Frances Hodgson Burnett

Born in Manchester in 1849, Frances Hodgson Burnett was a novelist and playwright, best known for her children’s books.Following her father’s death in 1853, the family emigrated to the United States, settling in Tennessee. Burnett started publishing stories at the age of nineteen, to assist her family financially. She married 1873, and the couple lived in Paris and Washington DC, where she first began writing novels. Little Lord Fauntleroy was published in 1896, cementing Burnett’s status as a successful writer of children’s fiction, although her romantic novels for adults were also popular.After her divorce in the 1890s, Burnett returned to England and bought a home there, where she wrote The Secret Garden, which was published in 1911. Burnett returned to the United States for the last 17 years of her life, where she died at her home on Long Island in 1924.