Frances Hodgson Burnett Audiobooks

The Secret Garden: a children's classic about ruined places brought back to life

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Who is Frances Hodgson Burnett?

Frances Hodgson Burnett, born in Manchester in 1849, was a British-American novelist and playwright best known for three children’s novels: Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess and The Secret Garden. Her own childhood had little of the fairy tale about it – her father died when she was four, the family fell on strained circumstances and emigrated to Tennessee, and she began publishing magazine stories at nineteen simply to help pay the bills.

Novels followed, the first published to good reviews, and Little Lord Fauntleroy made her a popular children’s writer in 1886, though her romantic adult novels of the 1890s found readers too. Life kept testing her: her elder son died of tuberculosis in 1890, deepening a depression she struggled with for much of her life, and two marriages ended in divorce. From the 1880s she travelled frequently to England and eventually bought a home here, where she wrote The Secret Garden. She died in New York in 1924; a memorial in Central Park depicts her characters Mary and Dickon.

Frances Hodgson Burnett in audiobooks

Our catalogue features The Secret Garden, written during her years in England and published in 1911, and it remains one of the most rewarding children’s classics to experience aloud. Burnett understood – perhaps because her own life supplied so much of both – how grief and renewal sit side by side, and that emotional weather is exactly what a good narration draws out. For UK listeners it is family listening of the old school: patient, atmospheric and quietly hopeful. An audiobook also restores the story’s original rhythm, that of being read to at bedtime, which is how tales like this were always meant to arrive.