Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) was born in Manchester, England, and emigrated with her widowed mother to Tennessee in 1865, where she began selling stories to magazines at eighteen to support the family. Her adult novels of the 1870s and 1880s were praised by Henry James; her fortune came from Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), which started a fashion for velvet suits and lace collars, and from its stage version, whose lawsuit established authors' dramatic rights in Britain. A Little Princess and The Secret Garden (1911) followed. She lived between England and America, married twice, lost her elder son at sixteen, and was the highest-paid woman writer of her time.