by Ann Thwaite
As for The Shuttle, it was causing endless problems. It was not finished, yet it was too long, hopelessly long for serialization. Richard Gilder would have to use his blue pencil: “The fact that one can restore everything in the book after the serializing makes it possible to gaze on blue pencils with calmness. Still, I am afraid it won’t cut well—I mean largely enough to make it practicable. The leisurely manner of it is the result of the need of atmosphere in such a book.” Serialization finally started in the Century for November 1906, before Frances had completely finished the book. But at last it was finished and she went off on holiday in Europe. She was slightly worried by a clause in her contract with Stokes, who were to publish The Shuttle. Apparently they laid claim to her next book and she had never had such a clause in a contract before. She had written rather surprisingly to Vivian a few months earlier, when the subject first came up: “I have not the remotest idea of a new book in my mind and I could not be bound and perpetually bothered about it. I should never have an idea. I wish I could deliver novels like coals—dump them down before publishing houses and watch them shovelled into the cellar.” Usually she boasted that she could write a story about anything, about a fly on the ceiling if necessary, that her mind was full of stories. And the idea of being a sort of literary coalman was nothing but the old pen-driving machine again, and surely equally distasteful to her in a normal mood.
That winter, anyway, she resolved to write nothing. She went off to Montreux with a party of friends, including Lord Ronald Gower, whom she had known now for ten years, Frank Hird, his adopted son, and Josephine Browne. Miss Browne was a splendid character who became a close friend during these years. Frances was full of admiration: “She has white hair and is rather—not very—stout, but she has lived on the edge of Dartmoor all her life, when she was not travelling the world over, and she is as strong and full of life and energy as if she were eighteen. She is never tired. She climbs mountains as if she were the funicular and comes back smiling and glowing to lunch and says ‘Now what shall we do this afternoon?’ ”
In February 1907, Frances was back at Maytham. It was her last visit. Her lease was running out and the owner was selling the estate. She recorded this final visit in a brief, sentimental book called My Robin, written in 1912 after someone had asked her if she had “owned the original of the robin” in The Secret Garden.
“There had been snow even in Kent and the park and garden were white. I threw on my red frieze garden cloak and went down the flagged terrace and the Long Walk through the walled gardens to the beloved place,” the Rose Garden. And her robin came. She could not bring herself to say goodbye to him “We have been too near to each other—nearer than human beings are. ‘I love you and love you and love you—little soul.’ Then I went out of the Rose Garden. I shall never go into it again.”
There were other goodbyes to be made; it was a sad time. When, on her death, a tablet made by Tiffanys in New York, decorated with ivy leaves and books, was put up in the church at Rolvenden, it justly carried the text “Careful to maintain good works. Titus 3, 8”. In Who’s Who for 1905, Frances had given her recreation immodestly as “Improving the lot of children.” In Rolvenden, she had improved the lot of many people, particularly the old and dying. They wept to see her go. Her servants, eight of them, signed a letter dated 21st March 1907. They could not believe she would not come back.
Dear Madame,
We one and all are taking the liberty to wish you health wealth and every happiness and a very Pleasant Voyage. We all hope to have the Pleasure of Serving you again at dear Old Maytham. Will you do us the favour to accept this Small Present, From your Faithfull Servants . . .
In 1905, possibly to avoid Stephen’s claims on her property and income, Frances took out naturalization papers and became an American. From this, time on, though she was to continue regular visits to England until the war, she never had an English home. Back in America, she began to look for a permanent home for her last years—a beautiful home and a garden that would be entirely hers.
Chapter Ten
Was That the Party?
1908–1924
In the spring of 1908 Frances bought a large plot of land at Plandome, Long Island. The site, with views over Manhasset Bay, was splendid. The plan was for a white Italianate villa, red-roofed, with a colonnade and balconies and a balustraded terrace. Vivian, now working on a new publication called the Children’s Magazine, was left to keep an eye on things while Frances set off on ss Zeeland to take a “cure” at Doctor Lampe’s sanatorium in Frankfurt. She was not at all well—bouts of neuritis, “osteoperinestitch” or whatever it was, continued to plague her. Her digestion was terrible; she existed much of the time on a diet of buttermilk and toast.
