Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0813538254, Paperback)

"Gretchen Gerzina’s biography, which is conscientious, well researched and diligent in its treatment of such things as the State of Tennessee after the Civil War, the women’s suffrage movement and the law relating to publishing, and which has made good use of family papers, steadfastly follows the trail of ‘an extraordinary woman,’ a quasi-fictional heroine of feminist romance."—Times Literary Supplement

"In this first biography to have the cooperation of Burnett’s descendants and relatives, we see a side of her that . . . puts her career in a whole different light."—Boston Globe

"A first-rate biography."—Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

Hugely successful in her own time for adult novels and plays, Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) would be astounded to find out she is remembered for a handful of books for children, but most of all for the enormously popular The Secret Garden. This fascinating biography—the first to have the full cooperation of Burnett’s descendants and relatives—examines her life with lively intelligence, sensitivity, and a wealth of new material.

Burnett’s life was full of those reversals of fortune that mark her work. Following modest beginnings in mid-Victorian Manchester, England she arrived in post–Civil War Tennessee at the age of fifteen with her widowed mother and four siblings. Burnett was a breadwinner for the family from the age of seventeen, eventually publishing a total of fifty-two books and writing and producing thirteen plays. She made and spent a fortune in her lifetime, was generous and profligate, yet anxious about money and obsessively hardworking.

Constantly restless and inventive, Burnett’s personal life was as complex as her professional one. Her first marriage to a southern doctor disintegrated after her prolonged absences and rumors of her flirtations and a scandalous affair. Her subsequent marriage to an abusive English doctor also failed. She understood the intensity and loneliness of the thoughtful child, but was herself a largely absent mother of two sons—overwhelmed by guilt when tragedy struck one of them; the other one never got over being the model for Little Lord Fauntleroy.

A woman of contrasts and paradoxes, this quintessentially British writer was equally at home in the United States, which honored her with a memorial in Central Park. Frances Hodgson Burnett reinvented for herself and for generations to come the magic and the mystery of the childhood she never had.