Among the one hundred and fifty guests were George Meredith, William Rossetti, Edmund Gosse, and Oscar Wilde. Burnett was now a literary celebrity. Her own dramatization replaced Seebohm’s play on the London stage, opening in May 1888 to an audience that included members of the British royal family. The play transferred successfully to New York and toured for years; at one time forty theater companies were performing it simultaneously in Britain and the United States.

Little Lord Fauntleroy has not aged well. To many modern readers the angelic, self-sacrificing, and androgynous hero, Cedric Fauntleroy (played by female actors in both Seebohm’s and Burnett’s dramatizations, and by Mary Pickford in a 1921 film version), who calls his mother “Dearest” and persuades his crusty and tradition-bound British uncle, the Earl of Dorincourt, to give more charity to the peasants on his estate, appears comically alien and unrealistic. From Burnett’s prodigious output of fiction and nonfiction for children and adults, only The Secret Garden continues to be widely read and appreciated in the twenty-first century. What makes this late novel stand out from Burnett’s other work as an acknowledged classic? When the author’s representations of children in Fauntleroy and such other one-time best-sellers as The Little Princess are often dismissed as outdated and unconvincing, what accounts for the continuing appeal of Mary Lennox and Colin Craven?

The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy share surface similarities. In both novels the main character arrives in England from another country and sees English customs through an outsider’s eyes. In both cases there is a mansion to be explored and a difficult uncle to tame. Both Cedric and Mary repair broken relationships and restore harmony to their surroundings. Fauntleroy’s rags-to-riches plot is a familiar one in Burnett’s fiction, influenced perhaps by her childhood love of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, and also by her own experience of early poverty and loss, followed by a hard-won restoration of fortune. The Secret Garden differs from Fauntleroy and most other Burnett novels in that the main characters already possess adequate material wealth. The riches they lack and eventually recover are physical, emotional, and spiritual. Written toward the end of her life, The Secret Garden reflects Frances Hodgson Burnett’s recognition that wealth and worldly success are not enough and echoes her own search for spiritual healing. While Burnett employs some tried-and-tested successful elements from her earlier fiction, such as the use of regional dialect and a Gothic setting, she also shows a new willingness to explore painful emotions and to present child heroes whose behavior is often unlovable. For once her relentless drive to “write some happiness into the world” does not inhibit her from creating convincing characters or compel her to resolve all the tensions in her narrative.

The greater psychological realism of The Secret Garden may stem from Burnett’s personal suffering in the years following Little Lord Fauntleroy. As Vivian Burnett told a Knoxville audience shortly after his mother’s death, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s life contained “many sorrows that the world did not know about” (Gerzina, p. xvi). While her early life is a story of adversity overcome by remarkable energy and achievement, her middle years were a period of loss, disappointment, and spiritual searching. During these years, her writing, at first little more than a means of providing imaginative consolation and financial relief for her family in a time of poverty, became an almost evangelical effort to create order and spread joy in an increasingly perplexing world. As she counseled in her 1909 children’s book, The Land of the Blue Flower, “If you fill your mind with a beautiful thought, there will be no room in it for an ugly one.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in Manchester, England, in 1849. Her father, Edwin Hodgson, kept a home-furnishings store, and the family lived in moderate affluence until his death in 1853. Burnett’s mother, Eliza, tried to keep the family business afloat through the 1850s, but times grew increasingly hard as Manchester, the center of the world’s cotton textile industry, fell into a recession caused by the outbreak of the American Civil War and its disastrous effect on the southern cotton trade. By 1865 Eliza Hodgson was forced to close the store and emigrate with her five children to New Market, Tennessee, where her brother had a dry goods business. The family lived in a log cabin and were supported by the earnings of Burnett’s two brothers, who went to work for their uncle. Having long entertained her sisters and schoolmates with the improbable adventures of a red-headed heroine, Edith Somerville, Frances decided to try her hand at writing for a living. Raising money for paper and stamps by gathering and selling wild grapes, she wrote her first stories, romances set in aristocratic English parlors, and sold two pieces to the magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book in June 1868. Soon she was writing five or six stories per month and publishing in prestigious periodicals such as Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, and Scribner’s Monthly.

Burnett’s early stories already contained some key features of her later fiction, including the contrasting points of view of British and American characters and the use of dialect, both the Lancashire dialect she had grown up with in Manchester and the dialect of her neighbors in Tennessee. In the mid-nineteenth century, there was a sudden surge of interest in regional variations in speech, just as these regional peculiarities were first coming under threat as the American population became more mobile. Two of Burnett’s favorite authors published novels making strong use of dialect speech: Charles Dickens, in Hard Times (1854), and Charlotte Brontë, in Shirley (1849).