After her father died in 1853, when Frances was 4 years old, the family fell on straitened circumstances and in 1865 emigrated to the United States, settling in New Market, Tennessee.

Frances began her writing career there at age 19 to help earn money for the family, publishing stories in magazines.

She was the third of five children of Edwin Hodgson, an ironmonger from Doncaster in Yorkshire, and his wife Eliza Boond, from a well-to-do Manchester family.

[2] In 1852, the family moved about a mile away to a newly built terrace, opposite St Luke's Church, with greater access to outdoor space.

[3][note 2] Barely a year later, on 1 September 1853 and with his wife pregnant for a fifth time, Hodgson died suddenly of a stroke, leaving the family without an income.

Their new home was located in a gated square of faded gentility adjacent to an area with severe overcrowding and poverty that "defied description", according to Friedrich Engels, who lived in Manchester at the time.

One of her favorite books was Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, and she spent many hours acting out scenes from the story.

[10] In 1863, Eliza Hodgson was forced to sell their business and move the family once again to an even smaller home; at that time, Frances' limited education came to an end.

Eliza's brother (Frances's uncle), William Boond, asked the family to join him in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he now had a thriving dry goods store.

[12] After the end of the Civil War and the trade it had brought to the area, Frances's uncle lost much of his business and was unable to provide for the newly arrived family.

[2] Keen to escape from the family's poverty, she tended to overwork herself, later writing that she had been "a pen driving machine" during the early years of her career.

[19] With the income from her writing, she returned to England for an extended visit in 1872,[2] and then went to Paris where, having agreed to marry Swan, she ordered an haute couture wedding dress to be made and shipped to Tennessee.

Writing about the dress disappointment to a Manchester friend, she said of her new husband: "Men are so shallow ... he does not know the vital importance of the difference between white satin and tulle, and cream-colored brocade".

[21] The couple wanted to leave Knoxville, and her writing income allowed them to travel to Paris, where Swan continued his medical training as an eye and ear specialist.

[22] After two years in Paris, the family intended to move to Washington, D.C., where Swan, now qualified as a doctor, wanted to start his medical practice.

Despite the difficulties of raising a family and settling into a new city, Burnett began work on Haworth's, which was published in 1879, as well as writing a dramatic interpretation of That Lass o' Lowrie's in response to a pirated stage version presented in London.

[25] However, as had happened earlier in Knoxville, she felt the pressure of maintaining a household, caring for children and a husband, and keeping to her writing schedule, which caused exhaustion and depression.

[24] Within a few years, Burnett became well known in Washington society and hosted a literary salon on Tuesday evenings, often attended by politicians, as well as local literati.

Little Lord Fauntleroy received good reviews, became a bestseller in the United States and England, was translated into 12 languages and secured Burnett's reputation as a writer.

[26] The central character, Cedric, was modeled on Burnett's younger son Vivian, and the autobiographical aspects of Little Lord Fauntleroy occasionally led to disparaging remarks from the press.

In 1888 she won a lawsuit in England over the dramatic rights to Little Lord Fauntleroy, establishing a precedent that was incorporated into British copyright law in 1911.

In response to a second incident of pirating her material into a dramatic piece, she wrote The Real Little Lord Fauntleroy, which was produced on stage in London and on Broadway.

[27] With her sons, she moved on to spend the winter in Florence, where she wrote The Fortunes of Philippa Fairfax, the only book to be published in England but not in the United States.

[30] Following his death, before she sank into a deep depression, she wrote in a letter to a friend that her writing was insignificant in comparison to having been the mother of two boys, one of whom died.

[14][32] She returned to London, where she sought the distraction of charity work and formed the Drury Lane Boys' Club, hosting an opening in February 1892.

[33] After a two-year absence from her Washington, D.C. home, her husband, and her younger son, Burnett returned there in March 1892, where she continued charity work and began writing again.

[35] Burnett returned to London in 1894; there she heard the news that her younger son Vivian was ill, so she quickly went back to the United States.

[2] Officially, the cause for the divorce was given to be desertion, but in reality, Burnett and Swan had orchestrated the dissolution of their marriage some years earlier.

The press was critical, calling her a New Woman, with The Washington Post writing that the divorce resulted from Burnett's "advanced ideas regarding the duties of a wife and the rights of women".

[37] From the mid-1890s, she lived in England at Great Maytham Hall—which had a large garden where she indulged her love for flowers—where she made her home for the next decade, although she continued annual transatlantic trips to the United States.