Little Lord Fauntleroy

We had a great beginning discussion of Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy in class today, and I'd like to continue it here on our blogs. I did a little definitive research, and it turns out that Frances Hodgson Burnett is, indeed, a female author. I'm reading this text for the first time along with you, and as you know I had been under the impression she was a man!

If we didn't know better, this mistake would seem embarrassing, but I'm not embarrassed in the least. (And no one else guilty of this should be either!) The nineteenth-century literary marketplace was full of authorial cross-dressing, so mistaking the gender of an author is more common than you may think. But my mistake raised an interesting question about authorship in class: what difference does the author's gender make anyway? How does a text change when we find out that an author is male or female? And what if we can't tell? Many male and female authors cross-dressed in their pen names, making these questions even more important and complex.

In your blog posting, please answer these questions concerning authorship. You should use Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy as your primary example, but you're welcome to draw on other texts we've read this semester as well.

Happy Blogging!