It’s hard to name my favorite, but I think it must have been Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, which I encountered after A Little Princess. The slightly oversweet taste of A Little Princess‘ heroine was dispelled when I read a character’s decription of the The Secret Garden’s protagonist — “A more marred-looking young one I never saw in my life.”
Mary Lennox is the anti-Sara Crewe. Sara’s hair is rich, brown and abundant. Mary ‘s hair is yellow and sparse. Sara is beautiful. Mary is ugly. Sara is almost preturnaturally sweet and loving throughout the book. Mary is, in the beginning at least, an ill-tempered, entitled little racist. In short, Mary is a far more believable orphaned scion of the white presence in English-occupied India than Sara Crewe could ever be.
Obviously, I was not aware of that when I first read it. I just knew, as much as I loved A Little Princess, Mary Lennox and Misselthwaite manor were more interesting to me. So, I frequently returned to the book. When I reread it in my teens, then my twenties, it revealed even more. Adult readers are likely to speculate that, once puberty hits, Mary Lennox’s close friendship with her sickly cousin Colin and the pan-like country boy Dickon is likely to become a bit complicated.
Which is why at least one filmed adaptation includes a coda set many years later, and a sequel, Back to the Secret Garden, takes place during WWII. In both, Dickon is absent and Mary is either engaged or married to Colin — which makes sense. As a working class country boy in the first decade of the 20th century, poor Dickon has WWI cannon fodder written all over him.
Pam Troy 