The One I Knew the Best of All

In this novel, originally published in 1893, the reader can follow the progress of Frances Hodgson Burnett through a fictionalized version of her childhood and into the beginnings of her writing career. Burnett refers to herself as the Small Person and writes -- as she did in all of her books -- with a grace and understanding of human beings, large and small, that has rarely been equaled. 

In The One I Knew the Best of All, we can see the Small Person as she encounters and grows to understand the many wonders of her life: love, deceit, laughter, kinship, birth, death, fear, worry, and much more. 

The stories within each chapter stand alone but they build to a climax as the Small Person's family leaves Manchester, England, and travels across the Atlantic Ocean to make a new home in East Tennessee. You will see the Small Person develop first into a reader, then a storyteller, and then a writer. 

This delightful and important book is one of the best that Burnett ever wrote -- equal in some ways to Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Secret Garden -- and yet it has ne ver received the attention that it deserves.