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

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating life of a best-selling author
Review: 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 was 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.

Rating:
Summary: An impressive and seminal effort
Review: 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!