Beyond the Secret Garden: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett

Written by Ann Thwaite and Jacqueline Wilson

Narrated by Anne Flosnik

Frances Hodgson Burnett's favorite 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 United Kingdom and America. But behind the colorful 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Dec 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350835342

Ann Thwaite

Ann Thwaite is a Whitbread-prize winning biographer and children’s writer. She was born in London, spent the war years in New Zealand and was educated at Queen Elizabeth’s, Barnet and St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Ann has travelled extensively and has lived in Tokyo, Benghazi and Nashville and is now settled in Norfolk with her husband, the poet Anthony Thwaite. Ann has written five major biographies. The first, of Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of The Secret Garden, was published in 1974. Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape won the 1985 Duff Cooper Prize and was described by John Carey as “one of the finest literary biographies of our time.” Emily Tennyson, The Poet's Wife, is widely regarded as the most interesting biography of Tennyson himself. Glimpses of the Wonderful, a life of Edmund’s father, Philip Henry Gosse, was picked out by D.J. Taylor in the Independent as one of the ‘Ten Best Biographies' ever. AA Milne: His Life won the Whitbread Biography of the Year 1990, and The Brilliant Career of Winnie-the-Pooh, a scrapbook off-shoot of her Milne biography was published in 1992. For many years, Ann wrote and reviewed children's books, as well as running a library for local children in her home. A history of her own family called Passageways: The Story of a New Zealand Family was published in 2009. Ann is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature as well as an Honorary Fellow of Roehampton University (National Centre for Research into Children's Literature). She also has an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia and a D.Litt from Oxford.