“Everything ’s a story. You are a story—I am a story.” From the people and places around her, Frances Hodgson Burnett, who moved to America from England at age fifteen, found stories enough for over forty novels and plays—including the three still-beloved classics of children’s literature presented in this Library of America volume. Restoring the novels to their original, unabridged American texts, this authoritative edition features over forty illustrations carefully reproduced from the first editions, twenty of them printed in full color.

In Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), seven-year-old Cedric Errol is growing up in New York City with his young widowed mother when he unexpectedly learns that the grandfather he has never met is an English earl. The Earl wants to give his grandson an education in power and privilege, but he does not suspect that the innocent little American may have more to teach.

Ten-year-old Sara Crewe in A Little Princess (1905) is sent by her father to a London boarding school, whose headmistress grudgingly favors the little girl while secretly loathing her intelligence and independence. When Sara’s once-wealthy father dies penniless, the headmistress’s behavior changes immediately. Sara goes from star pupil to hungry maid in the attic, but she remains cheerful by imagining that she is secretly a princess.

And in The Secret Garden (1911), Mary Lennox is a spoiled child who is sent to her neglectful uncle’s manor in Yorkshire, England, after her parents’ deaths, where she discovers an abandoned walled garden. Mary becomes fascinated by the prospect of restoring the garden—and in the process stumbles upon the house’s other secret, which changes both her and her uncle’s lives for the better.

The volume includes all the original illustrations by Reginald B. Birch, Ethel Franklin Betts, and Maria Louise Kirk, as well as three rare stories in which the author describes the inspirations behind the books: “How Fauntleroy Occurred, and a Very Real Boy Became an Ideal One,” a memoir of Burnett’s son, Vivian, the author’s inspiration for Fauntleroy; “Sara Crewe, or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s,” the short story that was the basis for the stage play and novel A Little Princess; and “My Robin,” Burnett’s memoir of an English robin that inspired the “robin” episodes of The Secret Garden.

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, editor, is Paul Murray Kendall Professor of Biography and Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. She is the author of Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden (2004).