A biography of the author of Secret Garden.

When orphaned Mary Lennox comes to live at her uncle's great house on the Yorkshire moors, she finds it full of secrets. Then one day she discovers a secret garden, walled and locked, which has been completely forgotten for years and years. Can Mary bring the garden back to life - and solve its mystery?

An American boy goes to live with his grandfather in England, where he becomes heir to a title, estate, and fortune.

Hugely successful in her own time for adult novels and plays, Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) would be astounded to find out she is remembered for a handful of books for children, but most of all for the enormously popular Secret Garden. This fascinating biography-the first to have the full cooperation of Burnett's descendants and relatives-examines her life with lively intelligence, sensitivity, and fascinating new, never-before-published material. Burnett's life was full of those reversals of fortune that mark her work. Following modest beginnings in mid-Victorian Manchester, she arrived in post-Civil War Tennessee at the age of fifteen with her widowed mother and two sisters. Burnett was the breadwinner of the family from the age of seventeen, eventually publishing a total of fifty-two books and writing and producing thirteen plays. She made and spent a fortune in her lifetime, was generous and profligate, yet anxious about money and obsessively hardworking. Constantly restless and inventive, Burnett's personal life was as complex as her professional one. Her first marriage to a southern doctor disintegrated as a result of her notorious flirtations and a scandalous affair, and her subsequent marriage to an English doctor turned actor suffered a similar fate. She understood the intensity and loneliness of the thoughtful child, but was herself a largely absent mother of two sons-overwhelmed by guilt when tragedy struck one of them; the other one never got over being the model for Little Lord Fauntleroy. A woman of contrasts and paradoxes, this quintessentially British writer was equally at home in the United States, which honored her with a memorial in Central Park. Frances Hodgson Burnett reinvented for herself and for generations to come in both countries the magic and the mystery of the childhood she never had.

A young girl discovers a burglar in the house and persuades the thief to take her own possessions instead of those belonging to her father.

Three beloved children's classics collected in a deluxe illustrated gift edition perfect for every family library "You are a story--I am a story." Introduce to your family or rediscover for yourself three classic children's novels by Frances Hodgson Burnett, an English-born writer who moved to America at age 15 and who now joins the Library of America. This authoritative edition restores the novels to their original American texts, as Burnett wrote them and features over 40 painstakingly restored illustrations--16 in full color--plus a ribbon marker, helpful annotations, and a short chronology of Burnett's life by her biographer Gretchen Gerzina Holbrook. In The Secret Garden (1911), spoiled orphan Mary Lennox is sent to live at her uncle's manor, where she finds an abandoned walled garden. When she decides to restore the garden, she discovers the key to unlocking her own true self. Sara Crewe is the star pupil at her London boarding school in A Little Princess (1905) until news arrives that her father has died penniless. Sara is forced to become a servant, but she stays hopeful by imagining that she is secretly a princess. And in Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), seven-year-old Cedric Errol lives in New York City and unexpectedly learns that his grandfather is an English earl. The Earl wants to teach Cedric about power and privilege, but little suspects that the innocent young American will completely change his own life. Soon to be a live action Disney movie starting Colin Firth and Julie Walters, The Secret Garden joins A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy in one deluxe illustrated volume, a perfect gift for young readers or for family libraries.