Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett (24 November 1849 29 October 1924) was a British novelist and playwright. She is best known for the three children’s novels Little Lord Fauntleroy (published in 18851886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911).
Frances Eliza Hodgson was born in Cheetham, Manchester, England. After her father died in 1853, when Frances was 3 years old, the family fell on straitened circumstances and in 1865 emigrated to the United States, settling in New Market, Tennessee. Frances began her remunerative writing career there at age 19 to help earn money for the family, publishing stories in magazines. In 1870, her mother died. In Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1873 she married Swan Burnett, who became a medical doctor. Their first son Lionel was born a year later. The Burnetts lived for two years in Paris, where their second son Vivian was born, before returning to the United States to live in Washington, D.C. Burnett then began to write novels, the first of which (That Lass o’ Lowrie’s), 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 popular. She wrote and helped to produce stage versions of Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess.
Beginning in the 1880s, Burnett began to travel to England frequently and in the 1890s bought a home there, where she wrote The Secret Garden. Her elder son, Lionel, died of tuberculosis in 1890, which caused a relapse of the depression she had struggled with for much of her life. She divorced Swan Burnett in 1898, married Stephen Townsend in 1900, and divorced him in 1902. A few years later she settled in Nassau County, New York, where she died in 1924 and is buried in Roslyn Cemetery.
In 1936, a memorial sculpture by Bessie Potter Vonnoh was erected in her honor in Central Park’s Conservatory Garden. The statue depicts her two famous Secret Garden characters, Mary and Dickon.


Source:
Wikipedia

eBooks: A Lady of Quality | A Little Princess | Barty Crusoe and His Man Saturday | Biographical notice of Nicolo Paganini Haworth’s | Editha’s Burglar | Emily Fox-Seton | Esmeralda | His Grace of Osmonde | In the Closed Room | Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame” | Little Lord Fauntleroy | Little Lord Fauntleroy (abridged) | Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories | Lodusky | Louisiana | Mere Girauds Little Daughter | Miss Crespigny | My Robin | One Day At Arle | Robin | Sara Crewe | Seth” | Surly Tim” | T. Tembarom | That Lass O’ Lowrie’s | The Dawn of a To-morrow | The Good Wolf | The Head of the House of Coombe | The Land of the Blue Flower | The Little Hunchback Zia | The Lost Prince | The Pretty Sister Of Jose | The Secret Garden | The Shuttle | The White People | Theo | Through One Administration | Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress | Vagabondia

Works by Frances Hodgson Burnett: