Chronology
1849–1852
Born Frances Eliza Hodgson on November 24, 1849, in Manchester, England, the third child and first daughter of Edwin Hodgson and Eliza Boond. They are a middle-class family with a thriving business selling household hardware, chandeliers, brasses, and door handles for the homes of the well-to-do merchants of Manchester. Manchester is prospering in the textile and mining industries fueled by cotton grown in the American South, and the family are able to employ a maid and a nurse, and to keep a carriage and horses. Frances will later recall that “all the human framework of the great dirty city was built about the cotton trade. All the working classes depended upon it for bread, all the middle classes for employment, all the rich for luxury.” Father, born c. 1816, holds himself erect to disguise his short stature, as Frances later will, and was considered bookish, owning a library consisting of an encyclopedia and volumes of Blackwood’s Magazine, as well as Scott’s novels, Keats, Coleridge, and Shakespeare. He is an affectionate and cheerful father but also a typically Victorian one, visiting his children in the nursery but not otherwise spending time with them. Mother, born c. 1812–15, comes from a prominent Manchester family. Parents marry on November 28, 1844. Frances and her older brothers Herbert (born February 20, 1846) and John George (born July 24, 1847) are joined three years later by a sister Edith (born February 10, 1852), who will later write that “I always knew that my sister Frances was different, even when we were children, though, of course, at the time I could not have told you why.” A few months before Edith’s birth, the family makes the first of many moves, from their home on Cheetham Hill Road to St. Luke’s Terrace, which was surrounded by gardens and bordered by fields owned by the Earl of Derby. As a toddler, Frances learns to read capital letters pointed out in newspapers by her brothers, and at the age of three sounds out her first sentence from a Bible and receives her first book, an alphabet flower book, from “a tiny shop on a sort of country road.”
1853–1854
Father suffers a stroke and dies months later, on September 1, at the age of thirty-eight. The children, who had been sent to a country house with their nurse during his illness, are brought home for the funeral; Frances will remember that she “looked down with quiet interest and respect” at her father’s body. Her sister Edwina, named for their late father, is born posthumously, c. January 1854. Mother decides to take over her late husband’s business, and sends out flyers on blue paper, advertising herself as “Eliza Hodgson (widow of the late Edwin Hodgson) . . . general furnishing ironmonger, lamp and chandelier manufacturer, electro-plate and fancy warehouse.” She is an innocent and somewhat unworldly woman, not particularly suited to business. As their income dwindles she dismisses some of the servants and moves to a less expensive house in Seedley Grove, Tanner’s Lane, Pendleton, the first of several such moves. Frances and her siblings are middle-class children now living among “the men and women who worked at their looms, the swarms of smoke-begrimed children who played everywhere.” Frances prefers to read the books of friends when she visits their homes rather than playing, and is “from her very first infancy making everything into a story” that she shares with friends. She attends the Seedley Grove school for small children, run by two sisters, Mary and Alice Hague; the first reward she receives from them is a storybook.
1855–1862
The family moves again to Islington Square, and Frances attends the Select Seminary for Young Ladies and Gentlemen, run by three young sisters named Hadfield. There are only six children at the school, and Frances will remain there until she is thirteen. The sisters and their father, an art instructor, give her a more cultured environment than she has experienced before. The sisters find Frances “exceedingly precocious . . . and very romantic,” and she continues to entertain her fellow students with the stories and poems she invents. At age seven, she begins writing her own stories. At home she is allowed to use the cook’s old ledger books to write her stories down, giving them titles like “How Donna Scarborough Married for Money.” Her reading is eclectic and haphazard, often including romantic potboilers in magazines such as the Ladies’ Halfpenny Journal and Godey’s Lady’s Book; it is not until she meets a neighbor, a young man in his late twenties (whose identity is not known), when she is nine, that she begins to form a better literary taste. Although not particularly warm toward her whenever she accosts him in the square and tells of the latest stories she’s read in magazines, the young man angers her by criticizing her reading and florid writing, and makes suggestions for her improvement. When she tells him with great excitement about a newspaper she plans to buy, she is told to “throw it into the kitchen fire, and I will get you something worth reading.” Over the five or six years that she knows him, he continues to make suggestions and she develops and improves as a reader and writer. During these years she reads James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, who becomes a lifelong favorite.
