The Real Secret Garden
On the centenary of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s best-loved story, The Secret Garden, Helen Brown visits the corner of Kent behind the myth.
It is a sun-baked afternoon deep in the Kentish countryside which once left Frances Hodgson Burnett feeling “flower drunk”. Hollyhocks skirt the old brick walls, lavender nods beneath the weight of drowsy bees and the ivy-wreathed archway of my childhood fantasies is just one step ahead of me. It’s a step that children have dreamed of taking for 100 years. A step into a world of friendship, mysteries and magic. A step into The Secret Garden.
Today, with the gentle acres keeping out all traffic noise, I feel I’m experiencing the same scent and hum that seduced her. The hall’s present estate manager, Roger Watts, beckons me beneath the glossy green foliage, pointing out the changes made by Edwin Lutyens in 1909 when the hall was rebuilt. The design is relatively formal now. “But when Frances first came here,” he says, “it was all one big orchard, overgrown with brambles. She created a rose garden. Over there is an old pink variety she loved, called ‘Madame Moussigny’.”
It was 1897 when Hodgson Burnett first stood within these lichened walls. By her late forties, she was exhausted from decades as a “pen-driving machine”. Born into shabby gentility in Manchester, Frances’s father died when she was four. After struggling for 12 years to keep the family’s decorative ironwork business afloat, Frances’s hapless mother shipped the family across the Atlantic to Knoxville, Tennessee, hoping that her brother – Frances’s uncle William – would be able to support her and her five children.
But the poverty-stricken Hodgsons nearly starved in their log cabin and their fortunes only improved when 18-year-old Frances began selling stories to ladies’ magazines, soon averaging six per month. When she married Swan Burnett in 1872, she kept up the pace in order to pay for her husband’s advanced medical training in Paris and to support her two sons, who slept beneath her desk as toddlers.
By the time she arrived in Kent, she was one of the world’s most successful authors: her many romantic stories, novels and plays for adults were as popular in her day as her more enduring children’s books, which by then included Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess.
She had spent years shuttling between the United States and England with trunks full of beautiful clothes, befriending authors such as Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Louisa May Alcott. But there had been depression and numerous nervous breakdowns along the way. She was separated – soon to be divorced – from Burnett and had become entangled with an aspiring actor whom she would also divorce. In 1890 her eldest son, Lionel, died of tuberculosis at the age of just 16.
Frances’s biographer Gretchen Gerzina writes that for months after her son’s death, she “wandered Europe like a ghost”, thinking “incessantly of Lionel’s body lying in the St Germaine Cemetery, where to prevent the soil touching his casket she had the grave walled and arched over and lined with flowers and green boughs”.
Her grief may have been tinged with guilt. She had regularly left her boys with their father in America and, after meeting her second husband in London, became an irregular correspondent to the ailing Lionel when his illness first became serious – although she nursed him devotedly at the end. After Lionel’s death, she did not return to comfort her surviving son, Vivian, either. But she wrote to Lionel for years in her journal: “I tried to carry you in my arms to the gates of Heaven, past Pain and Death so that you would wake up to a beautiful, strange surprise at your new, strong, happy body and the day that has no night, and the city whose gates are never closed.”
In The Secret Garden, the sickly, teenaged Colin Craven really is restored to health and happiness. He is brought to life by the friendship of the novel’s gloriously “disagreeable” heroine, Mary Lennox, her Pan-like friend Dickon and the healing power of the garden his mother once loved.
Gerzina suggests Frances was resurrecting her own Lionel through fiction. But A S Byatt has written that the whingeing and hysterical “Colin has nothing at all in common with the real Lionel, or with the idealised dead son”. She argues that “what readers come back to again and again in this potent tale is the irony and realism with which these not-so-nice children are presented, and the way they save each other”.
Significantly, Mary and Colin do not just save each other. They also rescue Colin’s widowed father. Like Frances, Archibald Craven had been wandering Europe, “alone through such beauty as might have lifted any man’s soul out of shadow. He had walked a long way and it had not lifted his.” But when he returns to the secret garden and his long-forsaken son, he finds himself looking at the “embowered temple of gold” and laughing “until tears came into his eyes”.
It is a moment that has enchanted generations. And its message of the power of digging and planting is certain to chime with the 21st-century grow-your-own philosophy: two centenary editions, illustrated by Robert Ingpen and Lauren Child, will be published this autumn.
Having struggled with conventional Christianity since Lionel’s death, Frances had been deeply influenced by the “New Thought”, which combined ideas of vital links between the spirit and the physical world. She would not name her new belief, but put it into practise during her few happy years in Kent.
Although she would continue to struggle with ill health until her death, in the US in 1924, Frances never lost the passion for freshly turned soil that she developed in her Kentish rose garden. She always said: “As long as one has a garden, one has a future, and if one has a future, one is alive.”
* Two new editions of The Secret Garden illustrated by Robert Ingpen (Templar, £14.99) and Lauren Child (Puffin, £25) will be published in September
* The gardens at Great Maytham Hall open to the public once a year as part of the National Gardens Scheme. See www.ngs.org.uk for more details
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