But the voyage was delightful; “we go about in white muslin blouses and without hats”. And she was happy in the thought of the house at Plandome and of Vivian’s future. Whatever happened to her, she was now sure he would be financially secure. (The Shuttle was being enormously successful and entirely paid for the new house. Royalties on the first three months’ sale of the American edition alone were thirty-eight thousand dollars.) But if only Vivian would marry . . . She had always hoped he would enjoy the love of wife and children. He was now thirty-two. Had she, with her unhappy marriages and her worldly success, made his life more difficult for him? Surely not. His career did not exactly glitter, but he was a dear, dear boy. She had never suggested that he was a disappointment to her. “You never say or trunk again,” she wrote on board ship, “the thing you said that morning in the train—about always working under the weight of my disbelief. If I thought of words as I once did, that would have meant black discouragement to me. Just look back and think.”
It was difficult being the son of a famous mother; there was no doubt about that. All his life the Little Lord Faunderoy label remained round his neck. Now there were other minor but irritating difficulties. Moffat and Yard, the publishers of the Children’s Magazine, wanted to take advantage of Vivian’s relationship with the famous writer. Frances had agreed to let them publish “The Good Wolf”, one of the hair-curling stories she had told to Vivian as a child, and she was working on a sequel for them, to be called “Barty Crusoe and his Man Saturday” (“I wonder what will happen in it—what queer fantastic things. I think there will be a tribe of Pygmies and perhaps Hidden Treasure”). But she felt there was a “commercial impertinence” in them wanting to title their annual Burnett’s Children’s Year Book. It is “cheapening and undignified and even vulgar—besides the fact that ‘Burnett’s’ certainly does not suggest me but might mean Burnett’s Extracts or Cocoa . . . I am beginning to learn that this desire to always do what other people want is too silly . . . One gains in return neither respect nor affection.”
In Frankfurt, Frances took “electric baths” and enjoyed tea under the blossoming linden trees with Lady Alma-Tadema and Daisy Hall. Later she stayed with Josephine Browne at Tavistock in Devon, but she returned to New York in time for the rehearsals of her new play—the dramatization of The Dawn of a Tomorrow, which she had written at Sands Point on Long Island during the land-hunting summer of 1907.
The play opened at the Lyceum Theater on 28th January 1909 starring Eleanor Robson. The New York World critic considered it a “theatrical tribute to the New thought—the cults of the Faith Cure, Mind Cure, Rest Cure or the theology of Mrs Eddy . . .” He wrote of the play’s transparent artificiality but said “it has many attractive elements. It is wholesome in every meaning of that trite term. It is restful and uplifting. Most important of all it is entertaining.” Frances found herself having to deny Mrs Eddy: MRS BURNETT NOT A CHRISTIAN SCIENTIST was a Chicago Post headline. As for the charge of artificiality, in an interview in February she defended the realism of her view of the world. “The most misused word in the language is ‘realism’. It has come to stand solely for all that is hideous, sordid and repulsive in life. One would think, to judge from the way in which this word is bandied about, that
no real things were beautiful or good . . . A rose, a spring day, the sun, kindness, tolerance, nobility, unselfishness—these are as real as poverty and sin and hopelessness.” In any case, there was plenty of fog and poverty in the play; why should it be considered “artificial” just because it ended happily?
The Dawn of a Tomorrow was a success in the theatre but stopped abruptly when Eleanor Robson abandoned it to marry August Belmont. Frances wrote ruefully to the Hepworth Dixons in England: “Far be it from me, however, to suggest that any girl should not marry a nice millionaire. I ’ave not a ’eart of stone, even though my play is stopped at the height of its career and I lose a couple of hundred pounds a week.”
