![]() ![]() Prescient enough to understand the increasing role of movies, she later built clauses guaranteeing her the film rights to her books. Thirteen of her works appeared in London’s West End theatres and on Broadway, generally written and produced by her. Not only a writer of novels and stories, however, Burnett also produced plays. The story-and the plays and films it spawned-started a fashion craze that mothers loved and boys hated, as they were forced into wide lace collars and long curls, probably not helped when girls were always given the stage and film role.Įven though writing was how she made her living, it also enabled Burnett to travel, buy beautiful clothes and furnish houses in England and America. The image of a sturdy and very masculine little boy in a velveteen jacket shot around the world and was to haunt her son Vivian, from whose photograph it was taken from, for the rest of his days. Largely forgotten or ridiculed today, it was the Harry Potter of its day. From the moment of its first appearance as a serial in Saint Nicholas Magazine to its publication as a book a year later in 1886, Fauntleroy became a household name. Now as Frances Hodgson Burnett she had money of her own, and she bought, in cash, a 17-room house in Washington, D.C. She was only 18 and none of her work was ever rejected.īy 1886, Frances had married a Tennessee doctor, had two sons and had written the blockbuster novel Little Lord Fauntleroy-her 18th novel, which made her hugely famous on both sides of the Atlantic. Both stories were accepted immediately, and with the check that arrived she launched a career that saw her eventually become America’s highest-paid woman writer. The editor was puzzled and surprised to find an accomplished work with an English setting coming out of Tennessee was she English or American? That evening she sat down and wrote a second one for him. The first story she sent came back with comments, but instead of revising she mailed it again to another magazine. She had read in the back of ladies’ magazines that they paid money for stories and, having invented them for her friends back in England, she thought she might take a chance at being paid to write. Their financial difficulties were quite real, but young Fanny (a name she quickly abandoned) found Tennessee a true Garden of Eden after the pollution of Manchester and the smuts that floated down like snow from its factory chimneys. There, but for the generosity of their neighbors, they would have starved. There the Hodgson family found itself ensconced in an unexpected place: a log cabin in a very small town outside of Knoxville, Tennessee. Just a year later, however, her father Edwin Hodgson died and his widow and five children embarked upon a decade of moving house, each time to a slightly less desirable neighborhood.Įach move took Burnett further and further away from gardens, until in 1865 her mother decided to make the riskiest move of all: to join her rogue of a brother, who boasted of his accomplishments in America, in the American South during the last months of the Civil War. There were farms and country cottages close by and she became friendly with a family of market gardeners who kept pigs. Luke’s Terrace, which backed onto fields owned by the Earl of Derby, leading Burnett to recall it later in life as the “back garden of Eden.” She remembered it as a place of gardens and perpetual summer, where a small child could daydream beneath the trees and beside the flowers, ignoring the industrial city that surrounded this suburb of light and air. In 1852, when she was just three, her family moved to St. Although she had a lifetime of love for children and gardens, she would be amazed to know that this book is the one for which she is most remembered today-even though it was one that was closest to her heart.įrances Hodgson Burnett’s love affair with gardens began when she was a small child living in Manchester, England. ![]() She is accepted into the quiet and remote country house of an uncle, who has almost completely withdrawn into himself after the death of his wife.In the Garden: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnettįew people realize that The Secret Garden, the book most readers associate with Frances Hodgson Burnett, was only one of 53 novels she wrote and published, and that most of her books were for adults, not children. Mary Lennox is a spoiled, middle-class, self-centered child who has been recently orphaned. Download cover art Download CD case insert The Secret Garden
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