The Secret Garden

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Your post about statues made me think immediately of the Secret Garden statue in Central Park's gorgeous Conservatory Garden.  It's a fine example of a statue which romanticizes its subject almost beyond recognition: yes, there's a boy playing a little flute who could certainly be Dickon, but is that sylph-like creature holding the birdbath really supposed to be sour-faced Mary Lennox?

Here, I think, is a far better depiction of Mary, at least as she first appears in the book.  She's a thoroughly unpleasant heroine at this point, a spoiled little rich girl who grew up in India with parents who didn't care about her at all.  When these parents die (Burnett loves her orphans), Mary is sent to live with her distant, rich uncle in his estate on the English moors.  The fresh air and proximity to growing things make her nicer and healthier (she talks a lot about how happy she is she's getting "fatter"; another way in which the statue gets it wrong).  And of course she discovers secrets: the secret garden of the title, which has been shut and locked since the uncle's young wife's untimely death ten years before; the secrets of the moor, as shown to her by the pure-souled, Yorkshire-voiced Dickon; the secret invalid, Colin, who turns out to be her cousin.

As you saw in Maine, Eleanor and I have recently been reading a gorgeous version of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, illustrated by Inga Moore, whose Wind in the Willows we fell in love with last summer.  Her illustrations are just as good here.  Moore has a feel for the English countryside, and you can tell she's thrilled to be able to capture the specific varieties of plants and flowers Burnett mentions. 

 I'll admit, though, it's Moore's animals that get me.  Sprinkled throughout the pages are mice, squirrels, badgers and other creatures, many mentioned in the text, but some just populating the book as they would a garden.  And sometimes, Moore depicts human actions described in the text via the animals.  Here are two of Dickon's squirrels on the page where Mary examines Colin's back to prove to him that he's not developing a hump:

Burnett depicts imaginative play among children as life-giving, even holy.  In  A Little Princess (which we've also written about here and here) and The Secret Garden, she uses the term "Magic" (her capital letter) to describe Sara Crewe's vivid stories and Mary, Dickon, and Colin's belief in the life-force that makes plants and children grow healthy.  It can feel a little heavy-handed at times, but when you give yourself over to the world of the book, it really is quite beautiful.

Love, Annie

Large Dolls and Little People

Dear Annie,

This thread goes deep.

I realized after posting last time that I should have mentioned
The Racketty Packetty House, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose praises we'd been singing.  It's another class-warfare-among-dolls tale.  The Racketty Packetty House has been around in a girl's family since the time of Queen Victoria's childhood, and it's old and shabby, but the dolls are oh so jolly and optimistic.  The current (1908 or so) girl receives Tidy Castle, inhabited by aristocratic and supercilious dolls, and plans are made to burn Racketty Packetty House.  Fairies, true love and a real princess intervene and all ends oh so jolly.  It's been beautifully re-illustrated by Wendy Anderson Halperin. 


Our household never bonded with The Littles, probably because we had spent so much time immersed in
The Borrowers, by Mary Norton.  They are also small people (tail-less) who, in the first book, are discovered under the floorboards by an unhappy boy who is living with an elderly relative.  Pod, Homily and Arrietty Clock (named for the furniture closest to their secret home) carry on the tradition of their tribe, "borrowing" from the humans they live near.  This, of course, is the explanation for the disappearance of small items -- safety pins, earrings, stamps, thread, etc. -- from all our homes.  Daughter Arrietty accidentally reveals herself to the boy, resulting in a friendship and more danger for all the Borrowers.  They eventually have to flee the house, and find other Borrower colonies and other adventures in The Borrowers Afield, The Borrowers Afloat, The Borrowers Aloft and The Borrowers Avenged.  After the first reading, Mona never let us read aloud the first chapter of the first book.  It's the set-up chapter, narrated by an elderly woman explaining how her brother as a boy had his adventures with the little people.  It's a slog, necessary the first time, but definitely skippable after that.

Bob and I have just had a delightful dinner conversation remembering The Mennyms by Sylvia Waugh, which we haven't read for at least ten years, but who remain with us.  They're a family of life-size rag dolls, mysteriously brought to life ("born knowing" how to be people) after the death of the elderly lady who sewed them.  They live in her house, paying rent to her heirs, selling crafts and written articles to make a living, but never coming in contact with humans.  Like the characters in many of the books we've been discussing, they have wonderful names: Sir Magnus and Tulip the grandparents, Joshua and Vinetta, the parents, teenagers Soobie (he's made of blue cloth, and descends into bouts of depression from time to time) and the rebellious Appleby (female), younger twins Poopie and Wimpey, and the baby Googles.  There's even Miss Quigley, a "neighbor" who lives in the hall closet and sneaks outside to ring the bell and come visit for tea.  Their lives are full of paranoia -- will they be discovered? -- and pretending.  They're cloth dolls, but they pretend to cook, eat and sleep.  They do not age, stuck forever in the age that was sewn into them. It's wacky and full of feeling.  And quite well written.  The first of the five Mennyms books was published in 1993, but they are all, alas, out of print. Worth digging up, however.  I'd say ages 7 or 8 and up.

