ABSTRACT
Frances Hodgson Burnett children's books, Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Secret Garden, Burnett was born on 24 November 1849 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, the eldest daughter and third child of an ironmonger, Edwin Hodgson and his wife, Eliza. After struggling to support her five children, her widowed mother took them in 1865 to Knoxville, Tennessee, in order to run a dry-goods store established by her brother. It was while she was in America that Frances began to have her work published in magazines, her first two stories appearing in Godey's Lady's Book. It is hard to know how to classify Burnett, who was born in England but lived mostly in America, and wrote novels and plays for adults but is best known as a children's writer. Burnett's autobiographical sketches, serialised first in Scribner's Magazine with the rather coy title of The One I Knew the Best of All, consistently refer to herself as 'the Small Person'.
