In 1879, shuttling between the United States and Europe, she published a more serious work of fiction, Haworth’s, which was followed by her first published writing for children, in the magazine St. Nicholas.

Burnett wrote more than fifty novels during her life, but it was the publication of Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1886 that determined the course of her future works and her place in literary history as a writer of children’s fiction. Although the book received an ambivalent critical response, it was a phenomenon in America and Europe, selling out printing after printing and earning Burnett enormous fame and fortune. After the dissolution of her first and second marriages and the 1890 death of her eldest son, Lionel, Burnett wrote the classic for which she is most remembered, The Secret Garden (1911). Its central theme—that the mind can heal the body—reflected Burnett’s own struggles with illness and despair. But regardless of the sadness she endured in reality, Burnett was determined to create only happy endings for her characters.

She remained prolific throughout and after World War I, although her Victorian style had become outdated in the eyes of many critics. Surrounded by her family and many friends, Burnett discarded such criticism, writing the successful works T. Tembarom (1913) and The Lost Prince (1915), doing charity work, and tending the luxurious gardens at her homes on Long Island and Bermuda. Frances Hodgson Burnett died of heart failure in Plandome (Long Island), New York, on October 29, 1924.

THE WORLD OF FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT AND THE SECRET GARDEN

1849 Frances Hodgson Burnett is born on November 24 in Manchester , England. Her father, Edwin, owns a home-furnishings shop whose profits provide a good life for his growing family . Henry David Thoreau publishes “Resistance to Civil Government ,” the original title of “Civil Disobedience.”
1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter appears.
1851 Herman Melville publishes Moby-Dick.
1853 When Edwin dies, Frances’s mother, Eliza, runs her husband’s company to support their five children.
1855 Eliza and the children move to Islington Square, a bleak area bordering the industrial section of Manchester. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is published.
1859 Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities are published.
1861 The American Civil War begins. Dickens’s Great Expectations is published.
1863 President Abraham Lincoln, through the Emancipation Proclamation , abolishes slavery in America.
1865 After struggling for many years to preserve the family business , Eliza moves with her children to her brother’s log cabin in New Market, Tennessee. Young Frances falls in love with Tennessee’s backcountry. When not exploring the natural world, she reads and writes stories, testing them on her friends and family. She takes a job teaching school, for which she is paid in food. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is published.
1868 In the wake of the Civil War, the family has barely enough money to make ends meet. Frances discovers her love of writing and attempts to help by selling her stories. Godey’s Lady’s Book, a popular women’s magazine, publishes “Miss Carruthers’ Engagement” and “Hearts and Diamonds,” launching Frances’s literary career; she will write more than fifty books
and numerous dramatizations of her fiction. Louisa May Alcott publishes Little Women.
1869 The family moves to a small house in Knoxville, Tennessee.
1870 Eliza Hodgson dies. Frances continues to support the family by publishing stories.
1871 A British Act of Parliament legalizes labor unions.
1872 A story, “Surly Tim’s Troubles,” is published by Scribner’s Monthly, which will issue more of Frances’s writing than any other magazine. A young local doctor, Swan Burnett, falls in love with Frances. When he proposes marriage, she somewhat apprehensively accepts, fearing he’ll be devastated if she refuses. Her feelings about marriage remain ambivalent. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is published.
1873 A first full-length work, Dolly, is serialized in Peterson’s magazine . Swan and Frances marry in Tennessee and honeymoon in New York, where Frances also meets with publishers.
1874 A son, Lionel, is born. Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd is published anonymously.
1875 Burnett enters into a lucrative writing contract that permits the family to live in Paris while her husband studies medicine. In addition to raising Lionel, Frances writes full-time. She is remarkably productive, but the experience exhausts her. Despite the fact that Congress passes a Civil Rights Act banning discrimination in places of public accommodation, the first law enforcing segregation on trains is passed in Tennessee, and segregation laws multiply throughout the South.
1876 A second son, Vivian, is born in France.