NEW YORK, April 30 (AScribe Newswire) -- Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, in a new biography of The Secret Garden author Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924), has opened Burnett's unconventional and complex life to a major new interpretation through previously unseen manuscripts, letters and photos from her family archives.

Gerzina, professor of English and director of Pan-African Studies at Barnard College, examines Burnett's literary life as the author of well-loved children's books like Little Lord Fauntleroy and her achievements as a free spirit and entrepreneurial woman who was handsomely paid but chastened by her peers and the turn of the 20th century press for her driven and extravagant lifestyle.

Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden (Rutgers University Press), out in bookstores this month, is the first biography written with the full cooperation of Burnett's descendants, who gave Gerzina complete access to the writer's materials.

The book includes many new revelations about Burnett and her family, including details of her extravagant lifestyle, an abusive relationship with her second husband, her brother's time as a spy in the Confederate army and her death from stomach cancer. She also discovered a letter that showed the author left her dying son in the care of a nurse for an extended period to travel with her lover.

Gerzina will give a reading from her novel Wednesday, April 14, 7 p.m., in the Brooks Living Room, Brooks Hall at Barnard as part of the Books Etc. series.

Burnett, who is one of the few women honored with a memorial statue in New York City, was full of paradoxes and contrasts. She wrote cherished books for children but was largely an absent mother to her own two sons as she became hugely successful, not only for her children's books but for novels and plays for adults. At one point, Burnett was the highest-paid woman author on either side of the Atlantic.

Born in Manchester, England, Burnett moved to post-Civil War Tennessee at age 15 to live in a log cabin with her widowed mother and two sisters. Burnett never felt grounded in either country and traveled back and forth between England and America for the rest of her life, crossing the Atlantic 31 times.

Gerzina was drawn to Burnett's story from her own perspective as a woman from a multiracial background. "Burnett was a person on the 'borders,' with two identities, which I could relate to, given my own interracial perspective with a white mother and an African-American father, growing up in the 1950s," she said. "Burnett arrived in the United States at the end of the Civil War; I came of age during the Civil Rights movement. Both of us grew to have strong opinions about the position of women."

Gerzina, who teaches courses on the novel, black literature and biography, is the author of Black London, on the black population of 18th century England, which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book in 1995. She is the host of the nationally syndicated radio show, The Book Show, which features notable authors, including Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie and Anna Quindlen. She also wrote a biography of Bloomsbury figure Dora Carrington, Carrington: A Life, whose life was made into a film starring Emma Thompson; and Black Victorians/Black Victoriana. She is currently working on a book titled Bijah and Lucy: Love in the Time of Colonial Slavery, about two former slaves in colonial Massachusetts and Vermont, who became landowners and advocates for their rights. Lucy Terry Prince is considered to be the first African-American poet. Bijah and Lucy will be the lead book for the Amistad imprint of HarperCollins, and an audio book.

Gerzina's interest in Burnett developed from a shorter piece on the author she contributed to Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers (1997), edited by Denise D. Knight five years ago. "I thought that I should keep going since I had already delved so deeply into the abundance of material that she had published in her lifetime," said Gerzina.

Gerzina said at first she had reservations about contacting Burnett's relatives, uncertain whether they would open the archives to her. They turned out to be quite welcoming, so she made plans to fly to Texas on September 12, 2001.

Instead of traveling by plane after the terrorist attacks, she took a train to Dallas. "When I arrived I was greeted by her great-great granddaughter who welcomed me into her home and invited me to explore boxes and boxes of Burnett's letters, manuscripts, prints, and photos no one had ever seen," said Gerzina.

With this new trove of research materials, she became aware of Burnett's more complex persona. She was a very successful author of adult books in her time, although today she is mostly known for her children's books, especially The Secret Garden. According to Gerzina, Burnett had a very complicated relationship with her own children, spending a great deal of time away from them - sometimes a year at a time.

Burnett sent her first short story to an editor as a teenager after coming to America. Due to the death of Burnett's father, her family's finances were precarious, and she thought that she could earn money by writing. After her first story, Surly Tim's Trouble, was published in Scribner's Magazine, she was quickly pursued by other publishers for more stories, and became her family's sole breadwinner.

Burnett was a free-spirit who made - and spent - a fortune and whose unconventional lifestyle was often criticized by her peers and the press. She married twice but only did so to satisfy the social pressures of the time.

Burnett wrote some 40 books and several plays and was the best-paid woman writer of her time - no publisher ever turned down her work. Her most famous book, Little Lord Fauntleroy, published in 1886, her 18th, was intended as a children's book, but had the most appeal with mothers, who adopted the main character with long curls and velvet suit with white collar, as the ideal young boy. The book sold over half a million copies, and Burnett won a lawsuit in England over its dramatic rights, establishing a precedent, which was incorporated into British copyright law in the early 1900s.

Burnett's later books included Sara Crewe (1888), which was dramatized as The Little Princess, and The Secret Garden (1896), both children's books. Her writing and extensive travels became wearing and after leaving her second husband Burnett retired to Long Island, where she died in 1924.

"We now think of writing as an art form and as an expression of freedom. For Burnett it was a matter of survival, yet she was one of the most talented and beloved artists and writers at that time," said Gerzina.

For more information, contact Petra Tuomi, Barnard College Public Affairs, at 212-854-7907.