Secret Garden (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

Near the end of her life, looking back over six prolific decades in which she had published fifty-two books and written and produced thirteen plays, Frances Hodgson Burnett told her son Vivian, “With the best that was in me I have tried to write some happiness into the world” (Burnett, The Romantick Lady, p. 410; see “For Further Reading”). The Secret Garden, Burnett’s novel about a pair of lonely children who are healed physically and psychologically by cultivating an abandoned garden, has brought happiness to child readers, and more than a few adults, for nearly a hundred years. Praised by writer and critic Alison Lurie as “one of the most original and brilliant children’s books of the twentieth century,” The Secret Garden has never been out of print since its publication in 1911. The novel has been filmed several times, notably in 1949 and 1993; has been serialized by the BBC (in 1952, 1960, and 1975) and by Viacom in 1987; and has been made into a Tony Award-winning musical by Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon, in 1991.

Although it was popular from the outset, The Secret Garden was not immediately recognized as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s most outstanding literary achievement. A typical review in The Bookman, while noting that the story contained “a deep vein of symbolism,” dismissed it as “an exceedingly pretty tale” (Gerzina, Frances Hodgson Burnett, p. 263; see “For Further Reading”). In Burnett’s lifetime The Secret Garden was eclipsed by her earlier children’s novel, the hugely successful Little Lord Fauntleroy. Published in 1886, Little Lord Fauntleroy was a late-Victorian Harry Potter. The story of a poor New York boy who faces a happy reversal of fortune when he is discovered to be the heir to an English earldom was a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic and gave rise to a profitable industry of toys, statues, chocolates, playing cards, songs, and dramatizations. Mothers rushed to dress their sons in lace collars, wide-brimmed hats, and velvet breeches modeled on those worn by the author’s son Vivian (to his lifelong embarrassment) in the illustrations for Fauntleroy. Vivian’s outfit, in turn, had been copied from the attire of Burnett’s friend Oscar Wilde. Meanwhile, Frances Hodgson Burnett won further publicity for herself and her work by successfully suing E. V. Seebohm, writer of an unauthorized London dramatization of Little Lord Fauntleroy, for violation of the Copyright Act of 1842. Her legal victory paved the way for other authors to control and profit from stage adaptations of their writings and was celebrated at a banquet given by the Society of British Authors. Among the one hundred and fifty guests were George Meredith, William Rossetti, Edmund Gosse, and Oscar Wilde. Burnett was now a literary celebrity. Her own dramatization replaced Seebohm’s play on the London stage, opening in May 1888 to an audience that included members of the British royal family. The play transferred successfully to New York and toured for years; at one time forty theater companies were performing it simultaneously in Britain and the United States.

Little Lord Fauntleroy has not aged well. To many modern readers the angelic, self-sacrificing, and androgynous hero, Cedric Fauntleroy (played by female actors in both Seebohm’s and Burnett’s dramatizations, and by Mary Pickford in a 1921 film version), who calls his mother “Dearest” and persuades his crusty and tradition-bound British uncle, the Earl of Dorincourt, to give more charity to the peasants on his estate, appears comically alien and unrealistic. From Burnett’s prodigious output of fiction and nonfiction for children and adults, only The Secret Garden continues to be widely read and appreciated in the twenty-first century. What makes this late novel stand out from Burnett’s other work as an acknowledged classic? When the author’s representations of children in Fauntleroy and such other one-time best-sellers as The Little Princess are often dismissed as outdated and unconvincing, what accounts for the continuing appeal of Mary Lennox and Colin Craven?

The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy share surface similarities. In both novels the main character arrives in England from another country and sees English customs through an outsider’s eyes. In both cases there is a mansion to be explored and a difficult uncle to tame. Both Cedric and Mary repair broken relationships and restore harmony to their surroundings. Fauntleroy’s rags-to-riches plot is a familiar one in Burnett’s fiction, influenced perhaps by her childhood love of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, and also by her own experience of early poverty and loss, followed by a hard-won restoration of fortune. The Secret Garden differs from Fauntleroy and most other Burnett novels in that the main characters already possess adequate material wealth. The riches they lack and eventually recover are physical, emotional, and spiritual. Written toward the end of her life, The Secret Garden reflects Frances Hodgson Burnett’s recognition that wealth and worldly success are not enough and echoes her own search for spiritual healing. While Burnett employs some tried-and-tested successful elements from her earlier fiction, such as the use of regional dialect and a Gothic setting, she also shows a new willingness to explore painful emotions and to present child heroes whose behavior is often unlovable. For once her relentless drive to “write some happiness into the world” does not inhibit her from creating convincing characters or compel her to resolve all the tensions in her narrative.