Meanwhile on Long Island things were not proceeding as rapidly as she hoped at the building site. It seemed that the New World could produce workmen of a temperament remarkably similar to the slow men of Rolvenden who had spent a day laying a bedroom carpet. On 29th June 1909, Frances wrote to the Hepworth Dixons:
There is a Stairmaker hammering away about four feet from me. He is one of the occult problems I find myself trying with sweet patience to solve. It is certainly three months—or four—since Vivian first began to search the dictionary for language sufficiently powerful to employ with a view to inducing them to “get a move on”. But nothing has transpired. (He is now whistling sweetly some gem from a popular opera.) He comes and spends four or five happy, peaceful hours with us, cheering us by his bright presence and then, having put in one balustrade, I think he goes abroad for a few weeks. He returns, refreshed, and after a joyous day spent with another balustrade, takes to his yacht again. I think he must go in a yacht . . . When you come to spend the summer with me in the far off years when the work is completed, you will say the place is lovely and you will like the house and the terrace and the big piazzas and the view—but let no one speak to me again of the pleasure of building one’s own house . . .
This will end—and after it is over the lovely Manhasset Bay will still lie smiling at the foot of the lawn and we shall go in the scented evenings down the wide stone steps (which are now being built) down the rose bank to the little curving beach and get into the pretty boat—which I can see from my window as I write—lying like a white dove on the water—and we shall float about, tinkling guitars and dungs, or merely being quiet, and we shall be sure to say, “How lovely! How adorable!” But in the meantime, let each man, woman and child who loves me at all understand that I do not write because I cannot.
. . . We came in on May 25th in the mad hope that by doing so we might push the workmen out—but we had not counted with the Stairmaker—the Terrace layers—the Painters, and the Builders of the garage. I could have endured these better if I had not simply revelled in neuritis.
Frances found herself forced to mutter through clenched teeth one of her own lines from The Dawn of a Tomorrow: “Things ain’t never as bad as wot yer think they are.” Why, as Glad had remarked, she “might ’ave broke [her] back or be in jail for knifin’ someone”. Even neuritis and an unfinished house and a garden full of builders’ rubble were mere trifles if she practised what she preached.
It was this spring of 1909, amidst the excitement of planning the garden at Plandome (“superintending the tucking in of plants and bulbs, making lawns, deciding on the direction of paths, the moving in and planting of hundreds of trees and shrubs”, as Vivian put it), that Frances began her most loved book, The Secret Garden. This title leaps to the lips of great numbers of people between the ages of seventy and seven when asked to name the favourite book of their childhood. Marghanita Laski, as I quoted earlier, calls it “the most satisfying children’s book I know”. Philip Larkin has praised it; so has everyone who has ever written on the history of children’s literature. It has been filmed and televised. It has never been out of print and it is read and enjoyed as a Puffin by children today, not as a “classic” urged on them by their elders, but as a living story of as much concern to them as any written more recently.
Its impact when it was first published in 1911, by Stokes in America and by Heinemann in England, does not seem to have been exceptional. The American Library Association booklist called it “a ‘new thought’ story, over-sentimental and dealing almost wholly with abnormal people”, while realizing that it would “appeal to many women and young girls”. Most of the other critics were more appreciative (“wholesome reading”, “will charm everyone”, “a quiet, beautiful tale of literary craftsmanship”) but it is hardly mentioned in the numerous entries on Frances in encyclopaedias and other reference books. It was not mentioned in her obituary in The Times. But on many people, old and young, it certainly made an immediate impression. One of them, Celia, Lady Scarbrough, had a “secret garden”, its door hidden by a thorn tree, laid out in 1912 and 1913 at Sandbeck in Yorkshire to commemorate her fondness for the book; her great-nephew, the present Lord Scarbrough, has always been called Dickon.
