From its interrogation of the ways illness changes and defines us to the tranquility found in nature, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s book is a story for our times
If the last time you encountered Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden was in childhood, you probably think of Mary, a sour little girl, waking up in a house in India to find herself orphaned and alone; a vast wind-buffeted house on the Yorkshire moors, and the sound of crying; a robin, a key, and a hidden garden; the transcendent scene in that garden, one of the most famous in children’s literature, in which Colin, a previously bedridden child, stands and learns to walk. So far, so magical. But rereading the book in adulthood reveals that it is also a story about neglect, remiss parenting and mental illness; a book that, for all its light, is underpinned by darkness. In fact, the novel offers such practical ways of coping, and even of healing that it was once suggested it should be prescribed on the NHS.
When Burnett wrote The Secret Garden – “a sort of children’s Jane Eyre”, as one of her friends described it, a characterisation that has been taken to heart by the latest film adaptation, directed by Marc Munden and starring Colin Firth, Julie Walters and Dixie Egerickx – she was 61, and had been a famous author for more than 40 years. She was so famous that, as her biographer Gretchen Gerzina notes in Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unpredictable Life of the Author of The Secret Garden, she crossed the Atlantic 33 times and on nearly every arrival was met by reporters. Oscar Wilde (who of course wrote his own story about children and a garden, “The Selfish Giant”) came to see her in Washington, where at one point one of her gloves was auctioned; in London she lived on Park Lane and was friends with Henry James. We do not read them much now, but – apart from Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) – she was known mainly for her books for adults. The Secret Garden in fact started life, in 1910, as a serial in a grown-up magazine called the American.
