A Note About The Secret Garden

We’re starting (Half a) Story Hour with the 1911 Gothic novel for children, The Secret Garden, because it’s old enough to be in the public domain and therefore freely available to us.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, who wrote the story over a century ago, was an Englishwoman who lived during the British Imperial era (when the British Empire took over big chunks of the world).  She had never been to India nor, very likely, did she ever meet an actual person of Indian origin.  She set her English main character’s early childhood in India for simple convenience: it gave Mary an exotic background and explained some of her peculiarities – though the story is most openly critical of Mary’s upper-class British mother – and also provided a dramatic way to do away with Mary’s parents (we’ll talk about the power of an orphaned hero in children’s books)…

In a few places, Hodgson Burnett talks about folks from India with offhand unfairness.  Even when she means to be fair-minded (through the character of Martha, for example), we can hear old attitudes based on false ideas.  (Half a) Story Hour uses a postcolonial reading (post- meaning after, and colonial referring to the age of European imperialism) to take apart these attitudes, and leaves out throwaway stereotypes entirely, since they do nothing for the story.

In later chapters, we’ll also think carefully about how the story treats dis/ability.

If you choose to read along using the original text, please keep the following in mind:

🕯️ Unfair attitudes that were common at the time are DUMB, and all they reveal is how wrong people can be about other people they don’t know. They also cause real harm in many ways.

🕯️ Remember the last time somebody assumed something about you without getting to know you or asking what you think – and work to make sure nobody in your world ever feels how you felt in that moment.

🕯️ All children have the right to imagine themselves into the life of any hero; whoever you are, you belong in this story.