consolation and financial relief for her family in a time of poverty, became an almost evangelical effort to create order and spread joy in an increasingly perplexing world. As she counseled in her 1909 children’s book, The Land of the Blue Flower, “If you fill your mind with a beautiful thought, there will be no room in it for an ugly one.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in Manchester, England, in 1849. Her father, Edwin Hodgson, kept a home-furnishings store, and the family lived in moderate affluence until his death in 1853. Burnett’s mother, Eliza, tried to keep the family business afloat through the 1850s, but times grew increasingly hard as Manchester, the center of the world’s cotton textile industry, fell into a recession caused by the outbreak of the American Civil War and its disastrous effect on the southern cotton trade. By 1865 Eliza Hodgson was forced to close the store and emigrate with her five children to New Market, Tennessee, where her brother had a dry goods business. The family lived in a log cabin and were supported by the earnings of Burnett’s two brothers, who went to work for their uncle. Having long entertained her sisters and schoolmates with the improbable adventures of a red-headed heroine, Edith Somerville, Frances decided to try her hand at writing for a living. Raising money for paper and stamps by gathering and selling wild grapes, she wrote her first stories, romances set in aristocratic English parlors, and sold two pieces to the magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book in June 1868. Soon she was writing five or six stories per month and publishing in prestigious periodicals such as Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, and Scribner’s Monthly.

Burnett’s early stories already contained some key features of her later fiction, including the contrasting points of view of British and American characters and the use of dialect, both the Lancashire dialect she had grown up with in Manchester and the dialect of her neighbors in Tennessee. In the mid-nineteenth century, there was a sudden surge of interest in regional variations in speech, just as these regional peculiarities were first coming under threat as the American population became more mobile. Two of Burnett’s favorite authors published novels making strong use of dialect speech: Charles Dickens, in Hard Times (1854), and Charlotte Brontë, in Shirley (1849). Burnett’s first novel, That Lass o’ Lowrie’s (1877), has as its heroine a coal miner’s daughter who speaks broad Lancashire. Burnett’s skilled ear for dialect is in evidence more than thirty years later, in The Secret Garden, in the Yorkshire speech of Dickon Sowerby, admired and imitated by Mary Lennox and taught to Colin Craven as a language of initiates that cut, at least temporarily, across class barriers.

By the time Frances wrote That Lass o’ Lowrie’s she was married to her childhood friend from Knoxville, Swan Burnett, and the mother of two sons, Lionel and Vivian. Unusually for the time, she continued to write after her marriage; indeed, it was her income that allowed Swan, a physician, to pursue extra training in Europe. Her career gave her a degree of independence that was then uncommon for a married woman and that, from the first, was a source of much gossip. After the family settled in Washington, D.C., Frances made frequent trips to England, often leaving her husband and children behind. In the course of her lifetime she would cross the Atlantic thirty-three times, an extraordinary tally for a period before air travel; her many trips gave rise, as she confessed in an 1895 speech to the London Vagabonds’ Club, to “a general indefiniteness as to whether I am an Englishwoman or an American” (Romantick Lady, p. 266). Meanwhile, she was becoming acquainted with some of America’s leading literary figures, including Emerson and Louisa M. Alcott, in addition to meeting Oscar Wilde, Alfred Tennyson, and Henry James in London. In the decade following That Lass she wrote a string of novels and stories, published on both sides of the Atlantic, culminating in the life-changing success of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

After Fauntleroy, darker elements creep into the narrative of Burnett’s life. Her gushing protestations of affection for her children were accompanied by astonishing neglect. Leaving her older son, Lionel, with his father, she took Vivian to England, where she rented a country cottage, named it Dorincourt after the family estate in Fauntleroy, and pursued an increasingly ardent and public relationship with Stephen Townsend, who was ten years her junior and a physician with dreams of a stage career.