FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
Imagine children’s books as popular as the Harry Potter series is today, and you have some idea of the iconic status Frances Hodgson Burnett earned from her writing more than a century ago. Frances was born in Manchester, England, in 1849. Her prosperous father owned a home-furnishings business, supported by customers made wealthy through the Manchester textile industry. But when her father died in 1853 and then cotton imports ceased when the American Civil War began, Frances’s family became almost penniless. To survive, her mother moved her five children to rural Tennessee in 1865.
A naturally gifted storyteller, Frances charmed family and friends with her keen imagination. In spite of little formal schooling, she read avidly, and it was not long before she realized she might aid her struggling family by selling stories to popular ladies’ magazines. She sent her work to Godey’s Lady’s Book, and in 1868 Godey’s published two stories for $35—the first of what would be a lifelong stream of handsome paychecks. When her mother died in 1870, Frances was the family’s chief supporter, a role she would play throughout much of her life. Indeed, when she married a Tennessee doctor, Swan Burnett, in 1873, it was she who paid their way to Europe so Swan could study medicine.
Within a few years, Frances gave birth to two boys, Lionel and Vivian, and released her first major works, including the critically acclaimed That Lass o’ Lowrie’s (1877). The conclusion of Lass, in which her characters leave the working-class oppression of the coal-mining culture of Lancashire for a peaceful garden in Kent, introduces an abiding theme for Burnett: the healing power of gardens. Noted by critics as an up-and-coming author, Burnett was also a prominent hostess in Washington, D.C. She was popular and charming, but the numerous roles she played—prolific writer, the family’s main breadwinner, mother, wife, and society hostess—were overwhelming at times, as she revealed in her 1883 novel Through One Administration. Yet Burnett loved to work and travel, and she spent considerable time away from her husband and sons. In 1879, shuttling between the United States and Europe, she published a more serious work of fiction, Haworth’s, which was followed by her first published writing for children, in the magazine St. Nicholas.
Burnett wrote more than fifty novels during her life, but it was the publication of Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1886 that determined the course of her future works and her place in literary history as a writer of children’s fiction. Although the book received an ambivalent critical response, it was a phenomenon in America and Europe, selling out printing after printing and earning Burnett enormous fame and fortune. After the dissolution of her first and second marriages and the 1890 death of her eldest son, Lionel, Burnett wrote the classic for which she is most remembered, The Secret Garden (1911). Its central theme—that the mind can heal the body—reflected Burnett’s own struggles with illness and despair. But regardless of the sadness she endured in reality, Burnett was determined to create only happy endings for her characters.
She remained prolific throughout and after World War I, although her Victorian style had become outdated in the eyes of many critics. Surrounded by her family and many friends, Burnett discarded such criticism, writing the successful works T. Tembarom (1913) and The Lost Prince (1915), doing charity work, and tending the luxurious gardens at her homes on Long Island and Bermuda. Frances Hodgson Burnett died of heart failure in Plandome (Long Island), New York, on October 29, 1924.
THE WORLD OF FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT AND THE SECRET GARDEN
1849 Frances Hodgson Burnett is born on November 24 in Manchester , England. Her father, Edwin, owns a home-furnishings shop whose profits provide a good life for his growing family . Henry David Thoreau publishes “Resistance to Civil Government ,” the original title of “Civil Disobedience.”
1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter appears.
1851 Herman Melville publishes Moby-Dick.
1853 When Edwin dies, Frances’s mother, Eliza, runs her husband’s company to support their five children.
1855 Eliza and the children move to Islington Square, a bleak area bordering the industrial section of Manchester. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is published.
1859 Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities are published.
1861 The American Civil War begins. Dickens’s Great Expectations is published.
1863 President Abraham Lincoln, through the Emancipation Proclamation , abolishes slavery in America.
1865 After struggling for many years to preserve the family business , Eliza moves with her children to her brother’s log cabin in New