A Lady of Quality
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First published in 1896, A Lady of Quality may have had its beginning "in a dark back chamber, revealed at the end of one of the corridors by the chance scratching of a match" in Portland Place, where Frances Hodgson Burnett was living. The house had a large basement area with long underground passages leading out to the Mews behind, about which Burnett is said to have remarked, "What a place to hide the body of a man you had accidentally killed."
Thought of as a departure from her previous work, and set in the early Eighteenth Century, the body in question turns out to be that of Sir John Oxon, killed with riding whip by the book's heroine, Clorinda Wildairs:
"Uncivilised and almost savage as her girlish life was, and unregulated by any outward training as was her mind, there were none who came in contact with her who could be blind to a certain strong, clear wit, and unconquerableness of purpose, for which she was remarkable. She ever knew full well what she desired to gain or to avoid, and once having fixed her mind upon any object, she showed an adroitness and brilliancy of resource, a control of herself and others, the which there was no circumventing. She never made a blunder because she could not control the expression of her emotions; and when she gave way to a passion, 'twas because she chose to do so, having naught to lose ..."
A Lady of Quality is a novel about the invincibility of the human spirit, the refusal of a woman to be mild and submissive, the acceptance of all experience, and courage born of adversity.
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Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) was born in Manchester and spent her early years there with her family. Her father died in 1852, and eventually, in 1865, Frances emigrated to the United States with her mother and siblings, settling with family in Knoxville, Tennessee. Frances began to be published at the age of nineteen, submitting short stories to magazines and using the proceeds to help support the family. In 1872, she married Swan Burnett, a doctor, with whom she had two sons while living in Paris. Her first novel, That Lass o'Lowrie's, was published in 1877, while the Burnetts were living in Washington D. C. Following a separation from her husband, Burnett lived on both sides of the Atlantic, eventually marrying for a second time, however she never truly recovered from the death of her first son, Lionel. Best known during her lifetime for Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), her books for children, including The Secret Garden and The Little Princess, have endured as classics, but Burnett also wrote many other novels for adults, which were hugely popular and favourably compared to authors such as George Eliot.
