To celebrate Francis Hodgson Burnett, we’d like to ask, which book would you read?
The Secret Garden
Author: Francis Hodgson Burnett
ISBN: 9780194791298
Though Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote more than forty books, none remains so popular as this miraculous and magical masterpiece. Has any story ever dared to begin by calling its heroine, “the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen” and, just a few sentences later, “as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived?” Mary Lennox is the “little pig,” sent to Misselthwaite Manor, on the Yorkshire moors, to live with her uncle after her parents die of cholera. There she discovers her sickly cousin Colin, who is equally obnoxious and imperious. Both love no one because they have never been loved. They are the book’s spiritual secret gardens, needing only the right kind of care to bloom into lovely children.
Mary also discovers a literal secret garden, hidden behind a locked gate on her uncle’s estate, neglected for the ten years since Colin’s birth and his mother’s death. Together with a local child named Dickon, Mary and Colin transform the garden into a paradise bursting with life and color. Through their newfound mutual love of nature, they nurture each other, until they are brought back to health and happiness.
Price: 8,5 GELBuy the Book
Little Lord Fauntleroy
Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett
ISBN: 9780194789295
At the age of sixteen Frances Hodgson Burnett moved to Tennessee with her bankrupt family and began writing for American magazines as means to support herself. Over two decades later Burnett published Little Lord Fauntleroy, modeling the character after her son, Vivian. Burnett’s text and Reginald Birch’s original illustrations helped popularize a very romantic style of dress for boys — a velvet suit with a broad lace collar — in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
At a very early age an American boy named Cedric is told that he is the sole heir to a British earldom. So, he leaves New York to take up residence in his ancestral castle, where, after some initial resistance, he is joined by his middle-class mother, ”Dearest”, the widow of the late heir. His grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt, intends to teach the boy to become an aristocrat, but Cedric inadvertently teaches his grandfather compassion and social justice, while the artless simplicity and motherly love of Dearest warms his heart.
Price: 7,5 GELBuy the Book