Read Secret Garden (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Online
Authors: Frances Hodgson Burnett
1849 | Frances Hodgson Burnett is born on November 24 in Manchester , England. Her father, Edwin, owns a home-furnishings shop whose profits provide a good life for his growing family . Henry David Thoreau publishes “Resistance to Civil Government ,” the original title of “Civil Disobedience.” |
1850 | Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter appears. |
1851 | Herman Melville publishes Moby-Dick. |
1853 | When Edwin dies, Frances’s mother, Eliza, runs her husband’s company to support their five children. |
1855 | Eliza and the children move to Islington Square, a bleak area bordering the industrial section of Manchester. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is published. |
1859 | Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities are published. |
1861 | The American Civil War begins. Dickens’s Great Expectations is published. |
1863 | President Abraham Lincoln, through the Emancipation Proclamation , abolishes slavery in America. |
1865 | After struggling for many years to preserve the family business , Eliza moves with her children to her brother’s log cabin in New Market, Tennessee. Young Frances falls in love with Tennessee’s backcountry. When not exploring the natural world, she reads and writes stories, testing them on her friends and family. She takes a job teaching school, for which she is paid in food. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is published. |
1868 | In the wake of the Civil War, the family has barely enough money to make ends meet. Frances discovers her love of writing and attempts to help by selling her stories. Godey’s Lady’s Book, a popular women’s magazine, publishes “Miss Carruthers’ Engagement” and “Hearts and Diamonds,” launching Frances’s literary career; she will write more than fifty books |
and numerous dramatizations of her fiction. Louisa May Alcott publishes Little Women. | |
1869 | The family moves to a small house in Knoxville, Tennessee. |
1870 | Eliza Hodgson dies. Frances continues to support the family by publishing stories. |
1871 | A British Act of Parliament legalizes labor unions. |
1872 | A story, “Surly Tim’s Troubles,” is published by Scribner’s Monthly, which will issue more of Frances’s writing than any other magazine. A young local doctor, Swan Burnett, falls in love with Frances. When he proposes marriage, she somewhat apprehensively accepts, fearing he’ll be devastated if she refuses. Her feelings about marriage remain ambivalent. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is published. |
1873 | A first full-length work, Dolly, is serialized in Peterson’s magazine . Swan and Frances marry in Tennessee and honeymoon in New York, where Frances also meets with publishers. |
1874 | A son, Lionel, is born. Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd is published anonymously. |
1875 | Burnett enters into a lucrative writing contract that permits the family to live in Paris while her husband studies medicine. In addition to raising Lionel, Frances writes full-time. She is remarkably productive, but the experience exhausts her. Despite the fact that Congress passes a Civil Rights Act banning discrimination in places of public accommodation, the first law enforcing segregation on trains is passed in Tennessee, and segregation laws multiply throughout the South. |
1876 | A second son, Vivian, is born in France. The family returns to Tennessee, where Frances raises the children and writes, while Swan moves to Washington, D.C., to begin his eye-and-ear medical practice. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer appears . Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone. |
1877 | The family joins Swan in the capital. Frances enters a period of intense work, creativity, and output. Her fame and earnings steadily increase, making her the breadwinner of the family. Burnett’s first novel, about Lancashire mining culture, That Lass o ’ Lowrie’s, is published, as is Surly Tim, and Other Stories. Henry James’s The American is published. Queen Victoria is proclaimed empress of India. |
1879 | Haworth’s is published. In order to protect its copyright and royalties in England, Frances travels to Canada to fulfill the legal requirement of standing on the soil of a British dominion on the day of the British publication. Burnett forges friendships with contemporary writers Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Louisa May Alcott. |
1880 | Louisiana is published. |
1881 | A Fair Barbarian is published. Esmerelda, a play written with actor/dramatist William Gillette, is produced in New York. President James Garfield takes office, and Frances, Swan, and the boys socialize at the White House. |
