by Angelika Zirker

I had every opportunity for knowing her well, at least. We were born on the same day, we learned to toddle about together, we began our earliest observations of the world we live in at the same period, we made the same mental remarks on people and things, and reserved to ourselves exactly the same period, we made the same mental remarks on people and things, and reserved to ourselves exactly the same rights of private personal opinion.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The One I Knew the Best of All, illustr. Reginald B. Birch. 1893. Private Copy (AZ).

I have not the remotest idea of what she looked like. She belonged to an era when photography was not as advanced an art as it is to-day, and no picture of her was every made. It is a well-authenticated fact that she was auburn-haired and rosy, and I can testify that she was curly, because one of my earliest recollections of her emotions is a memory of the momentarily maddening effect of a shark, sitting jerk of the comb when the nurse was absent-minded or maladroit. That she was also a plump little person I am led to believe, in consequence of the well-known joke of a ribald boy cousin and a disrespectful brother, who averred that when she fell she “bounced” like an india-rubber ball. For the rest, I do not remember what the looking-glass reflected back at her, though I must have seen it. It might, consequently, be argued that on such occasions there were so many serious and interesting problems to be attended to that a reflection in the looking-glass was an unimportant detail.¹

Frances Hodgson Burnett published her autobiography in 1893, at the age of 44. She was by then a well-known and popular author, mainly of adult fiction; her greatest success thus far had been Little Lord Fauntleroy, a story she had told to her younger son Vivian. The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was translated into several languages (see Gerzina 110). Her other bestselling novels that are still widely read today – A Little Princess and The Secret Garden – followed in 1905 and 1911, respectively.

Frances Eliza Hodgson was born in Manchester on 24 November 1849, the third child of Edwin and Eliza Hodgson. Her father, a successful ironmonger and silversmith, died in 1853. Her mother then raised their five children alone but was soon facing financial difficulties, which made her join her brother in Knoxville, Tennessee in April 1865. The move across the Atlantic did not solve the money issues of the family, so that Frances later that year opened a “Select Seminary for Young People” and took on pupils.

Shortly afterwards she became a professional writer. In June 1868 her first story, “Hearts and Diamonds”, was published in Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine, and from that time none of her literary works was ever rejected. She wrote altogether more than fifty novels, most of them for adults, and thirteen plays.

With her mother’s death in 1870, Frances was left to keep house for the family. By 1872 she had become so successful a writer that she could make a living from it and support her family; her income even allowed her to travel to England where she stayed for several months. Upon her return to Tennessee in August 1873 she married her neighbour, the medical student Swan Burnett, as she had promised upon her departure. A year later their first child, Lionel, was born. Their second son Vivian was born in Paris in April 1876, where the family had moved a year earlier so that Swan could study medicine with French doctors. That year also saw the publication of her first novel That Lass o’ Lowrie’s which was serialised in Scribner’s Magazine and followed the patterns of the industrial novel (e.g.  Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton). The novel was adapted as a play and staged in New York two years later.

More novels followed. In 1881, A Fair Barbarian was published, first as a serial in Scribner’s, and later that year in volume form. It is the story of an American girl who goes to stay with relatives in England and was very much influenced by Henry James, whom Burnett admired. Burnett would later adopt that pattern of transatlantic travel and adventure in Little Lord Fauntleroy as well as in her adult novels The Shuttle and T. Tembarom (cf. Thwaite 70).

Ever since her stay in France, where the family depended wholly on her income from writing, she had been prone to nervous illness and exhaustion; in the early 1880s, this situation came to a crisis, and she became so ill from exhaustion that she had to stop writing for some time. Little Lord Fauntleroy, published in 1886, first as a serial in St Nicholas Magazine and then in volume form, was the first publication after this breakdown. Burnett then began composing the story of “Sara Crewe, or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s”, first published as a serial in St Nicholas Magazine, then reworked as a play, and published as a book in 1888. It was later republished in an enlarged version as The Little Princess in 1905.

For the following decades, Burnett would spend her life between the continents, regularly travelling to England to spend the summers there, moving on to Paris and Florence during the autumn, and returning to America later in the year. Her son Lionel became ill at the age of sixteen, and she took both her children with her to Europe; Lionel died of consumption in Paris on 7 December 1890. Eight years later, she divorced her husband, and she took out a lease on Maytham Hall in Kent, where she would live for ten years, except for the winters which she spent either in London or in Washington. Maytham Hall became a life-changing place for her, as The Secret Garden evolved from her spending time in its walled rose garden, where she even befriended a robin; it was published in 1911 (see also Thwaite).

She lost her lease of Maytham Hall after ten years, in 1908. In the meantime, she had married for a second time in February 1900; the conjugal relationship with Stephen Townesend, an actor and former medical student, with whom she had started co-producing her plays as early as 1889 and who was ten years her junior (which caused some scandal in magazine gossip columns), lasted only two years. Upon losing Maytham, she bought land in Plandome, Long Island, and built a house there. It was in 1914 that she returned from England for the last time for her thirty-third Atlantic crossing. She eventually moved to Plandome and lived there permanently until she died of colon cancer on 29 October 1924 – one hundred years ago.

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s was an extraordinary life. She is today regarded as one of the most important writers of literature for children in the English language and was known and admired during her own lifetime for her novels for children and adults alike.

Works Cited

Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The One I Knew the Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893.

Gerzina, Gretchen. Frances Hodgson Burnett. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.

Thwaite, Ann. Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1849-1924. 1974. Boston: David R. Godine, 1991.

Further Reading

Bixler, Phyllis. Frances Hodgson Burnett. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

Burnett, Vivian. The Romantick Lady: The Life Story of an Imagination. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927.

Carpenter, Angelica Shirley, and Jean Shirley. Frances Hodgson Burnett: Beyond the Secret Garden. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1990.

Zirker, Angelika. “Frances Hodgson Burnett”. The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 March 2009. https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=655