1863
The American Civil War cuts off the supply of cotton to Manchester, and the local economy suffers. Mother sells business and moves family to smaller house. The Hadfields close their seminary, which ends Frances’s formal education.
1865
Mother decides to take the advice of her brother in America to join him with her family. He has offered to find jobs for her two sons in Knoxville, Tennessee. They sail from Liverpool to Quebec on May 11, a three-week journey followed by two weeks by train from Canada to Knoxville. Uncle has wildly exaggerated his financial situation, and the family arrives just after the end of the American Civil War to a South ravaged by defeat. Before leaving England, Frances burns most of her unfinished stories, including one, “the pride of her heart,” titled “Celeste, or Fortune’s Wheel.” Uncle has no room for them all, and family moves to a log cabin in nearby New Market; he does, however, find employment for Frances’s brothers, who work in Knoxville during the week and return to New Market at weekends. (Brother Herbert also acts for a time as a Confederate spy.) Still dressed in their proper English clothing, the family is nevertheless so poor that they nearly starve until sympathetic neighbors help to provide food. Still, having grown up in a factory city where the “smuts” rained down on them, Frances is thrilled by the natural beauty of Tennessee and the Smoky Mountains. In the winter, tries her hand at running a small school in her family’s home, a “Select Seminary for Young People,” but this fails after a few months.
1866
Family moves to Clinton Pike, closer to Knoxville, to a house Frances christens “Noah’s Ark.” As in England, Frances makes friends easily and makes up stories for them, only now imagining the Cherokee who once inhabited these lands. Among her new friends is Swan Burnett (born March 16, 1847, in New Market), the son of a local doctor whose family live across the street from the Hodgsons, who is finishing his studies at New Market Academy and will soon leave for medical school in Cincinnati. She is deeply sympathetic to him because he walks with a limp caused by a childhood injury. He is immediately enamored with her, but she is fiercely independent. Seeking some way to make money, Frances decides to send a story of her own to Ballou’s Magazine. To avoid the teasing of her brothers, but needing money for paper and postage, she and her sisters pick grapes and ask two African American girls to sell them for them in the market; she uses the return address of a local schoolteacher. The story, “Miss Caruthers’ Engagement,” is praised by Ballou’s editors, but unclear whether Ballou’s will pay her, she later sends it to Godey’s Lady’s Magazine. It puzzles the Godey’s editors; it is distinctly English in tone and setting but comes from an east Tennessee address. They ask for another before deciding, which she promptly sits down and writes, explaining that she is English but now living in Tennessee, and almost immediately she receives a check for $35. She sends more stories and receives a further $40. Now earning more than her brothers, Frances is a published writer at the age of eighteen. From that time on, no publisher ever turns down anything she writes.
1869
Family moves from Clinton Pike into Knoxville, where both brothers are working, John George in a bar, to his mother’s consternation, and Herbert in a jeweler’s. They christen their new home “Vagabondia Castle,” and it becomes a lively bohemian center for the young people and their friends; they play music and live in happy disarray.
1870
Brother Herbert marries Swan Burnett’s sister Ann, bringing the two families closer together. Mother dies on March 17, making the house one entirely populated by young people. Swan receives his MD degree and returns to Knoxville to practice medicine; he continues to be enamored of Frances, who is fond of him but not ready to settle down. Frances writes constantly, publishing stories in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine and Peterson’s Magazine, often under a pseudonym. They are somewhat formulaic, relying on romance to please a wide audience, but are also very popular. On November 15, Edith marries Arthur Pleasant Fahnestock.
1871
Sends story “The Woman Who Saved Me” to Scribner’s Monthly, and the cultured and elegant editor, Richard Watson Gilder, responds in October that it is too long but encourages her to shorten it. Scribner’s is a far more upscale magazine than the ones she’s been publishing in, and Gilder takes her under his wing. It is the beginning of a long friendship and mentorship. When she submits a story called “Surly Tim’s Trouble,” about a Lancashire factory worker with a sad past, Gilder writes her in February 1872, “Dr. Holland [the managing editor], Dr. Holland’s daughter and Dr. Holland’s right-hand man (myself) have all wept sore over ‘Surly Tim.’ Hope to weep again over mss. from you. Very sincerely and tearfully, Watson Gilder.”
