Frances Hodgson Burnett | 1849-1924 A children's cookbook containing many English and a few Indian specialties was published in 1999, "inspired by The Secret Garden." At least six bed-and-breakfasts in the United States and Canada have "Secret Garden Rooms." The devotion inspired by Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 book should not be surprising: In 1886, her Little Lord Fauntleroy inspired mothers in England and America to grow their young sons' curls long and to dress their boys in velvet suits and lace collars. Burnett was born in England but emigrated to a rather hardscrabble life in Tennessee when she was 15. In her late teens, she eased her family's financial difficulties with her earnings from stories she sold to women's magazines. Even before she became famous for her books for and about children, Burnett was a popular novelist, with her first, That Lass o' Lowrie's, published in 1877. Her fame grew with the publication of Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1886. Two years after its publication, Burnett successfully sued for the dramatic rights to the story, a ruling which would be incorporated into British copyright law in 1911. In the same year that Burnett was in court, she published Sara Crewe, later reissued and dramatized as A Little Princess. Her nearly 50 novels, plays, and collections of stories tended toward the sentimental, although they were notable for their faithful reproduction of family life and class distinctions. The Secret Garden, with its unsympathetic heroine, its physically imperfect hero, and its themes of childhood abandonment and resistance to authority, has retained the interest of several generations of readers of all ages. In fact, The Secret Garden is an example of children's literature taken very seriously: In recent years, it has been a favorite of literary scholars writing about gender and class relations in turn-of-the-century England.