Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Hodgson was born in Manchester, England, in 1849, into a family of hardware merchants. When her father died in 1865, the family's circumstances collapsed. Her mother moved the surviving children to Knoxville, Tennessee, where relatives had promised better prospects. Frances was sixteen. Within a few years she was selling stories to American magazines to help support the family; by her mid-twenties she was a professional writer of some reputation on both sides of the Atlantic.

She married Swan Burnett in 1873 and eventually settled in Washington, D.C., and later in England and Long Island. The marriage ended in divorce in 1898, and she later married and quickly divorced Stephen Townsend, a considerably younger actor. The biographical sketch of a twice-divorced woman who supported herself entirely by writing across two continents in the Victorian era is worth dwelling on: she was a more unconventional figure than her children's books might suggest.

Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), serialized in St. Nicholas Magazine, was one of the great popular phenomena of its decade. The story of an American boy who discovers he is heir to a British earldom, written with considerable sweetness, sold in enormous quantities and generated a cultural craze: for years after its publication, mothers in Britain and the United States dressed their young sons in the velvet suits and lace collars worn by Fauntleroy's illustrations, to the documented misery of many such sons. The theatrical adaptations were equally successful. Burnett became internationally famous.

A Little Princess (1905), an expansion of an earlier story, follows Sara Crewe through the reversal of her fortunes at a London boarding school — from indulged daughter of a wealthy father to drudge in the attic after her father's death and financial ruin. It is a fantasy of resilience through imagination, of maintaining inner dignity under external degradation. The novel is tighter and emotionally richer than Little Lord Fauntleroy, and it has worn better.

The Secret Garden (1911) is her most enduring work and the one most continuously in print. Mary Lennox, a sour and neglected child orphaned in colonial India, arrives at her uncle's Yorkshire estate and discovers a walled garden that has been locked for ten years. She begins to restore it, gradually drawing in two other isolated children: Colin, her hypochondriac cousin, and Dickon, a local boy with an extraordinary rapport with animals. The novel is about healing through work and attention — the garden is restored as its tenders are restored — and it makes its argument with a directness that bypasses sentimentality. The Yorkshire setting is rendered with particular care. The Secret Garden reads as children's literature and as something adults return to for different reasons: it is one of the more honest portrayals of depression and recovery in English fiction of any kind.

Burnett died in 1924 as one of the most famous writers of her era, then underwent the common posthumous fate of the widely beloved: critical condescension from the generation that followed, recovery as scholars looked again at work that had never left readers' hands. The Secret Garden in particular has accumulated a serious critical literature since the 1980s, with readings attentive to its colonial framing (Mary's origins in British India, the treatment of Indian servants as contrast to Yorkshire vitality), its gender politics, and its engagement with New Thought and Christian Science ideas circulating in Burnett's milieu. These readings complicate the novel without replacing it.