1872
On January 8, sister Edwina (“Teddy”) marries Frank Bridges. In the spring, Frances, who has finally promised to marry Swan, leaves for New York, where she has arranged to meet Richard Watson Gilder, on her way for her first visit back to England. It is her first visit to New York, and instead of meeting Gilder as arranged, she spends the afternoon and evening seeing the town with a woman editor. A worried Gilder makes three visits to her hotel trying to find the prodigal young author, before they finally meet the next day. Stays in Manchester with her Boond cousins and other friends. She continues to write for several magazines, but has been ill since before leaving Knoxville; one reason for the trip to Manchester is for rest. Visits the Hadfield sisters and takes trips to Chester, London, and Paris with cousins. Apologizing to Gilder she writes, “If my time was at my own disposal of course I could do a great deal more but I have scarcely an hour to call my own. I have so many places to go to whether I feel like visiting or not. And then my friends are not used to me & wont let me work. They say I came here to get strong & they will make me go out in the daytime & wont let me sit up at night & they are so kind that I cannot be so ungrateful as to tell them it only makes me feel restless & dissatisfied . . . I say this to you because I don’t want you to think I am lazy & indifferent.”
1873–1874
Frances’s first longer work, “Dolores,” later published in book form as Vagabondia, is serialized in Peterson’s beginning in January. In Paris, buys a wedding dress, which she has shipped to Knoxville, but does not return home to marry Swan until September, perhaps pressured by him to come back, since they had by now been engaged for several years. (She will later describe herself as “a woman who loathes marriage.”) The wedding dress does not arrive on time, but she finds another and marries Swan on September 18 at his parents’ home in New Market. They move into a house in an integrated neighborhood on Temperance Hill in Knoxville. A year after their wedding, almost to the day, their first child, Lionel, is born in Knoxville on September 20.
1875
The Burnetts go to Paris in March, Burnett paying the way with stories published in Peterson’s, where Swan is to study with French eye doctors. They take with them an African American servant, Priscilla, or Aunt Prissie, and move into a five-room apartment in the eighth arrondissement. Frances spends most of her time writing stories in order to support her family, further tiring her. “You must not think I begrudge my struggle,” she writes her sister Edith. “When I am the wife of the greatest ophthalmologist in two hemispheres, I shall forget my present troubles.” Becomes pregnant again in September, which she describes as a “calamity.” Burnett is by now suffering from nervous exhaustion. She secretly writes a poem that she hides from her husband. It begins: “When I am dead & lie before you low / With folded hands & cheek & lip of snow, / As you stand looking downward / Will you know / Why the end came & I wearied so?”
1876
In February Burnett’s first novel That Lass o’ Lowrie’s begins to appear as a serial in Scribner’s Monthly. The Burnetts’ second son, Vivian, is born in Paris on April 5; they had hoped for a daughter, to be named Vivien. They return to America in August, after paying a visit to Manchester, penniless and in debt. Burnett and her sons move in with Swan’s parents in New Market, while Swan goes to Washington, D.C., to set up an eye, ear, and nose medical practice. Both of Burnett’s sisters and their husbands move to California, where Edith’s husband Pleasant dies in a smallpox epidemic less than a year later; her infant son Ernest survives, but carries lifelong smallpox scarring. In October the book arm of Scribner’s writes to say that they would like to bring Lass out as a book when it completes its serial run. Frances appoints Swan as her business manager while she continues to write, publishing her final work for Peterson’s to repay the loan for the Paris money, “Miss Crespigny’s Absurd Flirtation,” in October and November. “Mère Giroud’s Little Daughter” appears in November in Scribner’s.
1877
Changes her publishing name from the juvenile “Fanny” to “Frances.” While Swan remains in Washington, she writes continuously, saying she “feel[s] like a species of shovel. I take & slice off some body almost every day. I wonder if it is quite fair.” With Swan still acting as manager, Scribner’s sells the British rights to Lass to Frederick Warne, who will remain Burnett’s British publisher for many years. The book is published in April to glowing reviews in America, with the New York Herald calling its publication a “red-letter in the world of literature.” The same month, Frances and the boys make the move to Washington, where she immediately becomes a literary star.
