Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Eliza Hodgson was born in Manchester in 1849, the daughter of an ironmonger who died when she was three. The family fell into poverty during the cotton famine caused by the American Civil War, and in 1865 her mother took the children to live near Knoxville, Tennessee.

To help the family, Frances began selling stories to magazines at eighteen, paying for postage by picking wild grapes. She soon became a regular contributor. In 1873 she married a doctor, Swan Burnett, with whom she had two sons, Lionel and Vivian.

Her first novel, That Lass o' Lowrie's, about the daughter of a Lancashire miner, was a success in 1877. In 1886 she published Little Lord Fauntleroy, the story of an American boy who becomes heir to an English earldom. It was a sensation, and his velvet suit with a lace collar became a fashion for boys.

She wrote plays and novels for adults, travelled constantly between America and England, and lived for some years at Great Maytham Hall in Kent, whose walled garden inspired her later novel. Her elder son Lionel died of tuberculosis in 1890, a loss that marked her deeply.

A Little Princess (1905), developed from an earlier story and play, tells of Sara Crewe, a rich pupil reduced to poverty at her boarding school. The Secret Garden (1911) follows Mary Lennox, a sour orphan from India who discovers a locked garden on a Yorkshire estate and brings it, and her sickly cousin Colin, back to life.

Divorced from Swan Burnett and later briefly married to Stephen Townsend, she settled in Plandome, on Long Island, New York, where she gardened passionately. She died there in 1924. The Secret Garden, little noticed at first, became one of the best-loved children's books of the century.