Although she wrote for the adult marketplace at least as much as for the juvenile, Burnett's reputation rests firmly on her achievements as a children's writer. As contemporary critic William Archer phrased it, "Mrs. Burnett shows herself a true poet though her Pegasus may be a rocking-horse."
Frances Eliza Hodgson was born on 24 November 1849 at Cheetham Hill, Manchester, the third of five children of Edwin Hodgson and Eliza Boond Hodgson. The family included two elder brothers, Herbert and John George, and two younger sisters, Edith Mary and Edwina. Her mother's relatives came from a family of some antiquity in the area and still maintained the traditions of gentility and noblesse oblige. The family's sense of its importance is dramatized in a whimsical family legend which traced the descent of the line from a mythical Welsh chieftain, Cadraad Haard, from whom, as Vivian Burnett was to remark in his biography of his mother, "it could be easily considered that many interesting and highly creditable and individual traits had descended."
Edwin Hodgson was a prosperous middle-class businessman, the head of a firm which specialized in the wholesale trade of decorative art fittings for the interior decoration of houses.
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