She made and spent masses of money and constantly worried about it, was profligate and generous, dressed expensively and ostentatiously (for her diminutive size), was obsessively hardworking, hard-headed, flighty, depressive, clever (though not well educated). She made an early marriage to a Southern doctor which wasn't a great success but was kept going for 'appearances'. She had several flirtations and ended up living scandalously with an actor/writer whom she finally married and then rejected dramatically - he may have been physically as well as mentally abusive. She understood the intensity and loneliness of the thoughtful child, but tended to leave her own two sons for months at a time. One of her adored but neglected sons died in his teens. The other never got over being the model for Little Lord Fauntleroy. She hankered after a kind of grand Englishness - which she finally achieved as lady of the maor at Maytham Hall in Kent, where there was and still is a beautiful walled (secret) garden. She belonged everywhere and nowhere, and was constantly restless and inventive.
There was a neediness and childish simplicity about her which is explored here and may be the key to why it is her children's books that have such lasting appeal.



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