Happy Endings
On Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden.
Frances Hodgson (later Burnett) emigrated with her family from Manchester, England, to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1865, when she was sixteen years old. She soon embarked on a writing career that would make her one of the most successful authors of the era and fund further peregrinations, resulting in her residence at one time or another in Paris, Washington, D.C., London and Kent in England, and Plandome, New York, where she died in 1924.
Although she wrote a number of popular novels and plays for adults, Burnett was most famous in her lifetime for Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), a tale for young readers whose protagonist, an American boy in straitened circumstances, unexpectedly becomes heir to an English earldom and steps into the traditions — replete with velvet suits and flowing locks — his new position entails. While the little lord proved a sensation in print and on the stage on both sides of the Atlantic, he has not aged well. Burnett’s considerable standing as a children’s author now rightly rests on two later works, A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, each of which displays the gifts — vivid characterization of both virtue and villainy, atmospheric dramatization of fairy-tale-like reversals of fortune, a feel for the emotional pull of a sharply defined narrative arc (not to mention the happy ending) — that made their creator a precursor of the storytelling empire soon to assert its dominance: the movies.
A Little Princess
Like most heroes whose trials and triumphs readers have loved to assume as their own through the power of fanciful identification, Sara Crewe possesses a poise that never deserts her, no matter what misfortunes are thrown her way. And make no mistake: A Little Princess is an adventure story as filled with bravery and resourcefulness as any episode in the The Odyssey or in J. K. Rowling’s wizardly repertoire, even if Sara’s story unfolds in the domesticated precincts of a Victorian era boarding school for girls in London, and even though her courage manifests itself in powers of imagination and empathy rather than cunning or magic.
Sent to Miss Minchin’s school by her doting father, who has lavished on her the accoutrements of privilege that mark her as the domestic royalty described by the book’s title, Sara is stranded there upon his death, penniless and at the mercy of the hateful headmistress. Reduced to poverty and relegated to the position of an ill-treated servant, Sara summons not only a future, but also a brighter present for herself and her friend and new roommate, the scullery maid Becky, despite the bleakness of their circumstances. Readers, of course, are rooting for her all along, and we turn the pages with the fervent belief that our wishes, as well as Sara’s, can will a happy ending — and Miss Minchin’s comeuppance — into being, as indeed they do, to our delight and satisfaction.
The Secret Garden
The story begins in India, with sickly, plain, moody Mary Lennox. Unloved by her pretty mother, Mary has been raised by servants who’ve done nothing but indulge the child in order to appease her petulance. Orphaned by cholera, she is shipped off to England to live with her uncle, Archibald Craven, an equally ill-tempered person whose slight hunchback symbolizes his cramped heart, embittered by ceaseless mourning for his deceased wife. Craven’s home, Misselthwaite Manor, is also an emblem of a closed and inhospitable existence: “The house is six hundred years old and it’s on the edge of the moor,” Mrs. Medlock, the head of the household staff, tells Mary, “and there’s near a hundred rooms in it, though most of them’s shut up and locked.”
Soon after arriving on the estate, Mary stumbles upon a walled garden that’s been locked and abandoned since the death of Mrs. Craven. Unbeknownst to anyone, Mr. Craven has buried the key; Mary, guided by a helpful robin (one of the story’s several fairy-tale touches), unearths it and surreptitiously rejuvenates the dormant plot, creating — with the help of her maid Martha and Martha’s resourceful young brother Dickon — an oasis in the midst of Misselthwaite’s blight that will not only nurture Mary’s emotional flowering, but restore the health of her invalid cousin and rouse her uncle from his profound grief. Ripe with metaphor and a heartwarming faith in the sympathetic magic of nature and friendship, The Secret Garden is a lovely fable of perseverance, restoration, and redemption.
In 1936, Burnett was paid tribute by the installation of a memorial fountain in New York’s Central Park’s Conservatory Garden. In the middle of a reflecting pool, a reclining Dickon plays the flute for Mary, who holds a bowl that serves as a birdbath for three seasons out of the year.
