“Look here,” he said, “if tha's curious. Look what's comin' across th' grass.”
When Mrs. Medlock looked she threw up her hands and gave a little shriek, and every man and woman servant within hearing bolted across the servants' hall and stood looking through the window with their eyes almost staring out of their heads.
Across the lawn came the Master of Misselthwaite, and he looked as many of them had never seen him. And by his side, with his head up in the air and his eyes full of laughter, walked as strongly and steadily as any boy in Yorkshire-Master Colin!
FRANCES ELIZA HODGSON WAS BORN ON NOVEMBER 24, 1849, in Manchester, England, one of five children. Her father, a successful hardware dealer, died when she was still young and the family was forced to move from the fashionable Cheetham Hill district to a shabby house in Islington Square.
After the Hodgsons struggled unsuccessfully to maintain themselves in Manchester for several more years, they emigrated to America in 1865, moving to Knoxville, Tennessee.
Young Frances had been a dreamy child, writing since the age of seven. She was published in American magazines before she was twenty years old.
Her first book,
That Lass o' Lowrie's
, set around a Lancashire coal mine, was published in 1877 when she was twenty-seven, and she was published with regularity after that. Her more than forty sentimental novels for adults were vastly popular at the time, though it is for her three children's books that she is known today:
Little Lord
Fauntleroy, Sara Crewe or The Little Princess,
and
The Secret Garden.
Little Lord Fauntleroy
was written in 1885. It was about the conversion of a young street boy through a legacy into a velvet-suited, long-haired young gentleman. It set a standard for rich boys' dress for a number of years. First serialized in the prominent
St Nicholas
magazine, the book was wildly successful both as a novel and a stage play, bringing Mrs. Burnett both fortune and fame.
Sara Crewe
was also serialized in
St Nicholas
in 1885 but was not immediately turned into a book. It went from the magazine directly onto the stage. Not until 1905, when friends convinced her to revise the book according to the successful stage playâadding characters and situations that had not been in the original serializationâdid Mrs. Burnett make it into a novel.
The Secret Garden
was published in 1911. It has been one of the most popular books of childhood ever since.
In 1873, Frances Hodgson married Swan Burnett, a young man who had been crippled in childhood but who went on to become a successful eye specialist. Though always mindful of her mother's insistence that she cultivate ladylike manners, Frances Hodgson Burnett nonetheless supported her husband during the time he was working to establish himself as an ophthalmologist.
They had two sons: Lionel and Vivian. Vivian was the model for Little Lord Fauntleroy and as a grown man wrote a biography of his famous mother called
The Romantick Lady
. In 1886, while Mrs. Burnett was travelling abroad after the extraordinary success of the Fauntleroy book, Lionel came down with consumption. She returned home at once to nurse him devotedly, keeping from him the knowledge that he was dying. “It seems to
me,” she wrote later in a notebook, “that I
must
not give you the terror of knowing.”
In 1898 Dr. Burnett and Mrs. Burnett were divorced and she soon married another young doctor, Stephen Townesend, who had helped nurse Lionel during his final illness. Townesend was ten years younger than his famous wife, and desired to become an actor. She treated him more like a son than a husband, attempting to help him in his theatrical ventures with her rather important connections. As Vivian was to write later: “This was one of the few solaces ⦠(she) had ⦠her wish to help her olderâdisappointedâStephen boy.” They separated a year later.
During her successful years, Mrs. Burnett was not considered a particularly appealing woman. Some critics accused her of being domineering and self-centered. But she left the literature of childhood richer with her writing, and that is worth a little conceit, surely.
Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett Townesend died at Plan-dome, New York, on October 29, 1924.
The Secret Garden
lives forever.
Â
âJANE YOLEN
BEFORE FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT WROTE
THE SECRET Garden,
most of the literature for children starred grotesquely good little boys and girls. Bad children were never the heroes of a story. Rather they were punished appropriately like the bad sister in the fairy tale, with a mouthful of toads, or reformed. Even Mrs. Burnett's earlier heroesâthe relentlessly courageous little Cedric Fauntleroy and the relentlessly hopeful little Sara Creweâwere such child paragons.
But in
The Secret Garden
a new child hero emerges. Cranky, demanding, angry, and thoroughly unattractive, both Mary and Colin are anything but likable. And yet, we understand what makes them that way.
Mary is a survivor. She survives her parents' dismissive behavior toward her. She survives the Indian servants' submissiveness. She survives the cholera epidemic. And we know she will survive the cold welcome she receives at Misselthwaite. She survives the only way she knows howâby being disagreeable, aggressive, and sly.
Colin, too, is a survivor. He survives his mother's
death and his father's strange behavior toward him. He survives despite the doctor's pessimistic diagnoses and detrimental treatment. He survives the servants' pity and their indifference. He survives in the only way he knows howâby being hysterical, prone to tantrums, and ill.
That Frances Hodgson Burnett can make us like these two thoroughly unlikable children is a large part of the genius that makes this book a classic. We admire and enjoy Dickon, who is as much a nature god as he is a little boy. But we do not love him. Our hearts go out to the impossible pairâMary and Colin. We root for them to get well, to fix the garden, to “live for ever and ever and ever.”
Some of what makes
The Secret Garden
work so well must have come from Mrs. Burnett's life. Like Colin's father, the gentleman with the unhappy past, Mrs. Burnett spent a great deal of time away from home. Her guilty secret was that she had been holidaying when her son Vivian had become so ill. And though she could not save him, she could save another little boy named Colin Craven. It is that secret guilt and her great need to have the child well, that drives the emotional part of this story.
Also, like Mary, Frances Hodgson Burnett lost a father early and was sent from a beloved home to a new, cold environment. Her solace had been in make-believe and in gardens. So Mary becomes a kind of symbol for Mrs. Burnett's childhood tragedy. As one critic wrote of her, “It was Burnett's lifelong habit ⦠to transform her experience into the conventional forms of a story.”
There is another curious element in
The Secret Garden.
Unlike most of the ordinary books of the day, which had little moral lessons of a decidedly Christian nature, there is something curiously
unchristian
about the book. Burnett all but deifies nature, and clearly speaks about a kind of life force working in nature. Though she has Dickon
sing the “Doxology,” that most Christian of hymns, both and he and his mother speak of the Magic in the earth and the growing things.
Mrs. Burnett was, herself, a most unorthodox Christian, dabbling in such interests as faith healing, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Christian Science. Clearly she is not trying to force young readers onto any such paths. But there is a great magic healing power in the garden itselfâand in the seasonal and cyclical plotting of the book. It ends in autumn, with everythingâchildren and gardenâawakened. That natural magic also transforms the book and every reader.
Â
âJANE YOLEN
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
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THE SECRET GARDEN
All new material in this edition is copyright © 1988 by Jane Yolen
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
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A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
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eISBN 9781466805736
First eBook Edition : November 2011
EAN 978-0812-50501-6
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First Tor edition: January 1990