Frances Hodgson Burnett

Biography

Manchester’s soot-gray streets welcomed Frances Eliza Hodgson on 24 November 1849, first-born among five brothers and sisters. When her father died three winters later, the family coffers collapsed; she learned the alphabet by scratching tales across the backs of used ledger sheets because blank paper was a luxury. In 1865 the Hodgdons crossed the Atlantic and settled in a Tennessee log cabin. Sixteen-year-old Frances turned the rough-hewn front room into a one-desk schoolhouse and, between lessons, mailed off stories to the “ladies’ pages” of Godey’s and Peterson’s. While most married women kept house, she kept contracts, cashing cheques for tales spun from cabin porch sunsets. Dr. Swan Burnett, an eye specialist, became her husband in 1873. Sons followed in quick succession—Lionel (1874) and Vivian (1876)—but the union cooled into polite silences. When Vivian begged for a book “about a boy who isn’t good all the time,” Frances stitched velvet knickers on a small hero and gave the world Little Lord Fauntleroy. In 1890 influenza stole Lionel at sixteen; grief hollowed the marriage beyond repair. The couple parted, and the divorce decree arrived in 1898. A year later she swapped Burnett for Townshend, but the second trip down the aisle proved briefer than the first. By 1901 she had traded Tennessee heat for Long Island sea air. Between planting rose arbors and overseeing a brood of grandchildren, she summoned two enduring daydreams: the attic kingdom of A Little Princess and the walled Eden of The Secret Garden, each seeded with memories of threadbare Manchester days and the flowers she had coaxed from Tennessee clay. White-haired and famously imperious in her seventies—she once received guests while perched on a garden wheelbarrow throne—Burnett kept writing until 29 October 1924, when she closed her notebook for the last time.