Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of fifty-six books and thirteen plays, is now chiefly remembered for three children's books, Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden. These, constantly reissued as films and television programmes, have never been out of print, and have become a yardstick in children's literature criticism. Grounded in realism, they take mythic form as they soar into a fairy-tale idealism. Their huge popularity and continual capacity for analysis pushes Burnett into a seminal position. Something in these books crystallized their age at the moment of publication, while they continually appeal to the present with more grist than mere nostalgia. New insight into both her books and her age is harvested from each succeeding generation, as psychological, historical and cultural interpretations change. Frances Hodgson Burnett is a classic in the canon of children's literature.

Burnett was a better judge of character in her books than of the people in her life. Her tragedy was the gap between her utopian dreams and the unhappy reality she made for herself. Her two marriages made her miserable. Eager to make as much money as possible, her constant Atlantic crossings (thirty-three times in all) enhanced her literary output and publicity but meant she saw little of her children as they grew older. She was racked with guilt when Lionel, the elder, died of consumption aged 16. Divorced, separated, with two living husbands, the second ten years younger than herself, her situation was the stuff of bitterness and scandal. ‘Women are not happy as a rule,’ the benchmark voice pronounces in her adult novel Through One Administration. On the other hand, she believed ‘there ought to be a tremendous lot of natural, splendid happiness in the life of every human being'. She converted her lofty convictions into the idealism of her books, a contrast, both, to the pitfalls in her life. A biographical approach to her work sheds light on how and why the chasm occurred.

IN THE REAL GARDEN? THE MAKING OF A STORY-TELLER

Burnett was born in Manchester in 1849, the third of five children of Edwin and Eliza Hodgson. Her father, a fairly well- to-do general furnishing ironmonger and silversmith, sold upmarket household goods.