During her own lifetime Frances Hodgson Burnett was best known for Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), the story of a disinherited American boy who charms his irascible English grandfather and wins back his rightful title and fortune. The book's immediate international success and its stage adaptations in England, France, and America made Burnett's innocent child hero prominent in popular culture as well as in children's literature. The curly-headed beauty in dark velvet came to epitomize the sentimental idealization of the child which marked other children's classics of the era such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and J.M. Barrie's play Peter Pan (1904); and Little Lord Fauntleroy has continued to be recognized as a landmark in nineteenth-century children's literature. As some of its early notoriety waned, its genuine literary merits have also been acknowledged. Burnett's book which has most often found its way onto lists of recommended reading for children, however, is The Secret Garden (1911).
