The remarkable woman who wrote those perennial childhood classics, THE SECRET GARDEN and A LITTLE PRINCESS, lived an unexpected and varied life, evoked and examined here with lively intelligence, sensitivity and fascinating new material. Hugely successful in her own time (1849-1924) for her adult novels and plays, Frances Hodgson Burnett would be astounded to be remembered for a handful of books for children. Her own life is full of those reversals of fortune which mark her work, from modest beginnings in mid-Victorian Manchester to adulthood in America, where she arrived in post-Civil War Tennessee at the age of fifteen, with her widowed mother, two sisters and two brothers.

A woman of contrasts and paradoxes, this quintessentially British-seeming writer was equally at home in the USA and revelled in straddling both countries' attitudes and opportunities. She made and spent a fortune, was generous and profligate yet anxious about money, flighty yet hard-headed, depressive, amusing, clever (though not well educated). She understood the intensity and loneliness of the thoughtful child, but was herself a largely absent mother to two adored sons. She hankered after a kind of grand Englishness--which she finally achieved as lady of the manor at Maytham Hall in Kent--but continued to relish American independence of spirit. She was a woman ahead of her time, who reinvented for herself and generations to come the magic and mystery of the childhood she never really had.

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BLACK VICTORIANS / BLACK VICTORIANA is a welcome attempt to correct the historical record. Although scholarship has given us a clear view of nineteenth-century imperialism, colonialism, and later immigration from the colonies, there has for far too long been a gap in our understanding of the lives of blacks in Victorian England. Without that undersanding, it remains impossible to assess adequately the state of the black population in Britain today. Using a transatlantic lens, the U.S. and British contributors to this book restore black Victorians to the national picture. They look not just at the ways blacks were represented in popular culture but also at their lives as they experienced them - as workers, travelers, lecturers, performers, and professionals. The essays taken as a whole also highlight prevailing Victorian attitudes toward race by focusing on the ways in which empire building spawned a "subculture of blackness" consisting of caricature, exhibition, representation, and scientific racism absorbed by society at large. This subculture made it difficult to be both black and British, while at the same time it helped to construct British identity as a whole. African American abolitionists in London, blackface minstrelsy, and portrayal of blacks in cartoons and children`s magazines and many other topics are covered in this landmark contribution to the emergent field of black history in England.

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Because of her Bohemian lifestyle, connection with the Bloomsbury group, her bobbed hair and outspoken views, Dora Carrington seemed to symbolize the "new woman" of the 20th century. This is a portrait of the woman who was once described as "a strange wild beast".

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