Frances Hodgson Burnett

Life

Frances Eliza Hodgson was born in Manchester, England, in 1849. Her father, an ironmonger, died when she was three, and the family’s fortunes declined through the cotton famine of the 1860s. In 1865 her mother moved the family to Knoxville, Tennessee, to join a relative. Frances began selling stories to American magazines as a teenager to help support the household, and by her early twenties she was a regular contributor to Godey’s Lady’s Book and Scribner’s.

She married Swan Burnett, a doctor, in 1873 and had two sons. Her first novel for adults, That Lass o’ Lowrie’s, set among Lancashire miners, appeared in 1877. Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), written for children, made her famous and wealthy on both sides of the Atlantic and started a fashion for velvet suits and long curls on small boys. Her elder son Lionel died of tuberculosis in 1890, a loss that affected her deeply and that shaped her later interest in Christian Science, Theosophy and New Thought. She divorced Swan Burnett in 1898 and was briefly and unhappily married to Stephen Townesend.

Burnett spent much of her adult life crossing between England and the United States. She leased Great Maytham Hall in Kent from 1898 to 1907, where a walled rose garden is usually cited as the model for the garden in her best-known book. She became an American citizen in 1905 and died on Long Island in 1924.

Literary significance

Burnett wrote more than fifty books, many of them romances and society novels for adults that were popular in their day and are little read now. Her lasting work is three children’s novels: Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905, expanded from an earlier story) and The Secret Garden (1911). All three turn on a child whose circumstances change suddenly and who has to find a way to live in a new household. The Secret Garden, which was received quietly at first, is now generally considered her best book and one of the central English children’s novels of the twentieth century. She was also an early and effective campaigner for authors’ rights, winning a case in 1888 over an unauthorized stage version of Little Lord Fauntleroy that helped change British copyright practice.

Where to start

The Secret Garden is the obvious first choice. A Little Princess, also in our catalog, is a good second: shorter, set in a London boarding school, and with a more conventional but very satisfying plot.