In the sun-blasted villages of the Riviera, Frances Hodgson Burnett introduces Piccino, a poverty-stricken Italian peasant boy whose extraordinary beauty makes him a magnet for tourists, coins, and attention. His charm brings brief advantages to a family struggling with hunger and hard labor, while his own world remains tender and precarious, shared with a beloved donkey he treats like a brother. When that donkey is sold to the moneylender Beppo, Piccino's grief exposes how deeply love, survival, and loss are entwined in his life. Burnett widens the story to the clash between glittering visitors and the children who beg at their tables, then brings Lady Aileen, a rich and restless Englishwoman, to the center of the action. Amused and fascinated by Piccino's angelic appearance, she begins to treat him as something to acquire, even as the household is thrown into turmoil by the donkey's return and the pressures of poverty. Alongside this tale of beauty and possession runs a darker domestic drama: Miss Rose is being pursued by the dangerous Basil Roscoe, and Master Lionel, Rabbett, and others can sense the ruin ahead as secrecy, warning, and drunken rage drive the tension toward an ominous confrontation. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

À propos de l'auteur

Burnett, Frances Hodgson

Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in England in 1849 and later made her life and career in the United States, a transatlantic journey that shaped both her sensibility and her fiction. After her family’s financial struggles and the death of her father, she began writing to help support them, and her early success grew into a remarkably durable literary career spanning novels, short stories, and plays. She became one of the most beloved storytellers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, admired for her gift for creating vivid child protagonists, emotionally rich family dramas, and settings that move from hardship toward hope. Her writing often explores resilience, class difference, loneliness, transformation, and the restorative power of affection, nature, and imagination, themes that still speak powerfully to modern readers navigating uncertainty and change. Though best remembered for her children’s fiction, she was also a keen observer of social feeling and inner life, giving her work a warmth and psychological insight that continue to resonate. Burnett’s legacy endures because she understood that stories for young readers can be both tender and serious, offering comfort without sentimentality and hope without denying struggle. Readers who enjoy classic children’s literature, heartfelt coming-of-age stories, and novels that balance realism with a touch of enchantment will find her especially rewarding.