Frances Hodgson Burnett

English-American · 1849 to 1924

Born on November 24, 1849, in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England, Frances Eliza Hodgson was the daughter of an ironmonger whose comfortable trade collapsed after his death when she was four. The family slid into genteel poverty as cotton mills failed during the Lancashire famine, and in 1865 her widowed mother moved them to the hills near Knoxville, Tennessee, hoping for a fresh start that never quite arrived. She began writing to bring money home, selling her first stories to American magazines in her late teens by promising editors she could supply whatever they wanted. She married Swan Burnett, an eye doctor, in 1873, and kept writing through two pregnancies and the household's chronic debts. Her first adult novel, That Lass o' Lowrie's (1877), drew on the Lancashire coalfields of her childhood and made her name. Then came the book that made her famous and rich, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), whose velvet-suited boy hero set a fashion that tormented a generation of small boys. She wrote nearly fifty more, but two children's books outlasted everything else, A Little Princess (1905), grown from her earlier Sara Crewe, and The Secret Garden (1911), with its locked door, its robin, and its convalescent garden behind the wall. She crossed the Atlantic dozens of times, kept houses on both sides, gardened obsessively in Kent and on Long Island, and lost her elder son Lionel to consumption in 1890, a grief that shadowed her fiction. She became a naturalized American citizen in 1905. She died on October 29, 1924, at her home in Plandome, Long Island, New York, at the age of seventy-four.