FRANCES ELIZA HODGSON BURNETT Author 1849 - 1924
Born in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England, on November 24, 1849, Frances Hodgson was the eldest daughter in a family of two boys and three girls. Their father was an iron monger and silversmith. She grew up in increasingly straitened circumstances after the death of her father in 1854. In 1865, when she was 15, the family emigrated to the United States and settled in New Market, near Knoxville, Tennessee, where the promise of support from a maternal uncle failed to materialize. Frances and her sisters went to a school in a neighbor's house, a Select Seminary for Young Ladies and Gentlemen, where she was popular as a storyteller amongst her peers and wrote her first stories at this time on the family cook's old notebooks. In 1868 Hodgson managed to place a story with Godey's Lady's Book. She earned the money for paper and stamps to submit a short story on grape picking. Within a few years she was being published regularly in Godey's, Peterson's Ladies' Magazine, Scribner's Monthly, and Harper's. In 1873, after a year's visit to England, she married Dr. Swan Moses Burnett of New Market (divorced 1898). In 1900 she married Mr. Stephen Townsend.
[In 1879, Swan Moses Burnett was appointed Professor of Ophthalmology and Otology at Georgetown University. Born in 1847 (1848 according to Hirschberg), in Newmarket, Tennessee, Burnett obtained his M.D. from Bellevue in 1870 (and twenty years later a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University). After a short time under Herman Knapp, Burnett returned from New York to set up practice in Knoxville. But after a few years, following the custom of his day, he sought continuing medical education in Paris and London (1875/76) and finally removed to Washington in 1876, where he opened his practice for eye and ear diseases. His marriage to author Frances Eliza Hodgson ended in divorce. He later married Margaret Brady of Washington.]
Burnett's first novel, That Lass o' Lowrie's, which had been serialized
in Scribner's, was published in 1877. Like her short stories, the book
combined a remarkable gift for realistic detail in portraying scenes of
working-class life--unusual in that day--with a plot consisting of the
most romantic and improbable of turns. After moving with her husband
to Washington, D.C., Burnett wrote several novels and, in 1886, Burnett's
most famous and successful book appeared. First serialized in St. Nicholas
magazine, Little Lord Fauntleroy was intended as a children's book, but
it had its greatest appeal to mothers. It established the main character's
long curls (based on her son Vivian's) and velvet suit with lace collar
(based on Oscar Wilde's attire) as a mother's model for small boys, who
generally hated it. The book sold more than half a million copies, and
Burnett's income was increased by her dramatized version. In 1888
she won a lawsuit in England over the dramatic rights to Little Lord Fauntleroy,
establishing a precedent that was incorporated into British copyright law
in 1911.
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Her later books include Sara Crewe (1888), dramatized as The Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1909), both of which were also written for children. The Lady of Quality (1896) has been considered the best of her other plays. These, like most of her 40-odd novels, stress sentimental, romantic themes. In 1893 she published a memoir of her youth, The One I Knew Best of All. From the mid-1890s she lived mainly in England, but in 1909 she built a house in Plandome, Long Island, NewYork, where she died on October 29, 1924. Her son Vivian Burnett, the model for Little Lord Fauntleroy, wrote a biography of her in 1927 entitled The Romantick Lady.
SOURCES:
Copyright © 1999 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Ruth Green, Lecturer in English - Francis Hodgson Burnett Fact
File
http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/archive/bookworm/burnett.htm