The first story she sent came back with comments, but instead of revising she mailed it again to another magazine. She had read in the back of ladies’ magazines that they paid money for stories and, having invented them for her friends back in England, she thought she might take a chance at being paid to write. Their financial difficulties were quite real, but young Fanny (a name she quickly abandoned) found Tennessee a true Garden of Eden after the pollution of Manchester and the smuts that floated down like snow from its factory chimneys. There, but for the generosity of their neighbors, they would have starved. There the Hodgson family found itself ensconced in an unexpected place: a log cabin in a very small town outside of Knoxville, Tennessee.
Just a year later, however, her father Edwin Hodgson died and his widow and five children embarked upon a decade of moving house, each time to a slightly less desirable neighborhood.Įach move took Burnett further and further away from gardens, until in 1865 her mother decided to make the riskiest move of all: to join her rogue of a brother, who boasted of his accomplishments in America, in the American South during the last months of the Civil War. There were farms and country cottages close by and she became friendly with a family of market gardeners who kept pigs.
Luke’s Terrace, which backed onto fields owned by the Earl of Derby, leading Burnett to recall it later in life as the “back garden of Eden.” She remembered it as a place of gardens and perpetual summer, where a small child could daydream beneath the trees and beside the flowers, ignoring the industrial city that surrounded this suburb of light and air. In 1852, when she was just three, her family moved to St. Although she had a lifetime of love for children and gardens, she would be amazed to know that this book is the one for which she is most remembered today-even though it was one that was closest to her heart.įrances Hodgson Burnett’s love affair with gardens began when she was a small child living in Manchester, England. In the Garden: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnettįew people realize that The Secret Garden, the book most readers associate with Frances Hodgson Burnett, was only one of 53 novels she wrote and published, and that most of her books were for adults, not children.
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