A Lady of Quality

Although best known for Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett was considered one of the leading writers in America on the strength of her adult novels, which made her name in the 1870s and 1880s. Ripe for rediscovery, Bello is proud to bring a select group of these classic novels back into print. 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."