One of the windows looking upon the courtyard gave also a glimpse of the lawn. Mrs. Medlock, knowing Ben had come from the gardens, hoped that he might have caught sight of his master and even by chance of his meeting with Master Colin.
“Did you see either of them, Weatherstaff?” she asked.
Ben took his beer-mug from his mouth and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Aye, that I did,” he answered with a shrewdly significant air.
“Both of them?” suggested Mrs. Medlock.
“Both of ’em,” returned Ben Weatherstaff. “Thank ye kindly, ma’ am, I could sup up another mug of it.”
“Together?” said Mrs. Medlock, hastily overfilling his beer-mug in her excitement.
“Together, ma’am,” and Ben gulped down half of his new mug at one gulp.
“Where was Master Colin? How did he look? What did they say to each other?”
“I didna’ hear that,” said Ben, “along o’ only bein’ on th’ stepladder lookin’ over th’ wall. But I’ll tell thee this. There’s been things goin’ on outside as you house people knows nowt about. An’ what tha’ll find out tha’ll find out soon.”
And it was not two minutes before he swallowed the last of his beer and waved his mug solemnly toward the window which took in through the shrubbery a piece of the lawn.
“Look there,” 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!
ENDNOTES
1 (p. 7) When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor ... everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen: Misselthwaite Manor is the ancestral home of the Craven family and site of the secret garden. The carefully chosen name “Misselthwaite” affirms the novel’s setting in the northern English county of Yorkshire and hints at the story’s concern with rebirth and rejuvenation. “Thwaite,” an ancient word meaning forest land cleared and converted to tillage, is part of many northern English place names. “Missel” is an old word for mistletoe, a shrub that puts out leaves and berries in the dead of winter and is associated with love and fertility.
2 (p. 7) Her father had held a position under the English government: Mary’s father was a member of the British colonial administration in India. Beginning with the merchants of the East India Company, the British were a presence in India from the early 1600s. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the Indian subcontinent fell under British rule and remained Britain’s largest colonial possession (the so-called jewel in the imperial crown) until India gained independence in 1948. In 1911, the year in which The Secret Garden was published, newly crowned King George V and Queen Mary paid a much-publicized royal visit to India.
3 . (p. 9) The cholera had broken out: Cholera is an acute and often fatal bacterial infection of the small intestine. The disease can kill its victims rapidly, often within a matter of hours. Cholera epidemics frequently swept through nineteenth-century India, striking colonizers and colonized alike. Between 1898 and 1907 (the period before Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote The Secret Garden) cholera was responsible for at least 370,000 deaths in the Indian subcontinent.
4 . (p. 17) “Riquet à la Houppe”: “Little Ricky with the Topknot” (1697) is a French fairytale by Charles Perrault, imitated by Gabrielle de Villeneuve in her “Beauty and the Beast” (1740). The ugly Riquet has the power to endow the person he loves with wit and intelligence. He falls in love with a beautiful but stupid woman who can make the one she loves beautiful. The two marry and exchange gifts.
INSPIRED BY THE SECRET GARDEN
My Robin, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Soon after the publication of The Secret Garden (1911), Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote a spin-off story featuring the garden’s robin as its central character. Titled simply My Robin ( 1912) , the short story runs forty-two pages and includes illustrations by Alfred Brennan. On October 2 3 , 1912 , the New York Times reported, “It is as pretty a bird story as any ever told, and if it be a bit self-conscious, that is merely because Mrs. Burnett cannot help posing picturesquely in whatever she writes. It is a charming little story, for all that.”
Film
The first film of The Secret Garden, a silent, black-and-white version, appeared in 1919, eight years after the novel’s initial publication. Better known is director Fred Wilcox’s 1949 version. The magnificent, stylized sets bring the magic of Burnett’s novel to life, while the actors, including Margaret O’Brien as Mary Lennox, play their roles with tenderness and emotion. The evocative cinematography and lighting capture the scariness of the dark hallways of Misselthwaite Manor, making the large house seem as if it really is haunted. In a dramatic point-counterpoint evocative of 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, the film bursts from drab black and white to blazing Technicolor upon the discovery of the secret garden.
