Frances Hodgson Burnett
Author biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who she was
Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in Manchester on November 24, 1849, and died in New York on October 29, 1924. Her father died when she was three, the family business failed, and in 1865 her mother took the children to Tennessee, where they arrived into real poverty.
She began selling stories to magazines at seventeen to bring money in, and she wrote for the rest of her life because the household depended on it. She knew firsthand what it is to go from comfort to nothing, which is the engine of her best book.
Why she wrote it
A Little Princess grew out of an earlier, shorter story, Sara Crewe, published in 1888. She returned to it, expanded it into a play, and then wrote the full novel, published in 1905.
The central situation is the one she had lived: a girl whose circumstances collapse overnight, through no fault of her own, and who has to decide what sort of person to be with nothing left to be it with.
The book we publish, and why
We publish A Little Princess as a Digital Junior Genius Reader.
Sara loses her father, her money and her standing in a single day and is moved from the best room in the school to the attic. She keeps her manners, her words and her kindness anyway, and she keeps them when there is no reward for it and no audience watching.
The benefit is the clearest lesson a child can have in how to behave when things are taken away. It also raises a question the book does not fully answer, and which we think is worth a child sitting with: whether Sara would have remained good if nothing had ever been given back.
How to read it with a child
Read aloud from about six, independently from about eight or nine. It is long and slow in the middle by modern standards, which is part of its usefulness.
The attic chapters are where children suffer, and where some want to stop. That is the book working. Miss Minchin is a genuinely unpleasant adult drawn without softening, and children need to see that such adults exist and can be endured.
Ask the hard question rather than the easy one. The easy one is whether Sara was brave. The better one is what she had left to be generous with when she gave away the buns, and why she did it anyway.
Pair it with
- The Junior Genius Method, our approach of Read, Notice, Write, Recite, Remember, Question, Apply, which the Digital Junior Genius Reader edition is built around.
- Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio, as the deliberate contrast: one child behaves well with nothing, the other behaves badly with everything.
- Thomas à Kempis, for the parent. Sara's conduct in the attic is practically a worked example of it, arrived at by a novelist rather than a monk.
Her principal works
- That Lass o' Lowrie's, 1877. Her first novel, written for adults.
- Little Lord Fauntleroy, 1886. The book that made her famous and briefly dictated how boys were dressed.
- Sara Crewe: or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's, 1888. The short original.
- A Little Princess, 1905. The expanded novel.
- The Secret Garden, 1911.
- The Lost Prince, 1915.
- The Making of a Marchioness, 1901, and a substantial body of adult fiction now less read.
General reference on Frances Hodgson Burnett. External links open outside Trumpet Publishing House.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.
All Trumpet editions by Frances Hodgson Burnett