Author
Frances Hodgson Burnett
1849-1924
Frances Hodgson Burnett was a British-American novelist and playwright, born in Manchester, best known for children's novels including A Little Princess and The Secret Garden.
Frances Eliza Hodgson was born on 24 November 1849 in Cheetham, Manchester, the third of five children of Edwin Hodgson, an ironmonger, and his wife Eliza. Her father died suddenly in 1853, leaving the family without an income, and when the American Civil War brought the Lancashire cotton famine her mother had to sell the family business. In 1865 the family emigrated to the United States, settling near Knoxville, Tennessee.
The family was poor there, and Frances turned to writing to earn money; her first story appeared in 1868. In 1873 she married Swan Burnett, who became a doctor, and they had two sons, Lionel and Vivian. After meeting the editor of the children's magazine St. Nicholas she began writing for children, and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), whose hero was modelled on Vivian, became a bestseller. Lionel's death in 1890 left her in deep depression.
From the mid-1890s she lived at Great Maytham Hall in England, where she wrote in the rose garden and had the idea for The Secret Garden (1911). A Little Princess (1905) grew out of her earlier story Sara Crewe, which she turned into a play before reworking it as a novel. In time Little Lord Fauntleroy lost the popularity that The Secret Garden has kept.
Burnett became an American citizen in 1905 and settled on Long Island, where she died on 29 October 1924, aged 74. In 1936 a memorial sculpture of Mary and Dickon from The Secret Garden was put up in her honour in New York's Central Park.
Sources: wikipedia.org
