Mary Lennox in The secret Garden,
by Frances Hodgson Burnett
“Somehow, something always happens,” she cried, “just before things get to the very worst. It is as if the Magic did it. If I could only just remember that always. The worst thing never QUITE comes.”
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT,A LITTLE PRINCESS
Frances Hodgson Burnett hadn’t aged well. Gossip had always been her closest companion, but it seemed to finally have taken its toll. Now the worst had come: not only was she a laughingstock, but her florid, romantic writing style, the words that had made her a star, had gone out of vogue. She had tried to stay relevant, penning books with toxic undercurrents of rape, scandal, and physical abuse instead of the flowery stories for children that had sealed her fame, but her efforts had done nothing to revive her literary reputation. Alone in her garden in 1910, she had plenty of time to think things over.
Solitude used to be a blessing. It was in solitude that she discovered the seedy and the beautiful side of Manchester, England, the city in which she was a little girl, blissfully unaware of her family’s rapid slide into poverty and obscurity. It was in solitude that she discovered the wilds of the countryside around Knoxville, Tennessee, where she moved with her mother and siblings in search of a better life away from Manchester’s dying economy, which had been ravaged by the decline of cotton production due to the American Civil War. A lonely teenager, Frances picked wild grapes in the woods, selling the fruit and using the proceeds to buy paper for the writing she had already discovered could bring in infinitesimal sums to help support her family. Back then, she feared she would never be successful: her surroundings were simply too plain and fortune too far away to grasp. “What is there to feed my poor, little, busy brain in this useless, weary, threadbare life? I can’t eat my own heart forever,” she wrote fretfully to a suitor. “I can’t write things that are worth reading if I never see things which are worth seeing, or speak to people who are worth hearing. I cannot weave silk if I see nothing but calico—calico—calico.”
The calico years stretched into a decade, and Frances, who described herself as “a pen-driving machine,” knew that writing was her only hope. She staunchly ignored the repeated proposals of her Knoxville neighbor, Swan Burnett, returning briefly to England in pursuit of glamour and success. On her return, she finally gave in to Swan’s steadfast courtship, agreeing to accompany him to Paris as he pursued studies in his specialty, eye and ear medicine. The newlyweds were poor, but as Frances continued to write, their fortunes improved steadily. By the time her breakthrough novel, That Lass o’ Lowrie’s, appeared in 1877, she’d been supporting Swan for years. What began as a financial exigency became a sort of dirty secret between the couple, both of whom were ashamed and frustrated by Swan’s inability to support his own even after they settled in Washington, D.C.
Frances had long forgotten her calico by the time her little sons came along, breaking the solitude she felt under the surface of her outwardly successful marriage. Her treatment of them provoked a minor scandal in itself when she allowed them to sleep at her feet while she wrote her best sellers, giving rise to ugly talk when it was revealed that they dug in her expansive gardens using her finest silver. They were her best friends, her confidants, her literary inspiration for books like Little Lord Fauntleroy, that sentimental tale dripping with idealization of Victorian youth.
But motherhood, as revered as it was in Victorian society, was not enough to shade Frances from unsavory accusations. She may have been a mother, but she was one who smoked cigarettes and indulged in expensive, opulent art and clothing. At first she was a glamorous enigma, but her growing fame meant growing scrutiny. Her frivolous dress and love of society earned her the slightly mocking nickname “Fluffy,” a moniker she took in stride, even adopting the name in her correspondence. Though she had plenty of time for balls, at-homes, and parties, Frances kept to a brutal work schedule, often appearing at social functions peaked and exhausted. The gossips were intrigued. She was clearly unhappy in her marriage, and for a while stifled, bored wives were stock characters in her popular novels. And why did she work so hard, anyway? Couldn’t her husband pay the bills?
Truth be told, she had supported Swan for so long that she knew no other way. Yes, it was unconventional for a woman to be the family breadwinner, but she saw no reason to stop once the money really appeared. Her exhaustion pointed to a deeper problem, an addiction to self-sacrifice and stress. Finally she collapsed, taking a three-year sabbatical from writing and devoting herself to her sons.
The years that followed bore little resemblance to anything but her most sordid tales. Unable to risk the fallout of a divorce, Frances soldiered on in an untenable relationship, the constant nagging of the publicity hounds who followed her every move making a bad marriage even worse. The rumors were incessant, but so were her own infidelities, some of which kept her away from the United States for long periods of time. She was overseas with Stephen Townesend, a much younger man, when she got news that her son Lionel had a mild case of influenza.
Herself struggling to recover from a riding accident that had left her in a coma for several days, Frances had no way of knowing that her son’s illness was severe. It is unclear when she realized that Lionel was dying, but she did not hurry to his bedside. Her erratic visits were punctuated by liaisons with Stephen and long absences that involved giving away toys at children’s charity events in her ailing son’s name. Finally, she returned to Lionel. She took him overseas, seeking relief at sanatoriums across Europe, but to no avail. The sixteen-year-old died of tuberculosis in December 1890.
