1849-1924 · English-born American novelist, author of The Secret Garden and A Little Princess
Posthumous or imagined likeness of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Source · Public domain
About Frances Hodgson Burnett
Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) was born in Manchester, England, and emigrated with her widowed mother and family to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1865. She began selling stories to magazines as a teenager to help support the household and became one of the most popular writers of her day on both sides of the Atlantic. Little Lord Fauntleroy was her first great success with young readers; A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911) followed. She spent her last years at Plandome on Long Island, New York.
“If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.”
“But only be good, dear, only be brave, only be kind and true always, and then you will never hurt any one, so long as you live, and you may help many, and the big world may be better because my little child was born.”
“It was really a very simple thing, after all,--it was only that he had lived near a kind and gentle heart, and had been taught to think kind thoughts always and to care for others.”
Cedric Errol is a curly-haired American boy of seven, living with his widowed mother in a modest side street of New York. He calls her Dearest, as his father did, and his best friends are Mr. Hobbs, the corner grocer who rails against earls as grasping tyrants, and Dick Tipton, a bootblack.
A Little Princess opens on a foggy London day as seven-year-old Sara Crewe rides in a cab with her adoring father, Captain Ralph Crewe, a young officer who has brought her from India to Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies. Because her father is rich, Sara is given a private sitting room, a French maid, a pony and a doll named Emily whom she half believes can walk and talk when no one is looking.
The Secret Garden begins in imperial India, where Mary Lennox is a sickly, spoiled and emotionally neglected child. A cholera outbreak kills her parents and household, and Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven.
