Burnett’s first novel, That Lass o’ Lowrie’s (1877), has as its heroine a coal miner’s daughter who speaks broad Lancashire. Burnett’s skilled ear for dialect is in evidence more than thirty years later, in The Secret Garden, in the Yorkshire speech of Dickon Sowerby, admired and imitated by Mary Lennox and taught to Colin Craven as a language of initiates that cut, at least temporarily, across class barriers.

By the time Frances wrote That Lass o’ Lowrie’s she was married to her childhood friend from Knoxville, Swan Burnett, and the mother of two sons, Lionel and Vivian. Unusually for the time, she continued to write after her marriage; indeed, it was her income that allowed Swan, a physician, to pursue extra training in Europe. Her career gave her a degree of independence that was then uncommon for a married woman and that, from the first, was a source of much gossip. After the family settled in Washington, D.C., Frances made frequent trips to England, often leaving her husband and children behind. In the course of her lifetime she would cross the Atlantic thirty-three times, an extraordinary tally for a period before air travel; her many trips gave rise, as she confessed in an 1895 speech to the London Vagabonds’ Club, to “a general indefiniteness as to whether I am an Englishwoman or an American” (Romantick Lady, p. 266). Meanwhile, she was becoming acquainted with some of America’s leading literary figures, including Emerson and Louisa M. Alcott, in addition to meeting Oscar Wilde, Alfred Tennyson, and Henry James in London. In the decade following That Lass she wrote a string of novels and stories, published on both sides of the Atlantic, culminating in the life-changing success of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

After Fauntleroy, darker elements creep into the narrative of Burnett’s life. Her gushing protestations of affection for her children were accompanied by astonishing neglect. Leaving her older son, Lionel, with his father, she took Vivian to England, where she rented a country cottage, named it Dorincourt after the family estate in Fauntleroy, and pursued an increasingly ardent and public relationship with Stephen Townsend, who was ten years her junior and a physician with dreams of a stage career. This reckless interlude came to an end when Lionel was diagnosed with tuberculosis, then the leading cause of death in America. Burnett returned Vivian to Washington and took fifteen-year-old Lionel on an increasingly frenzied and fruitless tour of European specialists. Despite his mother’s showers of gifts, tears, and endearments, and Townsend’s attentive care, Lionel died on December 7, 1890, in Paris. In her passion of grief Frances covered the walls of her hotel rooms with pictures of Lionel and wrote letters and journals to her dead son. She did not return to the equally heart-broken Vivian and Swan in Washington for more than a year.

In her mature years, Frances Hodgson Burnett was sometimes a subject of ridicule and caricature, mocked for her efforts to squeeze her increasingly stout figure into girlish ruffles, ribbons, and decolletage, her nickname, “Fluffy,” and her penchant for younger men. Her long-troubled marriage finally ended in 1898, and in the same year she moved to England to take up residence at Maytham Hall, a mansion in rural Kent. There she played the lady of the manor, engaging in charity work, attending services at the local church, visiting Henry James in nearby Rye (James called her the “Princess of Maytham”), and cultivating her garden. She wrote each day in a walled rose garden, accompanied by a friendly robin and, one year, a pair of orphan lambs who followed her about and slept on her knee as she sang to them. Burnett appeared to have found contentment and happiness. Then, seemingly on an impulse, she married Stephen Townsend in Genoa, Italy. Afterward she would claim that he had blackmailed her into marriage, threatening to publicize her earlier adulteries, and that his motives were wholly mercenary. By 1902 the marriage was over: It had lasted less than two years. The breakup left her in a state of mental and physical collapse. Writing and the garden at Maytham were her solace. When Maytham’s owner put the house up for sale, Burnett must have felt like an exile from Eden.

By the time she started work on The Secret Garden, Burnett was back in the United States, living with her sister Edith at Plandome, the house on Long Island that would remain her American home until her death in 1924. The passion for gardening that she had discovered at Maytham persisted for the rest of her life. In her last, posthumously published book, In the Garden, she wrote,

I love it all. I love to dig.