Still devastated six years after Lionel’s death, Frances finally found the strength to do what she had feared for years. But her 1898 divorce only created more marital troubles. Stephen transformed from ardent lover to angry man, finally blackmailing her into a marriage marred by angry episodes that seemed to be related to Stephen’s bipolar illness. “He talks about ‘my duties as a wife,’ “ wrote an angry Frances, “as if I had married him of my own accord—as if I had not been forced and blackguarded and blackmailed into it.” Frustrated by the bad press surrounding her attachment to a much younger man, Frances protested, then resigned herself to paying him to stay away from her until their divorce two years later. Had it really come to this?
Frances’s own childhood story was full of enchantment, of odds and tatters, and finally, of riches. The tales this childhood had inspired gained her acclaim and money. Now, weathered with years of hardship and strain, she looked back onto that little girl in a new light, squinting hard to see the woman inside who was more than frivolous “Fluffy.” Despite everything, she was still unabashedly romantic and guardedly optimistic. She was a woman who believed in vague spirits and mysticism in the face of the loss of everything she held dear. Looking inside, Frances began to write.
She had always found solace in the outdoors, and her garden became her greatest comfort. Surrounded by her books, her grandchildren, and the unorthodox spirituality she had dabbled in since her son’s death, she knew it was time to rest. Finally free from the years of self-sacrifice and toil, the constant pressure to conjure up money and prestige out of thin air with that pen of hers, she had a moment to breathe in and out again. And then she did what she always did. She started writing, devoting herself to another children’s story. But this time it was different. This time, she had magic on her side.
Any girl who has snapped sourly at her parents or scowled at well-meaning friends won’t just identify with the loathsome, dour heroine of The Secret Garden—she will love her. Mary Lennox is ugly and unlovable, cranky and sour, the polar opposite of adorable, long-locked Lord Fauntleroy and of Sara Crewe, whom fortune always favors. No, Mary is one of literature’s least appealing heroines, in the great vein of her literary sisters like Jane Eyre and Jo March. Mary’s not just contrary—she’s entirely out of her element. A child of imperialist India, she is left to her own devices in an unfamiliar country and surrounded by unknown faces.
Mary is not a favorable candidate for transplantation of any kind. She longs for companionship but fears it, wilting in her uncle’s locked-up house and unable to adjust to servants who don’t do as she bids them, food that doesn’t taste as it ought, and a climate that’s the polar opposite of the Indian heat in which she was raised. She seems poised to curl up and die in the interminable English winter that chilled this California girl to the bone every time I picked up The Secret Garden for a glimpse into Mary’s fate. And yet there are glimpses of motion in hibernating Mary: a jump rope, a friendly chambermaid, a tantalizing mystery just outside Misselthwaite Manor. The minute that Mary is led to her titular garden by a little bird, we know that she’ll do just fine.
The details of The Secret Garden are as familiar as a daisy, which makes it all the more shocking to read through adult eyes. By the time I picked up the book as a child, I was used to the idea of orphaned, imprisoned, and unloved girls (and liked to fancy I was one myself). But I wasn’t able to appreciate the cruelty and despair of Mary’s isolation until I reread the book as a grown-up very attuned to the little girl I once was. Mary can’t grow in a vacuum, and she can’t get started at all until she has a place of her own.
The Secret Garden is a gardener’s success story: the spare little cutting, attractive to no one and never one to thrive, does eventually bud. At first it seems unlikely she’ll ever manage. Disenfranchised, she is little and lonely, separated from her people and her place of origin. Her family is gone, and so is India, and Mary is tight and restricted within the confines of her ugly, jaundiced bulb. Slowly, though, magic happens. The sour, sallow child warms and relaxes, grows and stretches until she’s in bloom, too, in the midst of a garden all her own.
Yes, Mary grows, and having a place of her own is part of the equation. The garden, that “bit of earth” she is granted so grudgingly, is to be her new home for now. Left for dead so many years ago, the garden becomes a center, first for the children who play there, then for a family reunion as intense as the romance that once closed it off. Secure in the bit of earth she has managed to clear inside herself, Mary is finally ready to let others in, starting with cousin Colin. A kind of reverse Bertha Rochester, Colin is a child who is as irritating as he is sickly, and pouty Mary seems tailor-made to rock his tiny, whiny world. But who would think that Mary of all people could bring a bit of magic to Misselthwaite?
Over the course of the book, Mary begins to use the word magic more and more, until it becomes a sort of shorthand for all that is great and beautiful. It’s not necessarily spiritual; it’s something you can reach out and touch. It’s a crocus pushing its way out of the ground, a cranky child becoming playful and generous, a gift of simple food enjoyed among friends, a father’s pride in his son. It also works on a grander scale, for Mary and for us, stopping us all in our tracks as we realize that a world of death, asphyxiation, and isolation has been turned into one full of light, air, health, and love. These qualities were all inherent in the dead, lonely garden itself; they were inside Mary, too, though if left to her own devices she might never have discovered them.
