The Secret Garden

“It is only the exceptional author who can write a book about children with sufficient skill, charm, simplicity, and significance to make it acceptable to both young and old. Mrs. Burnett is one of the few thus gifted.”—The New York Times

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924)

Born in Manchester, England, on November 24, 1849, Frances Hodgson Burnett emigrated with her family to Tennessee in 1865. She lived near Knoxville until her marriage to Dr. S.M. Burnett in 1873. At eighteen, she began publishing her stories in magazines.

Her first success was the 1877 novel That Lass O’Lowries, based on colliery life in England. However, it was the 1886 children’s story Little Lord Fauntleroy that brought her fame. The hero’s distinctive fashion, including long curls and a velvet suit with a lace collar, became a popular trend for young boys.

Little Lord Fauntleroy was successfully adapted for the stage, as was her later novel Sara Crewe, which became the well-known play The Little Princess (1905). Burnett conceived and wrote her best and most enduring work, The Secret Garden (1911), while laying out a garden at her new home in Long Island.

Sandra M. Gilbert

Sandra M. Gilbert is an acclaimed literary critic and poet. She is the coauthor of influential literary studies such as The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination and No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century.

She has also published a memoir, Wrongful Death, and six collections of verse, including Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999, which received the American Book Award in 2001.

Gilbert is a professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and a past president of the Modern Language Association.

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