ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ways families are configured and reconfigured in Frances Hodgson Burnett's three major novels for children, A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Burnett's novels, though well known, are too often slotted into the ‘nostalgic’ category of children's literature, without thorough examination. Yet her children are remarkably agentic. Unable to ‘fit’ in their English families, they create found families from the friends they make—other children, schoolfriends, servants, even animals—and repair the failures of their families by telling new stories rather than following in their footsteps. In Burnett's novels, imagination and ‘maternal’ care, along with the vital energy of colonial children, restore and reform the English family.
