Frances Hodgson Burnett

Burnett's father died when she was three, and the family business failed with him. In 1865 they emigrated from Manchester to a cabin near Knoxville, Tennessee, into a poverty she described plainly in later life. She sold her first story at nineteen, having gathered wild grapes to pay for the postage, and from then on supported her mother and siblings by writing.

Little Lord Fauntleroy made her internationally famous in 1886 and dressed a generation of unwilling small boys in black velvet. It also made legal history: when an unauthorised stage version appeared, she sued and won, in a case that helped establish an author's dramatic rights in Britain.

The book she is now loved for came much later and out of grief. Her elder son Lionel died of tuberculosis at sixteen, a loss that turned her towards spiritualism and towards writing about recovery. Renting Great Maytham Hall in Kent, she found a neglected walled garden behind a door in a brick wall, restored it, and wrote there for years. The Secret Garden appeared in 1911, was received without much notice, and has outlasted everything else she wrote.