The Head of the House of Coombe

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.

The Head of the House of Coombe is the first of two volumes which were first serialised in 1920 in Scribner’s Monthly, before being published in 1922. Together with the second volume, Robin, the ‘House of Coombe’ novels comprise Frances Hodgson Burnett’s last substantial work.

Returning to a theme that occurs again and again in her books - that of the change from riches to poverty - The Head of the House of Coombe contains Burnett’s most dramatic manifestation of this idea, along with a potent sense of the old order breaking up in the years prior to the First World War.