1878
Family moves into three-story house at 1215 I Street; Burnett’s office is on the top floor, where her sons are allowed only if they are completely quiet. The boys play with the sons of James Garfield, who lives around the corner. Begins to hold Tuesday “evenings,” where the politically and socially powerful come to hear her talk and laugh. One of her friends writes that “with one or a roomful she was just the same, laughing and making others laugh.” Family spends the summer in North Carolina to escape the steamy Washington heat during the malaria season. Reads Henry James. Because of her growing fame, Peterson’s begins to publish unauthorized editions of her earlier works, and in London, F. Warne brings out both authorized and unauthorized works. The Burnetts consider suing, and Scribner publishes Earlier Stories (First Series) and Earlier Stories (Second Series) partly to counter the unauthorized editions. Scribner’s also begins publishing her second serial, Haworth’s, which they will later publish as a book. Four unauthorized dramatic versions of Lass open in London, prompting Burnett to turn it into a play herself, coauthored with Julian Magnus, in order to retain dramatic copyright in America. In November, Lass opens for a short Broadway run at the Booth Theater. From then on, many of her books become plays, both on Broadway and in London’s West End theaters, with Burnett sometimes producing them.
1879
In January she publishes her first children’s story, “Behind the White Brick,” in St. Nicholas, a children’s magazine founded by Scribner’s. In February visits Boston for the first time, meeting Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mary Mapes Dodge, the editor of St. Nicholas and the author of Hans Brinker; or The Silver Skates. Spends summer with her sons in Newport, Rhode Island.
1880
In June takes the boys to Nook Farm in Hartford, where she works on a play as well as drafts of novels In Connection with the DeWilloughby Claim and A Fair Barbarian, and becomes friendly with the Hooker family, who are related to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Mark Twain and his family are near neighbors. In the fall, her sons campaign enthusiastically for Garfield, who is elected president.
1881
Scribner’s begins serializing A Fair Barbarian in January. After Garfield’s inauguration, sons sometimes play with the Garfield children at the White House, including riding their bikes through its halls. Swan’s father dies in February, and he returns to New Market alone for the funeral. Spends the summer in Long Beach on Long Island, without the boys, who are sent to Swan’s mother in New Market. Works on novel Through One Administration, a long book that begins appearing as a serial in November. Play based on story “Esmerelda” opens in New York in October. A Fair Barbarian is published by James R. Osgood, and in reviews is compared favorably to Henry James’s Daisy Miller.
1882
In January, Oscar Wilde, in Washington, D.C., for his American lecture tour, comes to Burnett’s weekly Tuesday afternoon salon; the two authors ignore Burnett’s other guests and spend the afternoon chatting together in a corner. Sister Edith remarries, to Frank Jordan. Spends first part of summer at Nook Farm. Finishes Through One Administration, but is now thoroughly ill because of endless writing, and with family spends the remainder of the summer on Long Island while she recovers. Does not write again for several years. Through One Administration is published in both New York and London to positive reviews, the Critic comparing her to Dickens and Thackeray.
1883–1884
Family spends summer at Camp Cottage in Lynn, Massachusetts. Remains unwell. Spends the following summer in Boston. Still unwell, sends the boys back to Washington for school and remains in Boston, where she meets three sisters, the Halls, who become her lifelong close friends. Tries the “Boston Mind Cure,” a metaphysical healing technique, which she finds effective. Reads Mary Baker Eddy’s work in Christian Science as well as Hindu philosophy.
1885
Back in Washington, but still unwell, begins writing the story “Little Lord Fauntleroy” early in the year, which appears as a serial in St. Nicholas beginning in November. She bases this story of a boy in America who becomes the heir to an earl in England on stories that she tells her sons as she curls their hair before school. As “Fauntleroy” appears, she also begins to write the story “Sara Crewe.”
