When Burnett wrote The Secret Garden – “a sort of children’s Jane Eyre”, as one of her friends described it, a characterisation that has been taken to heart by the latest film adaptation, directed by Marc Munden and starring Colin Firth, Julie Walters and Dixie Egerickx – she was 61, and had been a famous author for more than 40 years. In fact, the novel offers such practical ways of coping, and even of healing that it was once suggested it should be prescribed on the NHS. But rereading the book in adulthood reveals that it is also a story about neglect, remiss parenting and mental illness a book that, for all its light, is underpinned by darkness. Primarily remembered today for her trio of classic children's novels - Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911) - Burnett was also a popular adult novelist, in her own day, publishing romantic stories such as The Making of a Marchioness (1901) for older readers.I f the last time you encountered Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden was in childhood, you probably think of Mary, a sour little girl, waking up in a house in India to find herself orphaned and alone a vast wind-buffeted house on the Yorkshire moors, and the sound of crying a robin, a key, and a hidden garden the transcendent scene in that garden, one of the most famous in children’s literature, in which Colin, a previously bedridden child, stands and learns to walk. She died in her Long Island, New York home, in 1924. Following her great success as a novelist, playwright, and children's author, Burnett maintained homes in both England and America, traveling back and forth quite frequently. In 1900 Burnett married actor Stephen Townsend until 1902 when they got divorced. Swan Burnett, with whom she had two sons, Lionel and Vivian. Here Hodgson began to write, in order to supplement the family income, assuming full responsibility for the family upon the death of her mother, in 1870. She was educated at The Select Seminary for Young Ladies and Gentleman until the age of fifteen, at which point the family ironmongery, then being run by her mother, failed, and the family emigrated to Knoxville, Tennessee. Frances Eliza Hodgson was the daughter of ironmonger Edwin Hodgson, who died three years after her birth, and his wife Eliza Boond.
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