Frances Burnett

This charming and uplifting novella is the basis for a later, novel-length version that author Frances Hodgson Burnett eventually published under the title The Little Princess. The daughter of a prominent captain, Sara is enrolled at a boarding school while her father sails the seas. When tragedy strikes, Sara's world is turned upside down, but in the end, she finds a way to triumph over adversity.

Twelve-year-old Marco has lived his entire life in a series of dingy, barely habitable rented flats, moving around Europe at a moment's notice, and seeing his father only sporadically. Remarkably, along the way, Marco has attained a formidable intelligence, and his kind heart and even disposition shine through in everything he does. One day, secrets from his past begin to surface, and suddenly the mystery of his true identity begins to fall into

Sara Crewe's young but doting father sends her to a London boarding school when she is seven. On her eleventh birthday her life of luxury comes to an abrupt end when she receives news that her father has died, shortly after losing his entire fortune. The school-mistress turns Sara into a servant to pay off her debts, and though Sara uses the entire force of her imagination and her good heart to remember who she is and keep starvation from the door,

If you love to read inspiring stories about dedicated, hard-working types who pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, you'll get a kick out of Frances Hodgson Burnett's T. Tembarom. Our eponymous hero emerges from a wretched childhood to finally realize his dream of making it as a newspaper columnist. When circumstances take him to England, Tembarom finds love—and uncovers some family secrets that change his life in ways he never

Author Frances Hodgson Burnett spent several years living in Paris as a young wife and mother, and her own life experiences and observations heavily influenced the series of stories that Burnett set in France, including the novella Le Monsieur de la Petite Dame. This tale examines the cultural differences between Americans and the French through the lens of a newly arrived American family and the French grand dames they encounter.

This fascinating historical novel from The Secret Garden author Frances Hodgson Burnett explores the lives of an often-overlooked group: female miners in nineteenth-century England. Joan Lowrie, the main focus of the novel, is a strong-willed lass who has struggled with a life of poverty and now works punishing hours in a Lancashire mine. Is there any hope for her to rise above her trying circumstances and find true happiness?

If you're tired of Victorian heroines who are weak-willed, simpleminded, and utterly incapable of looking out for themselves, you simply must make the acquaintance of Bettina Vanderpoel, the refreshingly shrewd, independent, and level-headed protagonist of Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel The Shuttle. In the early twentieth century, America's nouveau riche families began to marry off their daughters to British aristocrats, and many of these

Two young women are sent to a North Carolina resort to recover after illnesses. One is a cultured New Yorker, and the other—the Louisiana of the book's title—is a beautiful but unpolished country girl. Both find themselves out of their element at the resort, so they band together and become fast friends—and learn a lot about what it means to be different in the process.

In this moving short story from Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of The Secret Garden, a French family finds its social status zooming upward due to a daughter's marriage into an upper-class clan. But the salt-of-the-earth friends and neighbors of the Giraud family are deeply skeptical of what they see as brazen social climbing—and they aren't shy about expressing their displeasure.