After several BBC television adaptations, the novel made it to the big screen again in 1993 at the hands of Agnieszka Holland, the Polish director known for Europa Europa (1990) and Washington Square (1997). Holland’s film triumphs with its simultaneous lushness and understatement. The elegant production features graceful music by Zbigniew Preisner and suggestive visual effects that richly convey the garden’s transformative powers. A dour but pretty Kate Maberly portrays Mary Lennox, Andrew Knott plays a delightful Dickon, and screen legend Maggie Smith purses her lips tightly in the role of watchful Mrs. Medlock. The child actors in particular do an excellent job depicting the complexity of the emotions represented in the book. Caroline Thompson’s nimble, precise script lends all the right touches in this pitch-perfect adaptation of Burnett’s well-loved novel.
The Secret Garden on Broadway
The Broadway musical version of The Secret Garden, which opened in 1991, ran for well over a year. It was a major hit, garnering six Tony Award nominations, including one for Best Musical. Marsha Norman scored the prize for Best Book, Daisy Eagan received Best Featured Actress recognition for her role as Mary Lennox, and Heidi Landesmann brought home a trophy for her grand sets. Director Susan Schulman and Norman went out of their way to avoid sentimentality in their adaptation, devising an intellectual production that retains the hope and positive inspiration embodied by the novel.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
NEW YORK TIMES
“If Henry James is the most English of all Americans, Frances Hodgson Burnett is the most American of all the English,” says a friend of the latter’s, whose latest book, “The Secret Garden,” like many of her others, deals with English life. Mrs. Burnett was born in England, but she is naturalized as American.
—September 24, 1911
R. A. WHAY
The Secret Garden is more than a mere story of children; underlying it there is a deep symbolism. But regarded purely as romance, it is an exceedingly pretty tale, full of the pathos of sheer happiness, a tale which no one could possibly associate with any other name than that of Mrs. Burnett.
—from The Bookman (October 1911)
CURRENT LITERATURE
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br /> At last Little Lord Fauntleroy has found a successor—not one, but three, for three children are the heroes of Mrs. Burnett’s latest and delectable tale. “The Secret Garden,” as the Boston Transcript remarks, reveals Mrs. Burnett as a master of imaginative prose at its very best. The Book News Monthly concedes “Little Lord Fauntleroy” was “not sweeter, tenderer, more human.” Now and then, as the New York Sun points out, the author lays on the old Fauntleroy color pretty thick, but the novel’s fundamental idea saves the book from being merely a charming variation of a former theme. We find in this story for the first time, the New Thought doled out darlingly and delightfully to children. This, as Ellen Key has told us in one of her unforgettable books, is the century of the child. Why, then, should we withhold from the little ones the new knowledge which, in fact, is world-old? ...
The story, as one critic avers, is a morality piece. Yet Mrs. Burnett never preaches or gives one the impression of preaching. Her book may be a tract, but it is cleverly disguised, a tract about the “magic of love, the magic of growth, the magic of the joy of living.” It is all “good white magic,” as the Sun reviewer declares, and no one but a highly sophisticated child, probably, would resent magic not of the classical Arabian brand. May we not say that Mrs. Burnett has given us the fairy tale of the future? Mary and Colin and Dickon, to quote The North American, dwell in a mystical Arcadia, “where grown-ups and dogs and horses and birds talk to them in a common speech unknown to the outside world, with no thought of storms and stresses that assail and vex humdrum humanity.”
—November 1911
JEANNETTE L. GILDER
I find that as many children are reading Mrs. Burnett’s “Secret Garden” as grown-ups; to be sure, grown-ups read it to some of them, but the little ones love it just as much, if not better than if it were written down for their supposed understanding.
—from the Chicago Daily Tribune (November 18, 1911)
Questions
1. Can gardening have therapeutic value? For everybody? Only for people with special problems? If so, which problems?
2. Would clearing land, chopping down trees, and building your own log cabin in the woods have the same effect as cultivating a secret garden ?
3. Professor Muller, in the moving conclusion to her Introduction, describes the garden as a symbol and as an imaginative refuge. But a symbol of what, would you say? A refuge from what?
4. A garden is not just nature untouched. What’s allowed to grow in a garden is selected and planted by humans; it is watered, weeded, and arranged by humans for human needs and tastes, and for a human aesthetic sense. Indeed, it’s hardly “natural” at all. How does the “cultivated” or human or artificial or even unnatural component of a garden affect your understanding of The Secret Garden?
FOR FURTHER READING
Biography
Burnett, Constance Buel. Happily Ever After: A Portrait of Frances Hodgson Burnett. New York: Vanguard Press, 1965.
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The One I Knew Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child. London: Frederick Warne, 1893. Burnett’s memoir of her Victorian childhood, her early years in America, and her beginnings as a writer.
