Frances Hodgson Burnett Biography

The Secret Garden About the Author

Frances Hodgson Burnett was born Frances Eliza Hodgson on November 24, 1849, in Manchester, England. In 1865 the family's ironmongery failed, triggering the Hodgsons' move to Knoxville, Tennessee. Burnett began writing to supplement the family income, and by the time she was twenty, she was writing and publishing as many as six short stories a month in a wide array of potboiler magazines. Soon Burnett's work was accepted by established magazines such as Scribner's and Harper's; her commercial success financed the first of many trips to England. In 1873, back in Tennessee, she married Dr. Swan Burnett, a prominent physician. Burnett, however, was unhappy in Tennessee and persuaded one of her editors to advance her enough money to move to Paris with her husband and young son, Lionel, in 1874.

Returning to the United States in 1877, Burnett published her first novel, That Lass o'Lowrie's, a story about...
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