What Mary comes to see as Magic, capital M, is found in ordinary things: learning to love herself and others, seeing herself in a gentler and more flattering light. But magic is also nature, the things that sustain us but are bigger and more powerful than us. Magic is inside Colin’s wobbly, wizened legs and Mary’s reddening cheeks. It’s inside the whole world of breathless bees and climbing vines contained inside the secret garden’s walls. And, Frances insists, it is inside, too:
“Of course there must be lots of Magic in the world… but people don’t know what it is like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen.”
I don’t know about you, but I find the thought that we get to conjure our own magic to be a comforting one. Mary’s garden could never grow if she herself didn’t discover and believe in it. And we can’t possibly expand beyond ourselves if we don’t discover and trust that which we find within.
In one of the book’s most compelling scenes, colicky Colin, the child of “I can’t,” is so infuriated by the suggestion that his feeble legs are crooked that he stands in defiant anger. Energized by his belief in himself and the care and compassion he has received from others for the first time, he moves into a world of potential and possibility. Unsure he can, he does anyway… and we are led to believe that Mary’s own will and recognition of the power within this ugly child is part of the equation.
“Are you making Magic? “ he asked sharply.
Dickon’s curly mouth spread in a cheerful grin.
“Tha’s doin’ Magic thysel',” he said. “It’s same Magic as made these ‘ere work out o’ th’ earth,” and he touched with his thick boot a clump of crocuses in the grass…. He heard Mary muttering something under her breath…. But she did not tell him [what she said]. What she was saying was this:
“You can do it! You can do it! I told you you could! You can do it! You can do it! You can!”
Yes, heroines can make their own magic when they expect the highest and best of themselves and others. Magic summons up all of our secrets, turning them upside-down like old roots in fresh earth, uprooting the pain and isolation of an ugly, oppressed childhood and making it whole and good again in the light of day. Magic draws the sun up from its bed, calms anxiety, powers the insides of people who were shriveled, ugly, and small before their time. It embodies all the risk and potential of daily life, cyclical and obscure, a life that can and does mean something if we are brave enough to grow beyond ourselves. Magic occurs when, like Mary, we love others despite our deepest misgivings, pushing our boundaries even when, as for Frances, the world only offers us hurt and betrayal in return.
When I reread The Secret Garden, I hear echoes of the mockery Frances Hodgson Burnett endured for her idealism and her frivolity, her insistence on avoiding newspapers and the sad stories they contained. But to dismiss her, or her work, as unfashionable is shortsighted indeed. It’s the equivalent of dismissing ourselves during those awkward, ugly years, the years in which we had no idea of our own potential or our own futures. Whoever would think that Frances’s most enduring book would be among her last, the product in part of stress, despair, and heartbreak? To underestimate her would have been to deny a magical book.
Times of crisis usually mean that practical thinking trumps childish woes, crowding out magic as we return to grim reality. It’s hard to admit that we’re childish inside. We may turn back to girlish books like The Secret Garden, but we often do so in secret. After all, haven’t we been taught that we have to not only survive but master our unrelentingly adult world? No matter how successful or mature I become, I carry a smaller version of myself inside, and that spazzy, dramatic girl is always twitching for attention and for love. Too often as adults, as heroines who have seen their share of crises and chaos, we’re tempted to turn our eyes away from the smaller selves within. We’re taught to focus on what’s ahead; an admirable tactic, and one that can serve us well. But when we lose sense of that child, of the magic in our lives and inner landscapes, we risk losing the force that connects us irreparably to ourselves, to nature, to mystery, and to one another.
Frances Hodgson Burnett spoke up for the unappealing, peevish children among us, the ones who didn’t take well to the customs of school or public gatherings, the ones, like me, for whom curbing the emotions was a lesson learned late, if at all. Born of familiar concerns—sadness, isolation, overwork—her magical philosophy transcended a career on a downward trajectory and a personal life in shambles. In a story all too familiar to anyone who’s borne witness to the downfall of the Lindsay Lohans and Amy Winehouses of our day, her road from calico to literary superstardom gave her even further to fall. But unlike Britney Spears, Frances had a bit of magic to cushion her collapse.
Sometimes, mired in the unbalanced bank account and the lost job and the infuriating relationship and the dying relative, we get stuck in what’s in front of us, held captive by our own limited perspective and hard up to achieve even fumbling grace. Faced with heroines’ struggles, cholera, and freezing winters, sometimes all we can see through our adult eyes is an impenetrable wall with no door and no key. As adults in a grown-up world, we can choose to see what is in front of us or what could be all around us. We can ask what our favorite author would do, what would make the little girls we once were prouder, bigger, better. We can remember the women who came before us and the heroines they gave us. Bolstered by the stories and the strengths of women real and fictitious, we can bring a child’s eyes to the sight of the impossible. We can expect to see magic. Heroines and women all, we just might make some of our own.
READ THIS BOOK:
• When your stomach hurts, and grown-up remedies like ginger tea aren’t helping
• In a literary double feature with A Little Princess
• When you’re feeling contrary
MARY’S LITERARY SISTERS:
• Leslie Burke in Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson
• Gemma Doyle in A Great and Terrible Beauty, by Libba Bray
• Sara Crewe in A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett