A Lady of Quality

A Lady of Quality – Frances Hodgson-Burnett

The period of the tale is the reign of Queen Anne, and it is written in the language of the period—an audacious undertaking when one remembers that such a style must invite comparison with that of ” Henry Esmond.” Mrs. Burnett has written the story of a girl whose mother died in giving her birth, and who has grown to young womanhood under no softer influence than that of her father, who is a swaggering, sporting, hard-drinking squire of those easy-going days. So slight is his interest in domestic affairs that he doesn’t know his own daughter—as she plays about the hall, at six years of age, with the young children of the servants—until she is pointed out to him. The child’s ingrained audacity strikes her father’s fancy, and he declares she shall be reared as a boy, and allowed to do as she likes. Thenceforward she dresses in boy’s clothes, and has for companions only such rough friends as her father gathers about him …

A Lady of Quality

A Lady of Quality

Format: Paperback.

A Lady of Quality.

ISBN: 9783849686420

Available at amazon.com and other venues.

 

Biography of Frances Hodgson-Burnett (from Wikipedia):

Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett (24 November 1849 – 29 October 1924) was a British-American novelist and playwright. She is best known for the three children’s novels Little Lord Fauntleroy (published in 1885–1886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911).

Frances Eliza Hodgson was born in Cheetham, Manchester, England. After her father died in 1852, the family fell on straitened circumstances and in 1865 emigrated to the United States, settling near Knoxville, Tennessee. There Frances began writing to help earn money for the family, publishing stories in magazines from the age of 19. In 1870, her mother died, and in 1872 Frances married Swan Burnett, who became a medical doctor. The Burnetts lived for two years in Paris, where their two sons were born, before returning to the United States to live in Washington, D.C. Burnett then began to write novels, the first of which (That Lass o’ Lowrie’s), was published to good reviews. Little Lord Fauntleroy was published in 1886 and made her a popular writer of children’s fiction, although her romantic adult novels written in the 1890s were also popular. She wrote and helped to produce stage versions of Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess.

Burnett enjoyed socializing and lived a lavish lifestyle. Beginning in the 1880s, she began to travel to England frequently and in the 1890s bought a home there, where she wrote The Secret Garden. Her oldest son, Lionel, died of tuberculosis in 1890, which caused a relapse of the depression she had struggled with for much of her life. She divorced Swan Burnett in 1898, married Stephen Townsend in 1900, and divorced him in 1902. A few years later she settled in Nassau County, Long Island, where she died in 1924 and is buried in Roslyn Cemetery.

In 1936 a memorial sculpture by Bessie Potter Vonnoh was erected in her honour in Central Park’s Conservatory Garden. The statue depicts her two famous Secret Garden characters, Mary and Dickon.

 

(The text of the last section was taken from a Wikipedia entry and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)

 

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