Burnett, Vivian. The Romantick Lady: The Life Story of an Imagination. New York: Scribner, 1927. An affectionate memoir by Burnett’s son.
Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook. Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. The definitive biography, superbly researched.
Laski, Marghanita. Mrs. Ewing, Mrs. Molesworth, and Mrs. Hodgson Burnett. Edited by Hebert van Thai. London: Arthur Barker, 1950.
Thwaite, Ann. Waiting for the Party:The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1849-1924. New York: Scribner, 1974.
General Background
Brooke, Avery, and Madeleine L’Engle. Trailing Clouds of Glory: Spiritual Values in Children’s Books. Westminster, MD: Westminster Press, 1985.
Carpenter, Humphrey. Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985. Refers only briefly to The Secret Garden but places it in an important context of other classic children’s writings with pastoral and arcadian themes, such as The Wind in the Willows and Peter Pan.
Critical Studies
Bixler, Phyllis. The Secret Garden: Nature’s Magic. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. A discussion of major themes in Burnett’s novel, and a summary of critical responses.
. Frances Hodgson Burnett. Twayne’s English Authors series. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1984. An introduction to the full range of Burnett’s writings for both children and adults.
For Young Adults
Carpenter, Angelica Shirley, and Joan Shirley. Frances Hodgson Burnett: Beyond the Secret Garden. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1990. A well-illustrated, engagingly written introduction to Burnett’s life and work.
Other Works Cited in the Introduction
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. In the Garden. Boston and New York: Medici Society of America, 1925.
The Land of the Blue Flower. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1909.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. 1902. New York: Triumph Books, 1991.
Lurie, Alison. “Introduction.” In The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
Price, Danielle E. “Cultivating Mary: The Victorian Secret Garden.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 26:1 (2001), pp. 4-14.
a Nanny or nursemaid (Hindi).
b During British colonial rule, a word Indians used to address or refer to a European woman.
c Species of tropical shrubs or trees bearing large, showy flowers in various colors.
d House built in a style to mitigate intense light and tropical heat, with one story, few rooms, high ceilings, large windows and doors, and verandas on all sides; common in rural India.
e Beads made from a shiny black form of natural carbon.
f Black-dyed, thin fabric of crinkled texture, worn for mourning.
g Light, horse-drawn carriage, closed on all sides; the driver sits outside in front.
h Hardy species of dense shrubs found in moorland areas; they grow aggressively and produce clusters of fragrant yellow and bell-shaped, pinkish-purple flowers.
i Excessively eager to obey.
j Bows of greeting in which the right palm is placed on the forehead; in Arabic, salaam means “peace.”
k Molasses.
l Stressed, confused.
m Elephant keepers and drivers.
n Covered litters or couches resting on poles.
o Female fox; also used to denote a quarrelsome or malicious woman.
p Types of daffodils; bulbous plants grown for their white or yellow flowers.
q Irises.
r Thin, unleavened cake made from oatmeal.
s Bachelor.
t Blue flower of the species Delphinium.
u Plant with a small greenish flower and a sweet scent; once highly valued in perfumery for its essential oils.
v Pampered, refined.
w Brown bird with a speckled breast, noted for its beautiful song and its shyness; eats mistletoe berries and thus helps propagate the plant.
x Rich fabric with a raised design, often of a floral pattern.
y Gray crystal marked with bands of color.
z Dialect of Hindi adopted by the Muslim conquerors of Hindustan in northern and central India.
aa Short for typhoid fever, an acute infectious disease caused by bacteria in food or water and characterized by high fever, headache, coughing, intestinal hemorrhaging, and rose-colored spots on the skin.
ab Indian prince, chief, or ruler.
ac Hot drink made from water in which lean beef has been boiled.
ad Great, considerable.
ae That is, potassium bromide, used medicinally as a sedative.
af Starving.
ag London residence of the British royal family.
&nbs
p; ah The husband of a sovereign queen; in this case, Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1819-1861), husband of Queen Victoria.
ai Broom made of twigs.
aj Indian religious monks who beg for a living and often claim magical powers.
ak Muslim ascetics who perform whirling ecstatic dances and chant as acts of devotion.
al Perhaps an allusion to the Yorkshire village of Haworth, family home of English writers Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë from 1820 to 1854.
am Words or syllables spoken or chanted in ritual magic.
an Short Christian song of praise to God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
ao Narrow inlets of sea enclosed by high cliffs.
ap Perennial plants with vivid blue flowers that flourish in north-temperate and alpine regions.
aq Alpine province of western Austria.
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