Frances Hodgson Burnett

1849–1924
Portrait of Frances Hodgson Burnett in a fur hat and coat
Photograph (c. 1901)

Frances Hodgson was born in Manchester in 1849. When her father died, the family fell on hard times and moved to Tennessee, where as a teenager she began selling stories to magazines to help pay the bills.

Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) made her rich and famous, and A Little Princess and The Secret Garden (1911) followed. The garden was inspired by a walled rose garden at her house in Kent. She died in New York in 1924.

Frances Hodgson Burnett on the site

The Secret GardenPublished in 1911 About 6 hours read Mary Lennox is a sour, spoiled little girl in India until cholera takes her parents. She is sent to live in her uncle's huge, gloomy house on the Yorkshire moors, where a robin leads her to the key of a garden that has been locked for ten years, and at night she hears someone crying in the corridors. Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 story of a garden coming back to life.
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