Vivian believed that the book “grew out of a regretful feeling” when Frances heard (mistakenly as it happened) that the new owners of Maytham had turned the Rose Garden into a market garden, with rows and rows of cabbages and turnips, and lettuces under glass cloches. But, as Philippa Pearce has pointed out, “the last thing The Secret Garden can have grown out of is a regretful feeling”. She first drew my attention to that earlier garden near Islington Square, Salford, which Frances knew in her childhood, with “the little green door in the high wall which surrounded the garden”. This was the cindery desert where the weeds were transformed, by the child’s imagination, into a carpet of flowers.
Seeds of The Secret Garden had undoubtedly been growing in Frances’ mind for nearly fifty years. It may have been at about the same time Frances saw the Manchester garden that she read Jane Eyre for the first time. Mary’s arrival at Misselthwaite is too reminiscent of Jane’s arrival at Thornfield to be coincidental. Both girls were plain young orphans who were starting a new life in a mysterious manor house on the Yorkshire moors, a house where the master was abroad most of the time and the place run by servants. There is also the parallel between Mrs Rochester’s tragic laugh and Colin’s curious cry, both puzzling the listener beyond the closed door.
Maytham had provided the lamb, the rose garden and the robin. The Brontës (Mary “hated the wind and its wuthering”) and Frances’ visit to Lord Crewe’s house in 1895 had provided the Yorkshire setting. Frances’ interest in the New Thought, as they called the new realization of the power of the mind, had provided the plot. But the most original thing about the book was that its heroine and one of its heroes were both thoroughly unattractive children. The first sentence makes it compulsive reading: “When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.” And Colin, of course, is a hysterical hypochondriac. It is the entirely convincing transformation of these two unhappy children that gives the story its tremendous appeal, even to children who do not find the natural world particularly attractive.
It was a long time since the heroines and heroes of a children’s book had had to be as flat and perfect as creatures in a medieval morality play. Fifty years before, Charlotte M. Yonge had broken that pattern but it was still very unusual for them to be actively disagreeable. They might have their small faults, they might be careless and untidy, but they always had merry eyes. Mary and Colin did not have merry eyes.
The treatment of Mary is quite astonishingly accurate to our own much – greater understanding of child behaviour. Other Victorian writers had made deprived children behave quite inappropriately, but Frances’ instinct has since been confirmed by child psychologists. A child denied love does behave as Mary behaved. But The Secret Garden is far more than a parable or a demonstration of child behaviour. With Frances, as always, the story comes first and she was far too good a writer to spoil it with propaganda. Only at the beginning of chapter twenty-seven does she lapse into sententiousness, with explicit explanations of her symbolism and a bald definiti
on of what the rest of the book conveys so subtly and brilliantly: “To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body.” “Whatsoever things are honest, just, pure, lovely and of good report—think on these things” has been part of our collective wisdom for a very long time but it has seldom been put into more delightful form.
The Secret Garden is a book of the new century. Far from encouraging the attitudes instilled in Frances as a child (“Speak when you’re spoken to, come when you’re called . . .”), it suggested children should be self-reliant and have faith in themselves, that they should listen not to their elders and betters, but to their own hearts and consciences. Someone once said that you could learn the elements of pruning roses from The Secret Garden, and another large part of the attraction of the book is its exactly accurate descriptions of real gardening. Frances was always good at detail. She knew children liked it. It is not enough to mention they have tea, she once said, you must specify the muffins. It is the detail of things that makes them interesting. To Colin, the moor is bare and dreary. To Dickon, who knows its every detail, the moor is alive with activity and interest. Frances never lost her appetite for quiddities.
The Secret Garden was first called Mistress Mary, surely a title which would have hindered rather than helped. In April 1910, when it had been taken for serialization by The American Magazine (“This is the first instance I have ever known of a child’s story being published in an adult’s magazine,” Frances wrote), she was still calling it Mistress Mary: there is no record of how it came to have the familiar title.