The greater psychological realism of The Secret Garden may stem from Burnett’s personal suffering in the years following Little Lord Fauntleroy. As Vivian Burnett told a Knoxville audience shortly after his mother’s death, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s life contained “many sorrows that the world did not know about” (Gerzina, p. xvi). While her early life is a story of adversity overcome by remarkable energy and achievement, her middle years were a period of loss, disappointment, and spiritual searching. During these years, her writing, at first little more than a means of providing imaginative consolation and financial relief for her family in a time of poverty, became an almost evangelical effort to create order and spread joy in an increasingly perplexing world. As she counseled in her 1909 children’s book, The Land of the Blue Flower, “If you fill your mind with a beautiful thought, there will be no room in it for an ugly one.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in Manchester, England, in 1849. Her father, Edwin Hodgson, kept a home-furnishings store, and the family lived in moderate affluence until his death in 1853. Burnett’s mother, Eliza, tried to keep the family business afloat through the 1850s, but times grew increasingly hard as Manchester, the center of the world’s cotton textile industry, fell into a recession caused by the outbreak of the American Civil War and its disastrous effect on the southern cotton trade. By 1865 Eliza Hodgson was forced to close the store and emigrate with her five children to New Market, Tennessee, where her brother had a dry goods business. The family lived in a log cabin and were supported by the earnings of Burnett’s two brothers, who went to work for their uncle. Having long entertained her sisters and schoolmates with the improbable adventures of a red-headed heroine, Edith Somerville, Frances decided to try her hand at writing for a living. Raising money for paper and stamps by gathering and selling wild grapes, she wrote her first stories, romances set in aristocratic English parlors, and sold two pieces to the magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book in June 1868. Soon she was writing five or six stories per month and publishing in prestigious periodicals such as Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, and Scribner’s Monthly.

Burnett’s early stories already contained some key features of her later fiction, including the contrasting points of view of British and American characters and the use of dialect, both the Lancashire dialect she had grown up with in Manchester and the dialect of her neighbors in Tennessee. In the mid-nineteenth century, there was a sudden surge of interest in regional variations in speech, just as these regional peculiarities were first coming under threat as the American population became more mobile. Two of Burnett’s favorite authors published novels making strong use of dialect speech: Charles Dickens, in Hard Times (1854), and Charlotte Brontë, in Shirley (1849). Burnett’s first novel, That Lass o’ Lowrie’s (1877), has as its heroine a coal miner’s daughter who speaks broad Lancashire. Burnett’s skilled ear for dialect is in evidence more than thirty years later, in The Secret Garden, in the Yorkshire speech of Dickon Sowerby, admired and imitated by Mary Lennox and taught to Colin Craven as a language of initiates that cut, at least temporarily, across class barriers.

By the time Frances wrote
That Lass o’ Lowrie’s
she was married to her childhood friend from Knoxville, Swan Burnett, and the mother of two sons, Lionel and Vivian. Unusually for the time, she continued to write after her marriage; indeed, it was her income that allowed Swan, a physician, to pursue extra training in Europe. Her career gave her a degree of independence that was then uncommon for a married woman and that, from the first, was a source of much gossip. After the family settled in Washington, D.C., Frances made frequent trips to England, often leaving her husband and children behind. In the course of her lifetime she would cross the Atlantic thirty-three times, an extraordinary tally for a period before air travel; her many trips gave rise, as she confessed in an 1895 speech to the London Vagabonds’ Club, to “a general indefiniteness as to whether I am an Englishwoman or an American” (Romantick Lady, p. 266). Meanwhile, she was becoming acquainted with some of America’s leading literary figures, including Emerson and Louisa M. Alcott, in addition to meeting Oscar Wilde, Alfred Tennyson, and Henry James in London. In the decade following That Lass she wrote a string of novels and stories, published on both sides of the Atlantic, culminating in the life-changing success of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

