“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”
Author detail
Frances Hodgson Burnett was best known as an English playwright and author. Frances Eliza Hodgson was born on November 24, 1849, at Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England, to Eliza Boond and Edwin Hodgson. She was the middle child of five, with two older brothers and two younger sisters. Frances grew up in a comfortable home. Mr. Hodgson sold brass goods to upper class households, and the family had a maid, a nurse-maid, and a horse and carriage. However, in the early 1850's when Frances was only three or four years old, her father died of a stroke, and the family was forced to sell their house and move. Her mother carried on the business, and Frances was often left in the care of her grandmother, who taught her to read. Her future as a writer might have begun here. When she was about sixteen, the family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. From then until she was nineteen, Frances supported them by selling her stories to magazines. In September 1873, she married Swan Burnett. The couple moved to Paris for two years and had there two sons. In 1892, following the death her son Lionel from tuberculosis, Frances suffered severe depression. In 1898, she divorced Swan Burnett and remarried two years later; this second marriage only lasted a year. Frances settled in Long Island, New York, where she lived for the rest of her life. She died in 1924 and rests in Roslyn Cemetery in Greenvale, New York, next to her other son, Vivian.
Quotes
Showing 1-14 of 14
“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”
“At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done-then it is done and all the world wonders why it...”
0 likes
“It is astonishing how short a time it takes for very wonderful things to happen.”
0 likes
“If nature has made you for a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart; and though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give thing...”
“The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew wher...”
“My mother always says people should be able to take care of themselves, even if they're rich and important.”
“One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts- just mere thoughts- are as powerful as electric batteries- as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for...”
0 likes
“Hang in there. It is astonishing how short a time it can take for very wonderful things to happen.”
0 likes
“I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.”
0 likes
“They never sat up all night with Trouble, Peter Piper used to say. And I told him they were quite right. If you make a fuss over trouble and put it to bed and nurse it and give it beef tea a...”
0 likes
“Children's as good as 'rithmetic to set you findin' out things.”
“She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself.”
“Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book.”
“She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.”
0 likes