Question #23

Frances Hodgson Burnett:

Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett was an American-English novelist and playwright. She is most well-known for the three children's novels Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885-1886), A Little Princess (1905) and  The Secret Garden (1911). Frances was born in Cheetham, Manchester in England on the 24 of November 1849 and died on the 29 of October 1924 in New York U.S., aged 74. After her father died in 1852, her family fell on straitened circumstances and Frances and her family had to immigrate to the United States in 1865. They settled near Knoxville, Tennessee. At that stage Frances started publishing stories (aged 19) in magazines to help earn money for the family. Her mother then died in 1870 and Frances married Swan Burnett in 1872 who became a medical doctor. The Burnetts lived in Paris for two years, where their two sons were born, before returning to the United States to live in Washington D.C. When Frances returned, she began writing novels. The first was 'That Lass o'Lowrie's'. That novel was published to good reviews. Little Lord Fauntleroy was published in 1886 and made her a popular writer of children's fiction although her romantic adult novels written in the 1890s were also very popular. She wrote and helped to produce stage versions of Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess. In the beginning of the 1880s she began to travel to England frequently and in the 1890s she bought a house there where she wrote The Secret Garden. Her oldest son Lionel died of tuberculosis in 1890 which caused a relapse of the depression she had struggled with much of her life. She divorced Swan Burnett in 1898 and married Stephen Townsend in 1900 and divorced Stephen in 1902. A couple of years later Frances settled in Nassau County, Long Island, where she died and is buried in Roslyn Cemetery.


Frances Hodgson Burnett, Biography