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.
Burnett began writing for publication because her family was very poor; her mother could not make ends meet after her husband’s death, and emigrated with her five children from Manchester to Tennessee when Frances was 15. By 18 Frances was the main breadwinner, and remained so for the next 56 years, her 52 books and 13 plays further supporting two husbands (after divorcing Swan Burnett she married Stephen Townsend in 1900), two children, grand houses on both sides of the Atlantic, and a highly developed dress-buying habit. The contrast between rich and poor in, for instance, A Little Princess (1905), is deeply felt; the details that appealed to children were those that Burnett had personally observed.
Independence, while satisfying, was unmitigatedly hard work, and lonely. Burnett was often ill, frequently with depression; it became particularly bad after her second pregnancy, through which she worked and cared for her small son. In 1884 she suffered what Gerzina describes as a full-blown nervous breakdown and, by the age of 35, a friend wrote of her that “she was like something mended that can never be used as if it had not been broken”.
Burnett is brilliant, in The Secret Garden, on the tyranny of the ill and those who are seen as weak. She vividly captures how an entire household fears Colin’s rages and dances attendance on him; the way he uses something overheard (that he won’t live until adulthood) as both identity and threat: “I’m not as selfish as you, because I’m always ill … And I am going to die besides.” Mary refuses to be cowed. “You just say that to make people sorry. I believe you’re proud of it.”
Colin turns out to suffer what we might now describe as Munchausen syndrome by proxy, symptoms planted in his mind by a hunchbacked father who fears his son will be the same, then nurtured by a weak and overattentive doctor. Mary has little truck with this: “It was only a hysterical lump. Hysterics make lumps,” she snarls at Colin. But while Colin is portrayed, in the main, as a spoiled brat, there is also a deep understanding and sympathy at work. Burnett was a veteran of long periods of enforced bed rest, and she came to believe it was actively harmful. She also thought that there was nothing on earth more potent than the human mind, and that its healthiness, or otherwise, was written on the body. Earlier in her life she had attempted (like Louisa May Alcott, who had also suffered burnout) the Boston “mind cure” , which emphasised the healing power of positive thought. She had read Hindu philosophy and been swayed by Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, and eventually came to her own conclusion: that a sanguine mind, trained, moreover, to look outside itself and to care for others, could make a person well.
Late in The Secret Garden she writes: “Mere thoughts are as powerful as electric batteries and as good for one as sunlight. To let a sad thought or a bad one into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever get into your body.” There are obvious issues with this belief, not least those that Barbara Ehrenreich has so trenchantly observed in our present-day attitudes to cancer: the patient who “fights bravely” and positively should get well, while decline and disease are equated with moral failure. No amount of positive thinking could stop Burnett’s son dying of tuberculosis in his mid-teens – though perhaps the degree to which she came to insist on her credo merely reflects how much she wished it could have. Thankfully, in The Secret Garden, her close observation of detail and psychological insights tether her ideas to believable processes: Colin is taken outside, into the fresh air. He exercises, and develops an appetite. His mind begins to heal.
He also begins, at the end, to develop a relationship with his father. Burnett is in no doubt as to what is at the root of Colin’s ills. Both Colin and Mary have absent parents. The children are indulged, given every material comfort, but are unloved. As Dickon, the brother of a housemaid at the grand house, tells Mary: “Mother, she says that’s th’ worst thing on earth to a child: them as is not wanted scarce ever thrives.” Dickon is a model of emotional balance and quiet confidence. We might these days couch such thoughts in terms of self-esteem and attachment – Dickon is as securely attached as Colin and Mary are insecure, with the behaviour, and in Colin’s case the illnesses, to match. The Secret Garden can be read as a sophisticated study of the varieties of both intentional and unintentional emotional neglect. “She sets that up to be the root cause of illness and trauma,” Gerzina says. Though “I don’t think she would have admitted it to herself.”
Burnett had a complex relationship with motherhood. When her own two boys, Lionel and Vivian, were small they played quietly under the table as she worked. “Being good – somehow there is something sad in it to me,” she wrote to a friend. Later, when she was ill, the boys tried to help and protect her; even though they were very young, they nursed her and hid their own troubles, in Lionel’s case, both TB and serious depression. As she became more famous and her relationship with their father, Swan Burnett, began to break down, she spent months at a time in England without them. When her son Lionel died, Gerzina writes, Burnett “wandered Europe for months” (as Archibald Craven does in The Secret Garden), writing journal entries about Lionel, or addressing him directly in letters he would never read.
In 1897, at the age of 48, Burnett walked into Maytham Hall, in Kent, and felt at once at home, in the house, but especially in the gardens. Digging, pruning, planning, caring, watching, she began to find a calm that had eluded her for years; and in the book she wrote more than a decade later she gives this tranquil garden and a robin she befriended to Mary, Dickon and Colin. The Secret Garden is movingly accurate about the quotidian raptures, the feeling of wellbeing and purpose that can be made possible by a day of weeding. Lockdown has brought many of us to the idea of what Sue Stuart-Smith, in her recent book, called the “well-gardened mind”. The Secret Garden carefully and vividly evokes the benefits; we can almost feel Burnett’s garden working on us too. When spring arrives, in a burst of sunshine after weeks of rain, Mary, who at 10 has finally learned to dress herself, wakes early and lets herself out into the dawn. She runs to the garden, where crocuses are pushing up out of the earth, the robin is building his nest, and a green film cloaks the grey trees. “Oh, Dickon! Dickon!” Mary cries to the boy, who is already there. “I’m so happy I can scarcely breathe!”
• The Secret Garden is on Sky Cinema.
