Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances (Eliza) Hodgson Burnett was born on 24 November 1849 in England. After her father died (1865) the family had a hard time and in 1865 they emigrated to the United States in Tennessee. To help earn some money for the family, Frances began to write. She then published stories in magazines. Her mother died in 1870 and in 1872 Frances married Swan Burnett, who became a medical doctor. The Burnetts lived for two years in Paris, where their two sons were born, before returning to the United States to live in Washington D.C. Burnett then began to write novels, the first of which was “That Lass o’ Lowries’s”. “Little Lord Fauntleroy” was published in 1886 and made her a popular writer children’s fiction. She wrote many more books, a few that are one of her most popular books are “A little Princess” (1905) and “The secret Garden” (1911). Beginning in the 1880s, she began to travel to England frequently and in the 1890s bought a home there, where she wrote “The secret Garden”. Her oldest son, Lionel, died of tuberculosis in 1890, which caused a relapse of the depression she had struggled with for much of her life. She divorced Swan Burnett in 1898, married Stephen Townsend in 1900, and divorced him in 1902. A few years later she moved to Long Island, where she died in 1924 and is buried in Roslyn Cemetry.