Ysobel might have had the most isolated and lonely of childhoods, there in the feudal castle in Muircarrie moor. Yet the parentless child has the company of Jean and Angus, who look after her -- and now she has found a playmate, who is brought to her one misty day by a tall, gaunt chieftain with a star-shaped scar upon his forehead, and who rides a black horse. For a brief time the moor comes alive with the sounds of the two girls at play -- until the new girl whirls around a bush, and utterly vanishes. "Where did she go?" Ysobel says to Jean and Angus, when she finds them again. "It was Dark Malcolm of the Glen," says Angus, after hearing her out. "And the girl -- Wee Brown Elspeth!" "But she is white -- quite white!" said Ysobel. Jean sweeps the shivering Ysobel into her warm arms, hugging her close to her breast, and says, "She's one of the fair ones. She'll come often, I dare say!"

Author Biography

Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett (1849 - 1924) was a British-American novelist and playwright. She is best known for the three children's novels Little Lord Fauntleroy (published in 1885-1886), A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911). She was born in Cheetham, Manchester, England. After her father died in 1852, the family fell on straitened circumstances and in 1865 emigrated to the United States, settling in Jefferson City, Tennessee. There Frances began writing to help earn money for the family, publishing stories in magazines from the age of 19. In 1870, her mother died and in 1872 Frances married Swan Burnett, who became a medical doctor. The Burnetts lived for two years in Paris, where their two sons were born, before returning to the United States to live in Washington, D.C. Burnett then began to write novels, the first of which (That Lass o' Lowrie's), was published to good reviews. Little Lord Fauntleroy was published in 1886 and made her a popular writer of children's fiction, although her romantic adult novels written in the 1890s were also popular. She wrote and helped to produce stage versions of Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess. Burnett enjoyed socializing and lived a lavish lifestyle. Beginning in the 1880s, she began to travel to England frequently and in the 1890s bought a home there, where she wrote The Secret Garden. Her oldest son, Lionel, died of tuberculosis in 1890, which caused a relapse of the depression she had struggled with for much of her life.[1] She divorced Swan Burnett in 1898, married Stephen Townsend in 1900, and divorced him in 1902. A few years later she settled in Nassau County, Long Island, where she died in 1924 and is buried in Roslyn Cemetery. In 1936 a memorial sculpture by Bessie Potter Vonnoh was erected in her honour in Central Park's Conservatory Garden. The statue depicts her two famous Secret Garden characters, Mary and Dickon.