Each gorgeous box set includes four beautifully designed, pocket-sized editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll with original illustrations by John Tenniel, illustrated editions of Hans Christian Andersen’s Best Fairy Tales and Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector’s Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector’s Library are books to love and treasure.
Whether you want to chase after Alice into Wonderland or Mary into The Secret Garden, get caught up with Anne’s mischief in Green Gables or get lost in Hans Christian Andersen’s whimsical fairy tales, these classic stories will take you on unforgettable adventures.
Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has delighted and entranced children for over a hundred years. Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Born in 1832, he studied at Christ Church College, Oxford where he became a mathematics lecturer. The Alice stories were originally written for Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of his college
Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark, in 1805. He endured a lonely, impoverished childhood consoled by little more than his own imagination. He escaped to a theatre life in Copenhagen aged 14 where the support of a powerful patron enabled him to complete his scant education, and to write. His poetry, novels and travel books became hugely popular. But it was his
Fairy Tales, the first children's stories of their kind, published in instalments from 1835 until the time of his death in 1875, that have immortalised him. Translated into more than 100 languages and adapted to every kind of media, they have made Andersen the most important children's writer in history.
Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) was born in Manchester and spent her early years there with her family. Her father died in 1852, and eventually, in 1865, Frances emigrated to the United States with her mother and siblings, settling with family in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Frances began to be published at the age of nineteen, submitting short stories to magazines and using the proceeds to help support the family. In 1872, she married Swan Burnett, a doctor, with whom she had two sons while living in Paris. Her first novel, That Lass o'Lowrie's, was published in 1877, while the Burnetts were living in Washington D. C. Following a separation from her husband, Burnett lived on both sides of the Atlantic, eventually marrying for a second time, however she never truly recovered from the death of her first son, Lionel.
Best known during her lifetime for Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), her books for children, including The Secret Garden and The Little Princess, have endured as classics, but Burnett also wrote many other novels for adults, which were hugely popular and favourably compared to authors such as George Eliot.
Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1874 and raised by her maternal grandparents following her mother's death when she was just two years old. Biographical accounts of her upbringing suggest a strict and rather lonely childhood. She later spent a number of years working as a teacher before turning to journalism and then, ultimately to fiction writing. While
Anne of Green Gables was completed in 1905 Montgomery was at first unable to find a publisher for it and - having set it aside for a while - eventually found a champion for it in the Page Company of Boston. Her first novel - and the one which was to prove by far her most successful - was published in 1908 and has remained in print the world over ever since. In creating the uniquely memorable Anne, Montgomery gave the world of classic fiction one of its most enduring heroines.
