The Shuttle
1907
An American heiress marries into the English aristocracy, expecting romance. She gets a prison. Rosalie Vanderpoel believes she's found excitement when she weds Sir Nigel Anstruthers, a baronet with an ancient name and empty coffers. But Stornham Court becomes a gilded cage. Her husband is a bully and a miser who isolates her from everything she loves, leaving her muted and diminished. Years pass in silence until her sister Bettina, beautiful and bold, sails across the Atlantic to discover why Rosalie has vanished from their family's life. What follows is a psychological war waged with American dollars and English resistance. Bettina falls for a different Englishman, fights Nigel for control of the house, and begins spending Vanderpoel money to modernize the crumbling estate. The shuttle between the two worlds carries more than passengers; it carries assumptions about class, power, and what women owe their families versus themselves. Burnett, who made thirty-three Atlantic crossings, wrote from deep familiarity with both worlds. The result is a novel that treats its heroine's rescue not as simple rescue but as a complicated negotiation between cultures that never fully understand each other, even as they need each other.
Editions
X-Ray
“Their eyes met with a singular directness of gaze. Between them a spark passed which was not afterwards to be extinguished, though neither of them knew the moment of its kindling...””
— Frances Hodgson Burnett
“It was a mere matter of seeing common things together and exchanging common speech concerning them, but each was so strongly conscious of the other that no sentence could seem wholly impersonal. There are times when the whole world is personal to a mood whose intensity seems a reason for all things. Words are of small moment when the mere sound of a voice makes an unreasonable joy.””
— Frances Hodgson Burnett
“The strong and strange thing”
— Frances Hodgson Burnett
“When she was his companion, her father had always felt himself stirred to interest and enterprise. "You ought to have been a man, Betty," he used to say to her sometimes. But Betty had not agreed with him. "You say that," she once replied to him, "because you see I am inclined to do things, to change them if they need changing. Well, one is either born like that or one is not. Sometimes I think that perhaps the people who must act are of a distinct race, a kind of vigorous restlessness drives them. I remember that when I was a child I could not see a pin lying upon the ground without picking it up or pass a drawer which needed closing without giving it a push. But there has always been as much for women to do as there is for men.””
— Frances Hodgson Burnett
“Her genius, as has before been mentioned, is a genius for living, for being vital. Many people merely exist, are kept alive by others, or continue to vegetate because the persistence action of normal function will allow of their doing no less. Bettina Vanderpoel had lived vividly and in the midst of a self-created atmosphere of action from her first hour. It was not possible for her to be one of the horde of mere spectators where soever she moved there was some occult stirring of the mental and even physical air. Her pulses beat too strongly, her blood ran too fast to allow of inaction of mind of body.””
— Frances Hodgson Burnett
“You have yourself under magnificent control, but a woman passionately in love cannot keep a certain look out of her eyes.""If it is there”
— Frances Hodgson Burnett
“We trifle with France and labour with Germany, we sentimentalize over Italy and ecstacise over Spain- but England we love.””
— Frances Hodgson Burnett
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