Abstract
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) takes up the subjects of orphanhood, illness and the autonomous world of childhood, which characterize a number of fictions for girls in the late Victorian period. The fantasies of female power which the novel projects so powerfully remain, however, tantalizingly unresolved as the tensions in the text between authority, gender and social class gradually become more pronounced, and the achievements of the heroine correspondingly marginalized. Like The Wide, Wide World and Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden focuses on the experience of juvenile isolation and alienation and follows the adaptation of a young girl to a new and initially disturbing environment. Unlike earlier texts, however, the moral emphases are subordinated to a more searching psychological dimension. In its focus on processes of socialization the story of The Secret Garden follows a regenerative path, with pervasive images of death and debility transformed to those of life and energy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Froebel, System of Infant Gardens (1855), quoted in Juliet Dusinberre, Alice to the Lighthouse: Children’s Books and Radical Experiments in Art (London: Macmillan, 1987).
Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Literature (London: Macmillan, 1984), p.84.
See, for example, Laurie Langbauer, Women and Romance: the Consolations of Gender in the English Novel (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990);
Rosalind Miles, The Female Form: Women Writers and the Conquest of the Novel (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987);
Jean Radford, The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction (London: Routledge, 1986).
Karen E. Rowe, ‘Feminism and Fairy Tales’, Women’s Studies, 1979, vol. 6, p.248.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p.10. All subsequent references are to this edition and are included in the text.
Roderick McGillis, ‘“Secrets” and “Sequence” in Children’s Stories”’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 1985, Fall, vol. 18 (2) p.37.
See particularly Fred Inglis, The Promise of Happiness: Value and Meaning in Children’s Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);
Ann Thwaite, Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett 1849–1924 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1974).
Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, ‘Quite Contrary: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden’, Children’s Literature: An International Journal, The Modern Language Association Division of Children’s Literature, 1983, vol. 11, pp.1–13.
Quoted in Thwaite, op.cit. p.52.
Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel1875–1914 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1987), p.220.
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture1830–1980 (London: Virago Press, 1987), p.128.
Claudia Marquis, ‘The Power of Speech: Life in The Secret Garden’, Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, 1987, Nov., vol. 68, pp.163–187.
Phyllis Bixler Koppes, Frances Hodgson Burnett (Boston: Twayne, 1984), p.100.
Anthea Trodd: A Reader’s Guide to Edwardian Literature (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p.72.
Humphrey Carpenter, Secret Gardens: The Golden Age of Children’s Literature (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), p.189.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1995 Shirley Foster and Judy Simons
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Foster, S., Simons, J. (1995). Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden . In: What Katy Read. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23933-7_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23933-7_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-62673-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-23933-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)