Frances Eliza Hodgson was born to Edwin and Eliza (Boond) Hodgson in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England on November 24, 1845. Her father died in 1854 and her mother struggled to maintain her late husband's business until 1865, when her brother persuaded her to emigrate to Knoxville, Tennessee where he had established a prosperous dry goods store. Their first few years in America proved difficult, and Frances Hodgson began selling her short stories to earn money in 1868. Her output slowed in 1873, when she married ophthalmologist Swan Moses Burnett. The couple had two sons, Lionel (1874-1890) and Vivian (1876-1937), and moved to Washington, D.C. in 1877. Frances Burnett often traveled apart from her family and met such literary personalities as Henry James and Israel Zangwill. The marriage ended in 1898, and Burnett married Steven Townsend in 1900. They divorced two years later. In order to support her increasingly lavish lifestyle, Frances Burnett wrote innumerable short stories and over twenty novels, including The Lass o' Lowrie's (1877), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), The Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1910). She settled in Long Island, New York in 1909 and divided her later years between New York and Bermuda. She died in Long Island, New York, on October 29, 1924.