We'll all miss you as you immerse yourself in portfolios, Annie.  But after our last round of guest blogging, I'm looking forward to what your pals have to say this time. 

Love,

Deborah

Dolls past and present

Dear Annie,

I remember that edition of Hitty.   I remember that I read it, but not much else about it.  I carry it at the store, and occasionally a grandma will come in looking for it.  But it's not an old classic lots of people gravitate toward.  (Judy [mother of Annie, sister of me]: do you have any memories of it?)

The old and wonderful book I have that I remember receiving at too late an age is Sara Crewe or What Happened at Miss Minchin's:

It's old and fragile.  The copyright page says 1888.  It's the novella that Frances Hodgson Burnett later turned into a play (1902) and then A Little Princess (1905).  I was 12 or 13 when British friends of my parents brought it to me; I felt far too old for such a child's book at the time, although I think I did appreciate the fact that I was being given an antique.  There are just a handful of full-page illustrations.

"She slowly advanced into the parlor, clutching her doll."

I came to appreciate A Little Princess as an adult, reading it with my own kids.

The doll book I remember loving as a child was Rumer Godden's
The Doll's House, about a group of dolls brought together in an old dollhouse.  They're all from different eras and made of different materials.  The salt-of-the-earth central character -- Tottie Plantaganet -- is an old simple wooden doll.  The evil manipulative character, named Marchpane, is a beautiful china doll. This book taught me the term celluloid doll, which was a kind of brittle early plastic (wikipedia tells me it's still used for ping pong balls).  Birdie, the celluloid doll in the Doll's House, is lovely and sweet and slightly ethereal.   Celluloid is highly flammable, and there's an awful climactic scene in which Birdie sacrifices herself in order to save a child doll from flames.   Your household can probably wait a few years before reading it, but the wonderfully varied characters and the situation stayed with me for a long time.

As long as we're on the subject of books about dolls, I'll throw in a lovely contemporary one:
The Doll People.  It's by Ann Martin, of Baby-Sitters Club fame, and Laura Godwin.  It's the first of a series of three.  Brian Selznick, the wonderful author and illustrator I was talking about a few posts back, did the many illustrations.  You have your basic 100 year-old dollhouse, inhabited by a family that has played with many generations of the same human family.  Suddenly, the Funcrafts move in next door.  They are (shudder) plastic, which dictates their more energetic, fearless personalities because they're unbreakable.  The adults are skeptical, but of course the daughters from both families become friends and solve a 45 year-old mystery together.  The story is gentle and the pictures are great: it makes a good younger read-aloud.  For several years I had a colleague at the store whose two sons loved this book, and I watched her persuade many families that despite the gender-aversion some boys go through, this is a great book for everyone.  It's full of adventure, and a good way to nudge the no-girls crowd back into a wider range of books.

And a last question for you on the subject of dolls.  Our family has always been fond of Eleanor's first major doll, whom she named after my second-born.  Has Mona Baby been passed to a new generation, or does Eleanor just occasionally let Isabel do stuff with her, as described in your last post?

Love,

Deborah

Old treasures

Dear Aunt Debbie,

My parents are in the middle of a Great Purge and retooling of their apartment, spurred on by my brother, home briefly from his travels.  There have been great book-related results of this movement: first, the children's bookshelf containing all the books Michael and I grew up with has been moved to a far more accessible place in the living room, and all of the books are now visible, rather than hidden behind the couch.  Second, I have been made to take possession again of the 15 boxes which have been in my parents' storage room since I graduated from college.  While the prospect of dealing with all of the contents of the boxes is daunting, Eleanor's excitement over opening them has helped.  The first box we chose to open contained a number of my old dolls; the second was a book box.

Two old and much-loved books came out of this box, both, appropriately enough, containing dolls as major characters.


Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, by Rachel Field,  was first published in 1929, and the copy we have belonged to Grandma Helen, your mother.  There's her name, in bold ink on the first page: "H. Darling," and next to it a stamp with her married name and Pleasantville address.  Was this a book you and my mom read as children?  It appears to be a first edition, and I searched it up fully expecting it to be out of print, but lo and behold, it's a Newbery winner, and still very much available.