1886
In spring family moves to a house on K Street. Spends autumn in Boston with the Halls, without the boys and Swan. Little Lord Fauntleroy is an immediate and enormous success when published late in the year by Scribner’s and in London by F. Warne, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and being translated into several foreign languages. Burnett uses a photograph of Vivian in a velvet suit with a lace collar as a model for the illustrations by Reginald B. Birch, even though by now his long curls have been shorn. The suit and the curls of the illustrations become all the rage, to the consternation of the boys made to wear them by their mothers.
1887
In March the K Street house catches fire. In May, goes with sons and friend Kitty Hall to England and Italy. They spend the summer without Swan in London, and move on to Suffolk in August, then in October to Florence, Italy, where the boys attend school, and where they live in a pensione once owned by Anthony Trollope. Becomes friends with British prime minister William Gladstone and his wife, who are staying nearby. “Sara Crewe” is serialized in St. Nicholas.
1888
Rushes back to London early in the year, leaving the boys with Kitty Hall, when she hears that an unauthorized play based on Fauntleroy is in production. Writes her own version on the way and sues the rival author when she arrives. Her play opens in May and she wins her lawsuit, thus for the first time allowing British novelists to secure the dramatic rights to their own works. In July the Society of British Authors honors her for this achievement, giving her a banquet (attended by Oscar Wilde, George Meredith, and Wilkie Collins, among others) and a gift of diamonds. The boys and Kitty join her in London in the summer. Swan is established in his practice, but their marriage is now one in name only. Returns to America with the boys in September, sending the boys to Washington while she spends the fall in New York, and returns to Washington in mid-December. She is making enough money to buy, with cash, one of its largest houses in the city, on Massachusetts Avenue, and to decorate it sumptuously. The Fauntleroy play opens in Boston in September and on Broadway in December. Sara Crewe, or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s, short story that will later be expanded into A Little Princess, is published in book form by Scribner’s and F. Warne.
1889
Returns to London in late spring with Vivian to produce a play based on her novel The Fortunes of Phillipa Fairfax; Lionel chooses to remain with Swan and continue in his school. She is now making up to $60,000 a year, an enormous sum. In the summer Burnett and Vivian go to an artist’s colony in Surrey where she is frequently visited by Stephen Townesend, an English doctor ten years her junior who aspires to act. Swan leaves the teenaged Lionel alone in a boardinghouse in Atlantic City while he goes to Berlin for a conference. Burnett has not seen her elder son for some time, and does not write to him very often. She has not paid attention to her son’s letters, in which he writes that “I like my foot-ball very much but I can not play it with very much breath.” And later, “Why don’t you write to me is it that you have not time?” He is fourteen, and suffering from poor health and depression. He writes, “Let me know when you are coming home I want you to come just as soon as you can because sometimes I get the blues so bad that I feel like having a good cry but I try to throw it off because I know that you do not want me to feel badly.” In addition, he has been reading rumors about his mother in the newspapers, which comment on her expensive lifestyle and separation from her husband. In August, a horse cart Burnett is riding in overturns, causing a concussion; she is unconscious for days, and remains ill for a long time. In autumn, her friends move Burnett to London, where she continues to convalesce and is unable to write.
1890
Frances remains ill with fevers and headaches. Her English doctors recommend that she go to the south of France, Rome, and the Riviera, in stages, to see if the warmer climates might help her improve. In February, Swan begins keeping Lionel home from school with frequent illnesses. She is still in Europe when, in April, Swan cables her that Lionel is very ill, and that he has been diagnosed with tuberculosis. She leaves immediately for America, vowing to keep him alive. When she arrives, two weeks later, she “walked into a bed-room in my house in Washington where a boy with eyes as dark as [an Italian’s] lay waiting for me with cheeks and hands hot with fever.” She takes him to see various doctors in Atlantic City and Philadelphia, and finally decides to take him to Europe, with Vivian, to try the spas there. Stephen Townesend and a nurse meet them on their arrival at Southampton. They all travel to Silesia in central Europe, to Marienbad in Germany, and finally to Paris. Townesend discreetly departs when Swan arrives to take Vivian home. Frances continues her habit of treating her adolescent sons as though they are much younger than they are, making “fairy boxes,” “’sprises,” and picture books for them. Townesend stays with them, helping to nurse Lionel. Despite the fact that Lionel is clearly dying, Burnett makes a short business trip to London in October with Townesend; Lionel misses her desperately. Finally, on the morning of December 7, he dies at the age of sixteen. She sends a telegram to Swan, buries their son in the St. Germain Cemetery in Paris, and goes into deep mourning.
