Secret Garden (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (36 page)

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

“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

 

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)

 

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

 

 

 

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)

 

 

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?

 

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.

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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.