Hitty is a wooden doll, and she narrates the book, writing her memoirs from the comfort of an antique shop where she finds herself after cycling through the hands of a number of owners and going on an improbable number of adventures (a whaling ship, New York society, a hayloft with a litter of mice).  I remember most of the plot rather vaguely, but with some fondness.  Eleanor had me start reading it immediately, and while the language in the first chapter is a little stilted at times: "So here I am in the midst of her very untidy desk with my feet on a spattered square of green blotting paper, my back against a pewter inkstand, and a perfect snow bank of bills and papers heaped about me."  Lots of vocabulary words to touch on, there.  Hitty's narration is very matter-of-fact, and in that way quite appealing.  I'm not sure we'll get through it all now, but I look forward to trying again if this attempt falls flat.

A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, is another story.  I've written before about the tale of orphaned and cast down Sara Crewe, which captivated me even more than Burnett's most famous The Secret Garden.

I adored this book as a child.  The edition I pulled from the box is a former library copy, water-damaged from a flood caused by our upstairs neighbors' waterbed when I was perhaps 10 years old.  That flood took out a number of books, but I was always secretly grateful to it, because it allowed me to keep the sumptuously illustrated version of a book I would otherwise have had to return.  The full-color plates throughout the edition were painted by Ethel Franklin Betts, and they have just the shade of mistiness to make them most romantic to a girl with that bent.  Eleanor seems to be having a similar reaction.  After a chapter of Hitty, she asked for a chapter of Sara Crewe, and the clearer, simpler language and detailed descriptions of dolls and dresses in the early pages have made it our current chapter book of choice.  I'm finding the separation between Sara and her father hard to handle, as I know the death that's coming, but Eleanor is taking it in stride.

So here's Sara Crewe, with her doll Emily, who she speaks to as if she is a real person, and Eleanor sitting on the couch with her new/my old doll in her arms, and Isabel putting Mona Baby (Eleanor's baby doll, named after your younger daughter) to bed, and Hitty's memoir sitting on our coffee table -- it feels kind of intimate, really.

Love, Annie

Motherless children

Dear Aunt Debbie,

I agree with you, Bettelheim, and Kathryne that there are good reasons to read fairy tales to kids: they're a way of working through fears safely, they're exciting, and they are referenced throughout our culture.  I think the age at which you read them to a child, and the versions you read, has to be specific to the child -- you learn by reading what's going to scare the pants off your kid, and what she or he will adore.  I agree with Rachel as well that I'm not thrilled with a lot of the motherlessness in these stories, but I think I understand why it's there.

When we started reading fairy tales to Eleanor (and we were certainly spurred to do this earlier than I might have by the ubiquity of Disney princess stuff), she went through a brief period of time when she'd say to me, "I want a stepmother."  She said it thoughtfully, not in anger.  Perhaps, in her mind, having a stepmother was a way into the fairy tale world, since so many princesses (Cinderella, Snow White, Ariel, Belle) begin their stories motherless.  In a way, it reaffirms the power and safety of having a mother: if any of these princesses had mothers around, none of the bad stuff (and none of the adventure) would have happened to them in the first place.  When I explained that telling me she wanted a stepmother hurt my feelings, she began to lean over to me fondly at odd moments and say, "Oh, Mommy, I love you.  And I don't want a stepmother."

Rachel's comment brought to mind two of my favorite chapter books from my elementary school years.  In each, the protagonist(s) are orphaned, thus opening their lives up for adventure that wouldn't be possible if they had a mother and father taking care of them.  I haven't read either book in years, but I'm pretty sure they stand the test of time.

The Boxcar Children, by Gertrude Chandler Warner, focuses on a family of four kids who are orphaned.  They run away from their orphanage and a grandfather they think is cruel (though of course ultimately they're wrong) and live in an abandoned boxcar with their dog, Watch.  I remember scenes of homemaking in the boxcar, and the sense of having to create a whole new life.  In looking it up, I see that it was the first in a giant series, though I don't remember reading any of the others.


A Little Princess is by Frances Hodgson Burnett, of Secret Garden fame.  Sara Crewe begins motherless, and is orphaned when her father dies in India (the book was first published in 1904, so it's quite Imperial British Empire).  She goes from being one of the richest pupils at a boarding school run by a meanie to being the poorest, and in a Cinderella turn she has to do the school's housework and live in the attic.  Again, one of the things I remember most fondly about the book is Sara making her attic space livable and even homey.  This one has the added benefit of cruel boarding school girls, which resonates with anyone who's ever been a girl around other girls. 

Now that I think about it, in both of these books there isn't much active adventure -- more creating the best and most home-like situation possible in bad circumstances.  I suppose that's true in fairy tales like Cinderella and Rapunzel as well.  Still, there must be something liberating about projecting yourself into the dangerous and adventurous situation, and then comforting about being able to turn again to mom on the couch beside you or in the next room.

Love, Annie