Frances Hodgson Burnett: All 7 Books in the Library, Free to Read Online
Burnett is the writer of one enormous idea, repeated: a child is displaced, arrives somewhere with nothing, and is restored — not by rescue but by turning out to be someone. She wrote it as a boy inheriting an earldom, as a girl reduced to a servant in the school she used to attend, as an invalid nobody expects to walk. It works every time because she never made the restoration easy and never pretended the bad part was not bad.
She had lived a version of it. The family business failed when she was a child, they emigrated from Manchester to Tennessee into genuine poverty, and she started selling stories at eighteen to support her mother and siblings. By the 1890s she was one of the highest-earning novelists in either country, and she spent it in a way that scandalised people — divorced, remarried a man twenty years younger, divorced again, moved between England and Long Island.
Seven of her books are in the free library.
The three everyone means
The Secret Garden (1911) is the one to read, and it is a stranger book than the reputation suggests. It opens with a cholera epidemic killing an entire household and leaving a child nobody has ever liked. Mary Lennox is sour, rude and unloved for a third of the novel, and Burnett does not hurry her out of it — the garden works slowly and so does she. Colin's hysteria is written with real clinical attention, and the book's actual argument, stated repeatedly, is that what you keep thinking becomes what happens to you.
A Little Princess (1905) is the bleakest. Sara Crewe goes from the richest pupil at Miss Minchin's to an unpaid maid in its attic in a single afternoon, and the middle of the book is cold, hunger and being blamed. What makes it hold up is that Sara's defence is imagination used deliberately, as a discipline — she decides to behave like a princess precisely because nothing about her situation is princess-like.
Its first version is also here: Sara Crewe (1888), a novella about a third the length. Burnett wrote it, adapted it for the stage, found the play needed more characters and more plot, and then rewrote the novella into the full novel. Reading the short one after the long one is the clearest look at revision you will get from a Victorian writer — you can see exactly which characters were invented to fill a stage.
Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) is the one that made her famous and the one that has aged worst, mostly because of what the illustrations did to a generation of boys' haircuts and velvet suits. The book itself is better than the joke: an American child and his grandfather, an English earl who is a genuinely unpleasant man, and the novel's interest is entirely in the earl changing. It was also a legal landmark — Burnett sued over an unauthorised stage version and won, which is part of why British authors got dramatic rights at all.
The adventure novel nobody reads
The Lost Prince (1915) is her longest book here and the one most unlike the others. Marco Loristan and a crippled boy called The Rat travel across Europe carrying a signal to a secret network on behalf of a lost royal house. It is a spy story for children, written during the First World War and full of it, and the invented kingdom of Samavia is doing obvious work about the Balkans. Uneven, and much odder and better than its obscurity suggests. If you have read the famous three, read this next.
The two short ones
- Racketty-Packetty House (1906) — shabby old dolls in a nursery, displaced by expensive new ones, narrated by a fairy who is openly rude to the reader. About an hour, and much funnier than anything else she wrote.
- The Dawn of a To-morrow (1906) — for adults. A rich man goes into a London slum intending to kill himself and meets a dying girl with an unshakeable conviction that everything will come right. It is the Secret Garden thesis stated straight, without a story to carry it, and it is worth reading for exactly that reason.
What is not here
The Making of a Marchioness, her best adult novel and the one currently most in print, and The Shuttle — neither is on the free shelves yet. If you came for grown-up Burnett, The Dawn of a To-morrow is what there is.
All of it is free
Every book above is public domain and readable in the browser here, with nothing to install and no account needed to start. They are all on one author page.
By shelf: 24 books about orphans, which is her subject; 12 boarding-school novels for the Miss Minchin side; and 37 adventure stories for younger readers for the Samavia side. Our books like Anne of Green Gables list covers the displaced-child genre more widely, and the boarding school stories guide has A Little Princess in its proper company.