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Francis Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden

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Frances Hodgson Burnett was a celebrity and author of many runaway best-sellers from the 1870s to the 1920s and beyond. Now mostly remembered for her children's books, she had great fame for her romances and plays as well. This English-born author moved to the US as a child and became a true-life American rags-to-riches story. It is extremely interesting to learn how she was carried away by the resulting fame and fortune and what choices she made.

I have always loved Frances Hodgson Burnett's books and am delighted that such a detailed biography is now available. I have read the previous accounts of her life but this book is especially well-written and contains plenty of new material. Highly recommended.

While during her life time (1849-1924), Frances Hodgson Burnett was best known for her many adult novels and plays, today it is for her children's books that she is remembered, especially for her masterpiece which has become a true classic and has never been out of print -- The Secret Garden. Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life Of The Author of "The Secret Garden" is an impressive and seminal effort in which biographer Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (Professor of English, Bernard College, Columbia University) had the full cooperation of Burnett's descendants and relatives to help her examine and present an inherently fascinating life story of lively intelligence, contemporary sensitivity, and a wealth of new and never-before-published materials. From her modest beginnings in mid-Victorian Manchester, to her arrival in post-Civil "War Tennessee at the age of 15 with her widowed mother and two sisters, this outstanding biography details her become the family breadwinner at the age of 17 and the eventual publishing of 52 books and 13 plays. This is also the story of her marriages, flirtations, and a scandalous affair, the troubled motherhood of two sons (one of whom become the model for Little Lord Fauntleroy). A welcome and much appreciated contribution to literary biographies, Frances Hodgson Burnett is enthusiastically recommended reading!

Frances Hodgson Burnett
I love The Secret Garden, and that's the real reason for my getting and reading this book. But I have to agree (especially as a former editor) that the editing appears, at times, to be nonexistent. There were times when I simply shook my head because I was puzzled by such things as confusing pronoun referents. Still, I would recommend it to other lovers of Burnett's work, her life is that interesting.

What's good: The book is fully documented and the sources are mostly Frances herself and her trustworthy friends.

What's not so good: The book is written in competent, though arid, prose. Not much enthusiasm for Frances comes through. The book gives the impression of being an academic project, undertaken because academics are required to do such projects and almost every other woman has already been done.

Academic presses frequently have the authors do their own proof-reading, and this book is not well proofed. There are no glaring errors such as a spell-checker would find, but errors that would elude a spell-checker are not infrequent.

Worse, there are at least two glaring factual errors:
On page 286, the biographer states that "President Roosevelt" declared war in 1917, bringing America into World War I.

On page 215, the biographer declares that in 1900, "she was now forty-five." On page 13, the biographer declares that "Frances Eliza, the third child and first daughter, was born there too, on 24 November 1849." A little arithmetic will demonstrate that in 1900, Frances cannot have been "forty-five." She was in fact 50 or 51.

Still, for a Black British academic at Columbia University, the biographer is rather free of zeal, but she does insist on mentioning every Black maid which Frances, like other Southern women of the time, employed. However, she is forced to admit Frances' unswerving devotion to social equality, which she pushed in her novels.

As to the question of "flirtations," which are used to promote this biography, there is no evidence of them. Frances was extremely careful of her reputation (she had to be, since she was famous most of her life), and always traveled with a maid and usually a female companion as well. Whether Frances slept with Stephen Townsend during the ten years when he was around so much, one can only guess. But since he blackmailed her into marrying him in 1900 by threatening to tell the world they'd had an affair, it seems likely that there must have been some truth in it. On all occasions when she felt wronged, she threw herself publicly into the fray and defended herself indignantly. She was such a person that she could not have done that without truth on her side.

Frances Hodgson Burnett was a remarkable human being, and a biography of her should be read, since for the last fifty years or so, we have been assured by academics, psychologists and self-appointed pseudo-intellectuals that humans cannot possibly be what she in fact was.