THE SHUTTLE Popular Classic Literature [with Audiobook Links]

"THE SHUTTLE - Top Classic Novels" This edition included Free AudioBook Links, NEW illustrations, Clickable Table of Contents for both the list of included books and their respective chapters. Navigation couldn't be easier.

The text and chapters are perfectly set up to match the layout and feel of a physical copy, rather than being haphazardly thrown together for a quick release.

The Shuttle, a 1907 page-turner about American heiresses marrying English aristocrats, explores the effect of American energy, dynamism and affluence on an effete and impoverished English ruling class; and the process by which a great English country house can be brought back to life with the injection of transatlantic money. Sir Nigel Anstruthers marries the daughter of an American millionaire, Rosalie Vanderpoel. He turns out to be a bully, a miser and a philanderer and virtually imprisons his wife in his house, Stornham Court. Only when Rosalie's sister Bettina is grown up does it occur to her and her father to rescue her. The books title refers to ships shuttling back and forth over the Atlantic and also to the weaving of the alliance between America and Britain. One of the first and best-known of all the Anglo-American matrimonial alliances was that of Jennie Jerome to Lord Randolph Churchill. Another was the marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt (left) to the 9th Duke of Marlborough: Blenheim was renovated with her money. The actual model for Stornham Court is Great Maytham Hall, near Rolvenden in Kent.This had, and still has, a wonderful garden which, in The Shuttle, Bettina sets about restoring, and which is described in The Making of a Marchioness, a Persephone bestseller; a few years later, in 1911, it inspired the walled garden in The Secret Garden.

Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett (24 November 1849 – 29 October 1924) was an English playwright and author. She is best known for her children's stories, in particular The Secret Garden (published in 1911), A Little Princess (published in 1905), and Little Lord Fauntleroy (published in 1885-6).

Frances Eliza Hodgson was born in Cheetham, near Manchester, England. After her father died in 1852, the family eventually fell on straitened circumstances and in 1865 emigrated to the United States, settling near Knoxville, 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 she married Swan Burnett, who became a medical doctor after which they lived in Paris for two years where their two sons were born before returning to the US to live in Washington D.C. There she began to write novels, the first of which (That Lass o' Lowries), 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 bought a home there in the 1890s where she wrote The Secret Garden. Her oldest son, Lionel, died of tuberculosis in 1892, which caused a relapse of the depression she struggled with for much of her life. She divorced Swan Burnett in 1898 and married Stephen Townsend in 1900, and divorced him in 1902. Towards the end of her life she settled in Long Island, where she died in 1924 and is buried in Roslyn Cemetery, on Long Island.

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.