious.
Hi Judith,
I read about this one on a blog, don’t ask me which one! Anyway, I just came across a copy of it recently in a second hand bookshops so bought it, but it was published by Amazon (who knew?) and annoys me because it has none of the normal info such as when and who published it originally or where the cover art comes from. However, you can download a copy of it from Project Gurenberg.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/506
I’m so glad for Project Gutenburg and also for the Internet Archive, which is flaunting the rule of law and has for the past few years, making available photocopied editions of books. Digitized editions are so much clearer, but at least you can see with these photocopied editions if a book is something you want to go after. They are constantly in trouble with copyright law in the U.S. now and have been for at least four years, but nothing seems to shut them down. I find it so interesting that they’ve been getting away with it, and actually, I root them on. I think a large part of the reason the Internet Archive has gotten away with it is because very few people would actually suffer to read the photocopied books on their site. The best viewing is with a computer or laptop, and then the images are slightly marred, slightly blurred.
Still very interested in this book by Hodgson Burnett!
Judith,
I was under the impression that it was legal if the book they publish is over 100 years old, but I might have made that up!