Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unpredictable Life of the Author of the Secret Garden - Softcover

"'A sympathetic portrait of a warm-hearted, funny woman...a compulsive read from start to finish.'
'Gripping stuff indeed.' Economist" (Scotland on Sunday)

"'Gripping stuff indeed.'" (Economist)

"'Gerzina has chosen a rewarding subject for her latest biography, and employs all her skills to reveal a complex woman whose fierce independence brought her commercial success at the cost of considerable personal anguish.' '" (Yorkshire Evening Post)

"'Gerzina writes with admirable authority.'" (Miranda Seymour Guardian)

"'Conscientious, well researched and diligent.'" (Times Literary Supplement)

The remarkable woman who wrote those perennial childhood classics, The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, lived an unexpected and varied life. Hugely successful in her own time (1849-1924) for her adult novels and plays, Frances Hodgson Burnett would be astounded to be remembered for a handful of books for children.

From modest beginnings in mid-Victorian Manchester to adulthood in America, where she arrived in post-Civil War Tennessee at the age of fifteen, with her widowed mother, two sisters and two brothers, Burnett was a woman of contrasts and paradoxes.She made, and spent, a fortune; was generous and profligate, yet anxious about money and obsessively hardworking; flighty, yet hard-headed; depressive; amusing and clever (though not well educated). She published fifty-two books and wrote and produced thirteen plays; she made an early marriage to a Southern doctor and had notorious flirtations and a scandalous affair before making a disastrous second marriage to an English doctor turned actor. She understood the intensity and loneliness of the thoughtful child, but was herself a largely absent mother to two adored sons and she hankered after a kind of grand Englishness - which she finally achieved as lady of the manor at Maytham Hall in Kent, with its own walled garden - but continued to relish the American independence of spirit.

She belonged everywhere and nowhere, constantly restless and inventive, a woman ahead of her time, who reinvented for herself and generations to come the magic and mystery of the childhood she never really had.