decorating houses and creating exquisite gardens.

1887 A Woman’s Will is published, as is the story “Sara Crewe.” Burnett

informally separates from Swan, taking her sons on a tour of Europe. Their itinerary includes a stay in London for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebration.

1888 Frances’s stage adaptation of Fauntleroy opens in London three months after she learns of an unauthorized dramatization there. In a feat believed to be impossible at the time, she successfully sues under the Copyright Act of 1842, earning the gratitude of fellow authors. George Eastman patents the rollfilm camera.

1889 The Pretty Sister of José is published. Frances is involved in a traffic accident and incurs a concussion that further weakens her already fragile health.

1890 Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories is published. After months of seeking a cure for her eldest son, Lionel, Frances is devastated when he dies of tuberculosis. Perhaps in response to her son’s illness and death, Frances becomes active in children’s charities , to which she donates generous sums of money.

1891 Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is published.

1892 Children I Have Known is published. The first successful gaspowered automobile made in the United States is built by Charles and Frank Duryea, bicycle designers and toolmakers, at Chicopee, Massachusetts.

1893 A memoir, The One I Knew Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child, is published.

1894 Piccino and Other Stories is published.

1895 Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress is published.

1896 A Lady of Quality is published.

1897 Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published.

1898 After many years of alienation, Frances and Swan divorce. She moves into Maytham Hall, in Kent, with her son Vivian, a Harvard graduate in journalism. She conducts an unhappy affair with an abusive English doctor, Stephen Townsend. He wants to be a stage actor, and Frances arranges roles for him in the stage adaptations of her novels.

1899 In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim is published.

1900 Frances marries Townsend, reportedly under coercion: He had threatened to publicly reveal that she let him kiss her after

knowing him for two weeks. Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams published.

1901 The Making of a Marchioness is published. Queen Victoria dies.

1902 Ongoing struggles with her abusive husband lead Frances to seek a separation. She continues working to exhaustion and is hospitalized.

1905 A Little Princess is published.

1909 Burnett moves to a house she has built in Plandome (Long Island) , New York.

1911 Her greatest work, The Secret Garden, is published. Its underlying themes regarding the power of the mind over the body reflect Burnett’s growing interest in Christian Science.

1913 T. Tembarom is published.

1914 Frances begins spending more time at her home in Bermuda, where she grows more than a hundred varieties of roses in her gardens. James Joyce’s Dubliners is published. World War I begins.

1915 The Lost Prince is published.

1917 T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations is published.

1920 Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is published.

1922 The Head of the House of Coombe is published. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses are published. The appearance of modernist works causes some critics to find Burnett’s writing antiquated by comparison.

1924 Burnett dies of heart failure in Plandome on October 29.

INTRODUCTION

Near the end of her life, looking back over six prolific decades in which she had published fifty-two books and written and produced thirteen plays, Frances Hodgson Burnett told her son Vivian, “With the best that was in me I have tried to write some happiness into the world” (Burnett, The Romantick Lady, p. 410; see “For Further Reading”). The Secret Garden, Burnett’s novel about a pair of lonely children who are healed physically and psychologically by cultivating an abandoned garden, has brought happiness to child readers, and more than a few adults, for nearly a hundred years. Praised by writer and critic Alison Lurie as “one of the most original and brilliant children’s books of the twentieth century,” The Secret Garden has never been out of print since its publication in 1911. The novel has been filmed several times, notably in 1949 and 1993; has been serialized by the BBC (in 1952, 1960, and 1975) and by Viacom in 1987; and has been made into a Tony Award-winning musical by Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon, in 1991.

Although it was popular from the outset, The Secret Garden was not immediately recognized as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s most outstanding literary achievement. A typical review in The Bookman, while noting that the story contained “a deep vein of symbolism,” dismissed it as “an exceedingly pretty tale” (Gerzina, Frances Hodgson Burnett, p. 263; see