Biography: Every literate adult surely has one: a book from their childhood that shines out from all the rest when they look back on that golden age of reading, between about 10 and 12.
For me, that shining book is Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess, and I freely acknowledge my debt to it in my own development as a writer.
Frances Hodgson was born into a middle-class family in the north of England. Her father died young, and life was a struggle for the family. Mrs Hodgson eventually emigrated with her children to America, where she had a brother who had promised work to the older boys of the family. Frances was in her mid-teens by then, and for the rest of her life, she oscillated, spiritually and physically, between England and the US.
Frances was a merry child and a natural storyteller, always spinning yarns and scribbling furiously. When she reached adulthood, she embarked quickly on a writing life, selling short stories and later serials, subsequently published as novels, to magazines; her stories were usually transformed into stage plays, as today's novels are adapted for the cinema. Publication offered her an income, and this daughter of genteel poverty continued to write for money all her life. She was soon immensely popular - mainly for her stories for adults, though she is known today only as a children's writer - and later vastly rich by her family's modest standards. One of the most fascinating aspects of this biography is the account of the writer's finances over a lifetime. Money was tight at times, and she lived extravagantly, but she was generally well able to afford a lavish lifestyle on the proceeds of her work.
Frances and her husband, Swan Burnett, had two adored sons, Lionel and Vivian. The elder boy, Lionel, died of TB at the age of 16, and the chapter on his illness and death and his mother's tender care of him makes heartbreaking reading. Vivian lived to regret his transmogrification in the public mind into Little Lord Fauntleroy (a much misunderstood personage), but grew to be a supportive son, who wrote a defensive biography of his mother after her death.
Frances loved luxury for herself, but she was also extremely generous, and for most of her life she supported not only herself and her immediate family, but other family members and friends, on her earnings as a writer, and she set up, funded and often took an active interest in various imaginative charities for children. She was one of those rare people who really love children, their active little bodies as well as their rapacious little souls. She was no saint, and she had a snobbish streak, though it is hardly surprising that a self-made Victorian woman would expect her sons to study hard, be keenly ambitious and learn to speak with the "right" accents.
Already by the time of Lionel's death, Frances and her husband were living apart. Initially her work and later also her preference for travel and gaiety took her away from home, and gradually the couple's marriage deteriorated into a nominal arrangement; they were eventually divorced. Frances was coy, as a Victorian lady of reputation had to be, about her love life, but she later married a man with whom she had had a long relationship, and with whom she collaborated on several dramatisations of her novels. He turned out to be violent and manipulative.
Gerzina suggests that he may have forced Frances to marry him by threatening to reveal the sexual nature of their relationship, and perhaps other indiscretions of hers, which a woman in her position could not afford to have happen. She later shook him off, however, and lived her final years sustained largely by the company of female friends.
Partly because of Lionel's death and partly because her own health was always precarious (she often made herself ill by overwork), Frances became interested in spiritual matters.
The reader, like the biographer, can hardly avoid the conclusion that the experience of Lionel's death and the development of Frances's thinking about the spirit world deeply influenced The Secret Garden, where one of the central characters is a sick boy who is gradually brought back to health by "the Magic" - a pantheistic force released by the children who discover and nurture the locked-up walled garden of the title. As the subtitle of this very fine biography acknowledges, it is for that novel that she is chiefly remembered today.