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 family, and of little Mary herself – and also provided a dramatic way to do away with her 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 open-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, which are really lies that allowed some people to take advantage of others.

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 they show 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 ask questions any time you hear somebody else making the same kind of assumptions.

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