"Thoroughly researched and a good read."- New York Times

"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 learn she is remembered for a handful of books for children, most of all the enormously popular The Secret Garden. This biography examines her life with lively intelligence and a wealth of new material. Burnett's life was full of those reversals of fortune that mark her work. She was a breadwinner for her family from the age of seventeen, eventually publishing a total of fifty-two books and writing and producing thirteen plays. She was generous and profligate, yet anxious about money and obsessively hardworking. Burnett's personal life was as complex as her professional one. Her first marriage disintegrated and her subsequent marriage to an abusive English doctor also failed. She was a largely absent mother of two sons, one of whom never got over being the model for Little Lord Fauntleroy. A woman of contrasts and paradoxes, Frances Hodgson Burnett reinvented for herself and for generations to come the magic and the mystery of the childhood she never had.

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is the author of Carrington, a biography of Dora Carrington, and Black London: Life before Emancipation. She is a professor of English at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Contents
Introduction
Part One: The Coming Woman
"Two"
1. The New World: 1865
2. A Manchester Childhood: 1849-1865
3. A Shabby Genteel Story: 1866-1868
4. Vagabondia: 1869-1872
5. The Reluctant Bride Abroad: 1872-1876
6. Piracy and a Play: 1876-1878
7. A City of Groves and Bowers: 1877-1880
8. In the Company of Women: 1880-1884
9. Fauntleroy: 1884-1887
10. Return to Europe: 1887-1888
11. Lionel: 1889-1890
Part Two: A Lady of Quality
"The Lord God Planted a Garden"
12. Drury Lane: 1891-1892
13. "Great London Roars Below": 1892-1894
14. The New Woman: 1894-1896
15. Ladies of Quality: 1896-1897
16. Maytham Hall: 1897-1900
17. Stephen: 1900-1902
18. Recovery and New Thoughts 1902-1906
19. The End of an Era: 1907-1911
20. At Home and Abroad: 1911-1918
21. Elizabeth: 1921-1924
Epilogue
Notes
Index