1883 | Burnett publishes the novel Through One Administration, a revealing reflection of her Washington, D.C., social life and her unhappy marriage. Critics compare her writing to that of Henry James for its portrayal of contradictions in human nature. Constantly traveling on work-related business, Frances is often on the verge of nervous exhaustion. Although she does not reveal her problems, her marriage begins to suffer. The Supreme Court overturns the Civil Rights Act. |
1884 | Burnett begins traveling more frequently to Britain and Europe , spending long periods away from her family. Her relationship with Swan begins to dissolve; she is torn between being a good mother and living independently of her children and husband. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appears. |
1885 | Little Lord Fauntleroy is serialized in the magazine St. Nicholas. Its tale of a young American boy who discovers he is an English lord causes a literary sensation akin to that of today’s Harry Potter books. Mothers begin having their sons wear long curly hair and velvet suits to look like Fauntleroy. Frances dresses her own son Vivian, the inspiration for the character, in dandyish garb. She falls ill and receives treatment from a mind healer in Boston. |
1886 | Little Lord Fauntleroy is published in book form and becomes a runaway best-seller in America and Europe. Burnett grows wealthy from the sales of her books and indulges a passion for decorating houses and creating exquisite gardens. |
1887 | A Woman’s Will is published, as is the story “Sara Crewe.” Burnett |
informally separates from Swan, taking her sons on a tour of Europe. Their itinerary includes a stay in London for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebration. | |
1888 | Frances’s stage adaptation of Fauntleroy opens in London three months after she learns of an unauthorized dramatization there. In a feat believed to be impossible at the time, she successfully sues under the Copyright Act of 1842, earning the gratitude of fellow authors. George Eastman patents the rollfilm camera. |
1889 | The Pretty Sister of José is published. Frances is involved in a traffic accident and incurs a concussion that further weakens her already fragile health. |
1890 | Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories is published. After months of seeking a cure for her eldest son, Lionel, Frances is devastated when he dies of tuberculosis. Perhaps in response to her son’s illness and death, Frances becomes active in children’s charities , to which she donates generous sums of money. |
1891 | Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is published. |
1892 | Children I Have Known is published. The first successful gaspowered automobile made in the United States is built by Charles and Frank Duryea, bicycle designers and toolmakers, at Chicopee, Massachusetts. |
1893 | A memoir, The One I Knew Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child, is published. |
1894 | Piccino and Other Stories is published. |
1895 | Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress is published. |
1896 | A Lady of Quality is published. |
1897 | Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published. |
1898 | After many years of alienation, Frances and Swan divorce. She moves into Maytham Hall, in Kent, with her son Vivian, a Harvard graduate in journalism. She conducts an unhappy affair with an abusive English doctor, Stephen Townsend. He wants to be a stage actor, and Frances arranges roles for him in the stage adaptations of her novels. |
1899 | In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim is published. |
1900 | Frances marries Townsend, reportedly under coercion: He had threatened to publicly reveal that she let him kiss her after |
knowing him for two weeks. Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams published. | |
1901 | The Making of a Marchioness is published. Queen Victoria dies. |
1902 | Ongoing struggles with her abusive husband lead Frances to seek a separation. She continues working to exhaustion and is hospitalized. |
1905 | A Little Princess is published. |
1909 | Burnett moves to a house she has built in Plandome (Long Island) , New York. |
1911 | Her greatest work, The Secret Garden, is published. Its underlying themes regarding the power of the mind over the body reflect Burnett’s growing interest in Christian Science. |
1913 | T. Tembarom is published. |
1914 | Frances begins spending more time at her home in Bermuda, where she grows more than a hundred varieties of roses in her gardens. James Joyce’s Dubliners is published. World War I begins. |
1915 | The Lost Prince is published. |
1917 | T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations is published. |
1920 | Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is published. |
1922 | The Head of the House of Coombe is published. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses are published. The appearance of modernist works causes some critics to find Burnett’s writing antiquated by comparison. |
1924 | Burnett dies of heart failure in Plandome on October 29. |