After Fauntleroy, darker elements creep into the narrative of Burnett’s life. Her gushing protestations of affection for her children were accompanied by astonishing neglect. Leaving her older son, Lionel, with his father, she took Vivian to England, where she rented a country cottage, named it Dorincourt after the family estate in Fauntleroy, and pursued an increasingly ardent and public relationship with Stephen Townsend, who was ten years her junior and a physician with dreams of a stage career. This reckless interlude came to an end when Lionel was diagnosed with tuberculosis, then the leading cause of death in America. Burnett returned Vivian to Washington and took fifteen-year-old Lionel on an increasingly frenzied and fruitless tour of European specialists. Despite his mother’s showers of gifts, tears, and endearments, and Townsend’s attentive care, Lionel died on December 7, 1890, in Paris. In her passion of grief Frances covered the walls of her hotel rooms with pictures of Lionel and wrote letters and journals to her dead son. She did not return to the equally heart-broken Vivian and Swan in Washington for more than a year.

In her mature years, Frances Hodgson Burnett was sometimes a subject of ridicule and caricature, mocked for her efforts to squeeze her increasingly stout figure into girlish ruffles, ribbons, and decolletage, her nickname, “Fluffy,” and her penchant for younger men. Her long-troubled marriage finally ended in 1898, and in the same year she moved to England to take up residence at Maytham Hall, a mansion in rural Kent. There she played the lady of the manor, engaging in charity work, attending services at the local church, visiting Henry James in nearby Rye (James called her the “Princess of Maytham”), and cultivating her garden. She wrote each day in a walled rose garden, accompanied by a friendly robin and, one year, a pair of orphan lambs who followed her about and slept on her knee as she sang to them. Burnett appeared to have found contentment and happiness. Then, seemingly on an impulse, she married Stephen Townsend in Genoa, Italy. Afterward she would claim that he had blackmailed her into marriage, threatening to publicize her earlier adulteries, and that his motives were wholly mercenary. By 1902 the marriage was over: It had lasted less than two years. The breakup left her in a state of mental and physical collapse. Writing and the garden at Maytham were her solace. When Maytham’s owner put the house up for sale, Burnett must have felt like an exile from Eden.

By the time she started work on The Secret Garden, Burnett was back in the United States, living with her sister Edith at Plandome, the house on Long Island that would remain her American home until her death in 1924. The passion for gardening that she had discovered at Maytham persisted for the rest of her life. In her last, posthumously published book, In the Garden, she wrote,

For Frances Hodgson Burnett, as for her creation Mary Lennox, gardening was a consolation for disappointment and loss, a means of imposing order, an enactment of hope: “As long as one has a garden one has a future, and if one has a future one is alive” (In the Garden, p. 30).

Writing, like weeding, was a defense against painful memories. In The Secret Garden, Burnett recreates and immortalizes her beloved garden at Maytham, complete with its friendly robin, and uses it as a setting in which to revisit and repair some of her own life’s sorrows and dislocations. A pet lamb reappears in the company of Dickon the “animal charmer” (p. 122) and is bottle-fed by the spoiled invalid, Colin, who thereby initiates the process of his emotional and physical recovery through contact with the natural world. Colin shares his pallid face and luminous “agate-grey” (p. 100) eyes with Burnett’s son, Lionel. Unlike the unfortunate Lionel, however, he leaves behind his couch and wheelchair to greet his father, in the final chapter, as a perfectly healthy child. Colin’s cousin Mary, orphaned in India, must learn, like the young Frances Hodgson, to adapt to a new country and unfamiliar customs. Unlike Frances, who shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic through most of her life and dreamed of a permanent home at Maytham, Mary puts down roots in her rose garden at Misselthwaite Manor. The characters in The Secret Garden enact a fantasy of healing and integration in which a dying boy recovers and a lonely girl discovers her true home. In Burnett’s fairy tale the children owe their triumph not to a golden goose or a fairy godmother but to a new kind of magic derived from nature, healthy exercise, and positive thinking, all sources of comfort to Frances herself in later life.