Secret Garden (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free Page A

had been copied from the attire of Burnett’s friend Oscar Wilde. Meanwhile, Frances Hodgson Burnett won further publicity for herself and her work by successfully suing E. V. Seebohm, writer of an unauthorized London dramatization of Little Lord Fauntleroy, for violation of the Copyright Act of 1842. Her legal victory paved the way for other authors to control and profit from stage adaptations of their writings and was celebrated at a banquet given by the Society of British Authors. Among the one hundred and fifty guests were George Meredith, William Rossetti, Edmund Gosse, and Oscar Wilde. Burnett was now a literary celebrity. Her own dramatization replaced Seebohm’s play on the London stage, opening in May 1888 to an audience that included members of the British royal family. The play transferred successfully to New York and toured for years; at one time forty theater companies were performing it simultaneously in Britain and the United States.
    Little Lord Fauntleroy has not aged well. To many modern readers the angelic, self-sacrificing, and androgynous hero, Cedric Fauntleroy (played by female actors in both Seebohm’s and Burnett’s dramatizations, and by Mary Pickford in a 1921 film version), who calls his mother “Dearest” and persuades his crusty and tradition-bound British uncle, the Earl of Dorincourt, to give more charity to the peasants on his estate, appears comically alien and unrealistic. From Burnett’s prodigious output of fiction and nonfiction for children and adults, only The Secret Garden continues to be widely read and appreciated in the twenty-first century. What makes this late novel stand out from Burnett’s other work as an acknowledged classic? When the author’s representations of children in Fauntleroy and such other one-time best-sellers as The Little Princess are often dismissed as outdated and unconvincing, what accounts for the continuing appeal of Mary Lennox and Colin Craven?
    The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy share surface similarities. In both novels the main character arrives in England from another country and sees English customs through an outsider’s eyes. In both cases there is a mansion to be explored and a difficult uncle to tame. Both Cedric and Mary repair broken relationships and restore harmony to their surroundings. Fauntleroy’s rags-to-riches plot is a familiar one in Burnett’s fiction, influenced perhaps by her childhood love of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, and also by her own experience of early poverty and loss, followed by a hard-won restoration of fortune. The Secret Garden differs from Fauntleroy and most other Burnett novels in that the main characters already possess adequate material wealth. The riches they lack and eventually recover are physical, emotional, and spiritual. Written toward the end of her life, The Secret Garden reflects Frances Hodgson Burnett’s recognition that wealth and worldly success are not enough and echoes her own search for spiritual healing. While Burnett employs some tried-and-tested successful elements from her earlier fiction, such as the use of regional dialect and a Gothic setting, she also shows a new willingness to explore painful emotions and to present child heroes whose behavior is often unlovable. For once her relentless drive to “write some happiness into the world” does not inhibit her from creating convincing characters or compel her to resolve all the tensions in her narrative.
    The greater psychological realism of The Secret Garden may stem from Burnett’s personal suffering in the years following Little Lord Fauntleroy. As Vivian Burnett told a Knoxville audience shortly after his mother’s death, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s life contained “many sorrows that the world did not know about” (Gerzina, p. xvi). While her early life is a story of adversity overcome by remarkable energy and achievement, her middle years were a period of loss, disappointment, and