1891–1892
Unwell herself, Burnett travels to Italy and fills notebooks writing to Lionel. Returns to London in the spring and is visited by Henry James. The following year, a play by Burnett and Townesend, The Showman’s Daughter, starring Townesend, who has never acted before, opens in London on January 6, and successfully launches Townesend’s acting career. Writes to Vivian that Townesend “is so delicate and nervous and irritable . . . But I have to remember when he seems to be unreasonable, that he was never anything but perfect to Lionel.” In February, she helps open a boys’ club in London in Lionel’s honor. Later that year she publishes a small book about it, The Drury Lane Boys’ Club. In March returns to Washington, and takes Vivian, now sixteen, to spend the summer with her on Cape Cod. Bringing family closer to herself, she asks her sister Edith and her second husband Frank Jordan to come live with her on their return from California. Edith will remain with her for the rest of Burnett’s life. With Edith and Frank now installed in her house, she can travel to London and New York with a clear conscience, leaving Vivian in their care.
1893
The One I Knew Best of All, her autobiography of her youth, is serialized by Scribner’s beginning in January; it is published late in the year. In May, sails to London with Edith. Vivian joins them later and spends the summer traveling around England on his own. In the fall, takes a house near Regent’s Park. They all return to Washington at Christmas.
1894
Returns to London by herself in May. Writes to Edith and Frank from New York, just before her crossing, “Thank you dears for all you are to me. You dont know how I value & love you both. Your price is above rubies.” But in mid-August Vivian contracts a life-threatening case of typhoid, and once again she rushes back home to save the life of a son. This time the son survives, and matriculates at Harvard in November, two months late.
1895–1897
In January Burnett returns to London, and remains in England for two years, with Vivian joining her in the summers. Swan moves out of the Massachusetts Avenue house. Burnett works on A Lady of Quality, which is published the following March. Enlarges her friendship with Henry James and meets Bret Harte and art historian Bernard Berenson. Returns to America in November with Stephen Townesend, who helps her produce a play based on A Lady of Quality. Townesend has by this time taken over managing much of her royalties and contracts and acting as an intermediary with publishers. On January 25, 1897, her original play The First Gentleman of Europe opens in New York. Burnett is again very ill with what she refers to as “heart failures.” A Lady of Quality opens in New York on November 1.
1898
On January 29, departs again for London, taking Edith with her, and leaving divorce papers for her lawyer to file in March. The divorce is finalized in May. Burnett and Swan have not lived together for some years. She had seen no reason to divorce him. Even though they lived apart and rarely saw each other, marriage to the father of her children gave her social and professional protection. In the spring Frances moves, with Edith, into the house that will be the one forever closest to her heart. For ten years she leases Maytham Hall, in Kent, England. Years later it will inspire her book The Secret Garden, because of its roses and the robin she partly tames, memorializing it in My Robin. Henry James is a near neighbor. Vivian, who dislikes Townesend, refuses to visit her there. Edith returns to Washington in November.
1899
In March the play A Lady of Quality opens in London, but is reviewed poorly. Vivian graduates from Harvard in June. Her book In Connection with the DeWilloughby Claim, which she had worked on since 1880, is published in New York and London in November. She has fallen into a pattern of alternating long, serious books with shorter ones that are easier to write. Returns to Washington for Christmas with Vivian, who himself returns there from a new job as a reporter in Denver. Burnett’s relationship with Townesend is fraught at this time. He does not want to practice medicine, and her plays offer him a way out. Dependent upon her writing for her income, she cannot afford scandals about her personal life. Burnett will later tell friends that “I was dragged & threatened & blackmailed & forced into this marriage.”
1900
Sails to Genoa, Italy, in February to reluctantly marry Townesend. Her marriage to a man ten years younger than she only serves to bring her name back into the gossip columns. It does not go well. He has rooms in London, and her servants will recall that he came to Maytham only to demand money. It is likely that she pays him to disappear. Suffers heart problems again. Vivian, who had been ill in Denver, returns to Washington to care for Swan, who has been unwell. In the fall, Burnett moves back to London and brings sister Edith over as a buffer between her and Townesend.
1901
Works on novels Bettina and The Making of a Marchioness. Moves back to Maytham Hall in March with Edith, Townesend joining on weekends. Vivian visits in the summer.
1902
Separates from Townesend for good in spring, but they never formally divorce. Frances collapses. She returns to New York and enters a private hospital. Edith and Vivian spend the summer with her on Long Island. In the fall, takes an apartment at 44 West 87th Street in Manhattan. Her play A Little Princess, taken from the story “Sara Crewe,” opens in London in December, and the following January in New York. Scribner’s suggests that she expand it into a novel.
1903
Works on a number of plays based on previously published works. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst, a sequel to The Making of a Marchioness, is published in London. Spends the summer on Long Island and then the winter and following spring in North Carolina with Edith.
1904
Visits the Azores, Gibraltar, Florence, Venice, Milan, Como, and Lucerne. Swan remarries in March. Returns to Maytham Hall after a two-year absence in June. On November 12, receives news that her brother John George has died in Knoxville. Sails to New York in December.
1905
Begins working on novel The Dawn of a To-morrow, which reflects her interest in New Thought, a spiritual movement related to Christian Science. Returns to Maytham Hall in May. A Little Princess published in September by Scribner’s. Spends the winter in New York with Edith.
1906
Swan Burnett dies on January 18. Frances and Edith return to England. The Dawn of a To-morrow is published in both New York and London. With the exception of Little Lord Fauntleroy, it will be the book for which she is most known by her contemporaries. She follows it with a short one, as is her habit, but now these are little books for children. Racketty-Packetty House is the first, followed by Queen Silver-Bell. Vivian becomes editor of the Children’s Magazine, and she writes these books, and also serves nominally on his editorial board, to help him out.
1907
In January travels to Lake Geneva. In March comes to New York and rents a house at Port Washington on Long Island and works on play of The Dawn of a To-morrow. A book that has been difficult for her to finish, The Shuttle, is finally completed and published in the fall. It is a long book that took seven years to write, and a thinly disguised examination of her troubled second marriage. In it, an American heiress marries an English nobleman who abuses her. She is finally rescued by her strong-minded sister. The most adult of Burnett’s novels, it contains violence and a rape.
1908
Burnett is heartbroken when she loses her lease on Maytham Hall, “the one place which has given me the atmosphere I like & feel at home in—but I do not let myself think about it except to say to myself obstinately that I shall find myself somewhere presently which will be even larger, more picturesque & more lovable . . . There has never been one thing I wanted back again but two lovely little boy things with sturdy legs & sailor hats, & rushes and hugs & kissings. But I do not let myself think about that either.” She publishes two more little children’s books, The Spring Cleaning and The Good Wolf, and in June purchases land in the Plandome area of Manhasset, Long Island, on the shore of the Long Island Sound, to build a house. Returns for the last time to Maytham Hall in the fall to remove her belongings, and ground is broken for her new house at Plandome on September 2, while she is still abroad. Sails back to New York in December.
1909
When the play made from her novel The Dawn of a To-morrow opens in New York on January 28, Burnett defends the mysticism behind it, calling it “beautiful thought.” Reporters disparage her use of “New Thought,” the belief that God is everywhere, that sickness comes from the mind, and that selfhood is divine. She does not trust doctors, and is not a Christian Scientist, but she writes that “we are to-day mysteriously conscious of this strange magic in the air that we will call the beautiful thought. It has so revitalized and stirred our souls that there has been in its most recent evolution a magnetic force that seems to me must almost stir the dead in their graves . . . We have a new knowledge of love, a conception of hope, new unwritten laws of conscience and mutual helpfulness that it is no longer possible to escape, and which we are consequently in constant effort to explain.” “New Thought” and “beautiful thought” find their fullest expression in her children’s book The Land of the Blue Flower, published this year, and the next year in The Secret Garden. Moves into Plandome in September. Unlike her Washington house, which was very Victorian, this one is modern and airy, surrounded by extensive gardens full of roses. Her longtime editor and mentor Richard Watson Gilder dies November 19. Begins writing The Secret Garden, which she at first calls Mistress Mary.
1910
Returns to England in the spring for the opening of the play The Dawn of a To-morrow there; it is put on hold when Edward VII dies on May 6. Makes a tour of the Continent. In November The Secret Garden begins to appear as a serial in The American Magazine; she claims that it is the first children’s story to appear in an adult magazine. She has always believed that her books just come to her, in a semi-magical way. She writes to her English publisher, “Oh, I know quite well that [The Secret Garden] is one of my best finds.”
1911–1912
Spends the winter in Bermuda with Edith. Three months after their return, Edith’s husband Frank is killed in a car accident on July 13, making her a widow for the second time. The Secret Garden appears as a book in England and America a month later. It is well received, but Burnett would have been amazed to learn that it is the book for which she is best known today. Even so, readers young and old write to her to express their admiration and she claims that this is her favorite among the books she’s written. She still suffers from poor health and begins to spend all her winters in Bermuda with Edith. There, as well as in Plandome, she hires gardeners and grows beautiful flowers. Vivian begins building his own house on the property at Plandome. New York novel T. Temberom is published, about a typewriter salesman in upper Manhattan. Her final play, an adaptation of Racketty-Packetty House, is produced in Manhattan.
1913
In July, sails to Trieste with the Hall sisters, leaving Edith behind. A fellow passenger on the ship is Elizabeth Jordon, the editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, whom Burnett had previously met at social functions but did not know well. They talk for hours on end, smoke cigarettes together onboard; and Elizabeth serves as a sounding board for Frances’s thoughts and works. She will become one of Burnett’s closest friends and a frequent visitor to Plandome, as well as a regular correspondent, in which she addresses Frances as “Querida,” which is Spanish for “Dearest.” Spends ten months travelling in Europe with the Hall sisters.
1914
On her way back to America, stops in London to sell film rights to three of her works. Arrives in New York on May 4. Stephen Townesend dies in England of pneumonia on May 20. Goes to Bermuda with Edith in May; on their return in June or July they are met at the dock by Vivian, who announces that he is going to be married. The British film version of Little Lord Fauntleroy premieres in June. As with the plays, Cedric is played by a female actor. Vivian, now thirty-eight, marries twenty-one-year-old Constance Buel on November 21.
1915
Burnett pays for a yearlong tour of Asia as a honeymoon present for Vivian and Constance. They also visit Burnett’s sister Edwina in California. Novel The Lost Prince is serialized. Burnett participates in New York’s suffrage parade on October 23.
1916
Edith’s daughter-in-law, Annie Fahnestock, brings a libel suit against Frances in February, asking for $50,000 in damages for a letter Burnett wrote to Annie’s family defending Edith, who had been maligned by Annie. After many months Frances wins on appeal. On August 11, Frances becomes a grandmother when Vivian’s daughter Verity is born, and revels in this role. A spate of children’s books follow.
1917
Burnett’s brother Herbert dies in Norfolk, Virginia, on January 8. Sister Edwina’s daughter Bertha dies in California in the spring, and then Edwina herself dies a couple of months later. Begins writing her last novel for adults, The Head of the House of Coombe. The White People, about ghosts and love transcending death, is published.
1918
On January 15, Vivian’s second daughter, Dorinda, is born. In April, Burnett sells her Washington home at last. Edith’s son Ernest dies of the Spanish flu at Plandome on December 31; she has now lost two husbands, a daughter, and a son. Burnett is as heartbroken as her sister.
1921
In September, attends the premiere of the film version of Little Lord Fauntleroy starring Mary Pickford.
1922
The Head of the House of Coombe is published, and a sequel, Robin, appears shortly thereafter by Frederick A. Stokes Company in America and Heinemann in England.
1924
On her deathbed at Plandome, Frances writes her final slim book, In the Garden. Very ill and unable to sit up, she writes lying down, with pencil. It contains the words, “As long as one has a garden, one has a future; and as long as one has a future one is alive.” Edith and Vivian are with her when she passes away on October 29; the death certificate gives the cause of death as colon cancer. She is buried at Roslyn Cemetery on Long Island.