{"product_id":"frances-hodgson-burnett-book-gretchen-gerzina-9780712664400","title":"Frances Hodgson Burnett","description":"The remarkable woman who wrote those perennial childhood classics, \"The Secret Garden\" and \"A Little Princess\", lived an unexpected and varied life. 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. 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, Burnett was a woman of contrasts and paradoxes. She made, and spent, a fortune; was generous and profligate, yet anxious about money and obsessively hardworking; flighty, yet hard-headed; depressive; amusing and clever (though not well educated). She published fifty-two books and wrote and produced thirteen plays; she made an early marriage to a Southern doctor and had notorious flirtations and a scandalous affair before making a disastrous second marriage to an English doctor turned actor. She understood the intensity and loneliness of the thoughtful child, but was herself a largely absent mother to two adored sons and she hankered after a kind of grand Englishness - which she finally achieved as lady of the manor at Maytham Hall in Kent, with its own walled garden - but continued to relish the American independence of spirit. She belonged everywhere and nowhere, constantly restless and inventive, 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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49508746264849,"sku":"GOR001965688","price":11.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50154985980177,"sku":"GOR005679524","price":16.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51720997011729,"sku":"GOR002269685","price":24.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0712664408.jpg?v=1750700041","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/frances-hodgson-burnett-book-gretchen-gerzina-9780712664400","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}