 Mary Lennox has no one left in the world when she arrives at Misselthwaite
Manor, her mysterious uncle's enormous, drafty mansion looming
on the edge of the moors. A cholera epidemic has ravaged the Indian
Village in which she was born, killing both her parents and the "Ayah,"
or Indian servant, who cared for her. Not that being alone is new to
her. Her socialite mother had no time between parties for Mary, and
her father was both too ill and too occupied by his work to raise his
daughter. Not long after coming to live with her uncle, Archibald Craven,
Mary discovers a walled garden, neglected and in ruins. Soon she meets
her servant Martha's brother Dickon, a robust country boy nourished
both by his mother's love and by the natural surrounding of the
countryside; and her tyrannical cousin Colin, whose mother died giving
birth to him. So traumatized was Archibald by the sudden death of his
beloved wife Lily, that he effectively abandoned the infant Colin and
hid the keys to the garden that she adored. His son has grown into
a self-loathing hypochondriacal child whose tantrums strike fear into
the hearts of servants. The lush garden is now overgrown and all are
forbidden to enter it. No one can even remember where the door is,
until a robin leads Mary to its hidden key. It is in the "secret
garden" and with the help of Dickon, that Mary and Colin find
the path to physical and spiritual health. Along the way the three
children discover that in their imaginations, called "magic" by
Colin, is the power to transform lives.
- from Penguin Putnam, Inc.
| THE LIFE OF FRANCES HODGSON
BURNETT |
Frances Hodgson, author of the novel, The
Secret Garden, was born
on November 24, 1849 in Manchester England. Following her father’s
death in 1854, she and her family moved to rural America. The move
from industrial England was a journey to a green, natural world that
would become a central theme in many of Burnett’s later works,
including The Secret Garden.
Before moving to America, the Burnett family lived temporarily with
relatives, where five-year-old Frances enjoyed a garden. Her recollection
of the garden will contribute to the magic aura of the garden in The
Secret Garden. Another move took Frances and her family to an
iron-gated square of once-imposing houses, now surrounded by the overcrowded
lodgings of mill workers employed in the smut-spewing factories nearby.
Always admonished to speak and act like a "lady," Frances
was forbidden to play with the mill workers' children, but she
surreptitiously used their dialect much as Mary and Colin learn Dickon's
Yorkshire, in the novel. While living in this place, Frances discovered
a walled garden and imagined a carpet of flowers replacing its refuse
and weeds; this experience anticipates Mary's discovery of the
locked garden. It is around this time that Frances began to write.
Manchester's economy plummeted, in part because the American
Civil War interfered with the shipments of cotton needed in British
textile mills. Frances's mother then sold the business, which
she had been trying to run on her own, and moved to live with her brother
in Tennessee. The family arrived in war-raved Tennessee and moved
into an abandoned log cabin in rural New Market. Frances, almost 16,
met Swan Burnett, son of the local doctor.
Frances's family next moved to an even more isolated house,
closer to Knoxville; here a mountain thicket she called her "Bower"
provided solitude and stirred her imagination. Time passed and Frances
had two sons named Lionel and Vivian. In 1877 the Burnett's moved
to Washington D.C., where Swan established a medical practice. Frances
continued to write and began to publish her novels, which did well
in both England and America. She also adapted some of her fiction for
the stage. As a child she used to love to play-act for her friends
and family.
Life in D.C. became difficult and strains developed within Frances's
marriage. In 1884 she became ill and unable to write. She was treated
by a mind healer in Boston, where Mary Baker Eddy had just helped establish
the first Church of Christ Scientist. Burnett never became a Christian
Scientist, but she accepted some of its beliefs, which are reflected
in the healing role, attributed to mental attitude and natural medicine
in. In 1890 her son, Lionel, died of consumption at age 16. Burnett
went into a long period of mourning. Partly in Lionel's memory,
she increased her charitable works for sick and poor children in London.
Her experience with her son and in children's hospitals provided
insights later used in her portrayal of sickly Mary and Colin.
Frances eventually divorced her husband and moved with her other son,
Vivian (then a Harvard graduate in journalism) to Maytham Hall, Rolvenden,
Kent. At Maytham she turned a walled, overgrown orchard into a rose
garden, where she often sat to write. It was in this garden that she
got her first ideas for The Secret Garden. Frances's
continued grief over her son Lionel's death is reflected in another
book, In the Closed Room, portraying a dead child's
attempts to let her surviving mother know that she is happy. The paradisiacal
garden in which the dead child plays anticipates the association of
the garden and death in The Secret Garden.
In 1909 Frances moved into her new home on Long Island, in the garden
of which she wrote much of The Secret Garden. The novel began
as a serial in The American Magazine in 1910 and was published as a
book in 1911. Frances died on October 29, 1924 and is best remembered
for The Secret garden that was published almost 40 years earlier.
- Taken from “The Secret Garden”/Lesson
Plans/Family Education Network (Internet source) The Secret Garden
In the Closed Room |
Marsha Norman received the Tony Award
for The
Secret Garden. She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author
of 'night, Mother. For that play, she also received
the coveted Hull-Warriner Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn
Prize. Her first play, Getting Out, received the Gassner
Medallion and the Newsday Oppenheimer yard. Her other plays
include Third and Oak, The Laundromat, The
Pool Hall, Sarah and Abraham, Loving Daniel
Boone. She has also published a novel, The Fortune
Teller. Though The Secret Garden was Marsha
Norman's first musical, she grew up studying piano, and later
played her way through college, serving as accompanist for
a dance group and pianist for student musical productions.
She has received grants from the national Endowment, the
Rockefeller Foundation and the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters.
Lucy Simon made her Broadway
debut with The
Secret Garden for which she received a Tony Award nomination. Fanny
Hackabout Jones, a collaboration with Erica Long and
Susan Birkenhead was produced at the Long Wharf Theatre in
New Haven. Ms. Simon also contributed songs to the Off-Broadway
Hit A... My Name Is Alice. In addition to her musical
theatre work, Ms. Simon has won two Grammy Awards for her In
Harmony albums, which she wrote and produced, and has
recorded two solo albums for RCA Records. Ms. Simon began
her professional singing, composing and recording career
at age 16, with her sister Carly, as part of the Simon Sisters.
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