The definitive and revealing biography of the author of The Secret Garden. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s favourite theme in her fiction was the reversal of fortune, and she herself knew extremes of poverty and wealth. Born in Manchester in 1849, she emigrated with her family to Tennessee because of the financial problems caused by the cotton famine. From a young age she published her stories to help the family make ends meet. Only after she married did she publish Little Lord Fauntleroy that shot her into literary stardom. On the surface, Frances’ life was extremely successful: hosting regular literary salons in her home and travelling frequently between properties in the UK and America. But behind the colourful personal and social life, she was a complex and contradictory character. She lost both parents by her twenty-first birthday, Henry James called her "the most heavenly of women" although avoided her; prominent people admired her and there were many friendships as well as an ill-advised marriage to a much younger man that ended in heartache. Her success was punctuated by periods of depression, in one instance brought on by the tragic loss of her eldest son to consumption. Ann Thwaite creates a sympathetic but balanced and eye-opening biography of the woman who has enchanted numerous generations of children.

"The Shuttle" deals with themes of intermarriages between wealthy American heiresses and impoverished British nobles. It is about wealthy American heiresses who could not make the best societal marriages because their family fortune came from new rather than old money. To solve this issue, they travelled to England. They married poor but Aristocratic husbands who needed money to finance their neglected estates.

Frances Hodgson Burnett is remembered today as the author of the children’s classic The Secret Garden, but in her lifetime she had a long and successful career as a novelist, dramatist and writer of children’s stories. Of high literary quality, her novels covered a range of genres, including industrial novels, American-themed social novels, historical novels, transatlantic novels and post–World War I novels. The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett reads her novels in the context of the changing literary field in England and the United States in the years between the death of George Eliot in 1880 through to the Great War. Read as a body of literary fiction in relation to Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and T. S. Eliot among others, and read in the context of literary realism, historical fiction, the sensation novel and so on, Burnett’s novels constitute an important thread that chronicles the changing contexts and forms of English and American fiction from the end of the Victorian period to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

High quality reprint of The Ne'er-Do-Well by Rex Ellingwood Beach.

«Таинственный сад» – любимая классика для читателей всех возрастов, жемчужина творчества Фрэнсис Ходжсон Бернетт, роман о заново открытой радости жизни и магии силы. Мэри Леннокс, жестокое и испорченное дитя высшего света, потеряв родителей в Индии, возвращается в Англию, на воспитание к дяде-затворнику в его поместье. Однако дядя находится в постоянных отъездах, и Мэри начинает исследовать округу, в ходе чего делает много открытий, в том числе находит удивительный маленький сад, огороженный стеной, вход в который почему-то запрещен. Отыскав ключ и потайную дверцу, девочка попадает внутрь. Но чьи тайны хранит этот загадочный садик? И нужно ли знать то, что находится под запретом?.. Впрочем, это не единственный секрет в поместье...