#Frances Hogsdon Burnett

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I brushed through A Little Princess today.

It was one of my favourite books when I was younger, and I still quite adore it! I took it down from my bookshelf today and skimmed over it. It was lovely to meet them all again because I’d forgotten the little things, like Melchisedec the rat, Ermengarde, and Lottie. It has been a while since I last read it, and I noticed so many things I didn’t before!

One of the more heartbreaking moments is Sara finding out her papa is dead on her BIRTHDAY. Imagine the pain of an eleven-year-old having to deal with her world turned upside down and losing the only family she has left on her birthday :(

Much as I hate to say it, some parts of the book are a tad racist, although I suppose it’s reflective of the time period in which the book was written (1905).

  “It’s a’ Nindian gentleman that’s comin’ to live next door, miss,” she said. [...] He worships idols, miss. He’s an ’eathen an’ bows down to wood an’ stone. I seen a’ idol bein’ carried in for him to worship. Somebody had oughter send him a trac’. You can get a trac’ for a penny.”

Sara is really good with languages (she is shown to be multilingual), which is a trait I adore because I love learning languages too! She speaks both French and Hindi, and it shows up in two very different situations in the book. One to Monsieur Dufarge, the French teacher, and the other to Ram Dass, the Indian servant. The descriptions of both men’s reactions to hear a child speaking their respective languages are strikingly similar.

“Monsieur Dufarge began to smile, and his smile was one of great pleasure. To hear this pretty childish voice speaking his own language so simply and charmingly made him feel almost as if he were in his native land - which in dark, foggy days in London sometimes seemed worlds away.”

“She thought she had never seen more surprise and delight than the dark face expressed when she spoke in the familiar tongue. The truth was that the poor fellow felt as if his gods had intervened, and the kind little voice came from heaven itself.”

As someone who speaks passable Hindi and is currently studying French, this is so sweet and touching! To be in a foreign land and feeling like an outsider, hearing someone speak the same language as you must be so inexpressibly comforting, like you have a comrade and a friend.

Miss Minchin is literally abusive and has a heart of stone. She puts Sara through hell. She also shows severe insecurity and covers it up with projecting her feelings of inadequacy (on a 7 year old!) The scene in Chapter 2 where she concludes that Sara does not know French is especially telling.

“One of Miss Minchin’s chief secret annoyances was that she did not speak French herself, and was desirous of concealing the irritating fact. She, therefore, had no intention of discussing the matter and laying herself open to questioning by a new little pupil.”

I have met quite a few adults like this, who are in the wrong and know it, and unwilling to admit it. They are nice and willing to praise kids and make them their golden child as long as things are going well. The second they are contradicted or called out in the slightest, they turn NASTY. So Miss Minchin, horrid as she is, is written very realistically. Excellent characterisation, and I always like reading the bit where she gets her comeuppance at the end.

My absolutely favourite passage in the book is:

“If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it. There was Marie Antoinette when she was in prison and her throne was gone and she had only a black gown on, and her hair was white, and they insulted her and called her Widow Capet. She was a great deal more like a queen then than when she was so gay and everything was so grand. I like her best then. The howling mobs of people did not frighten her. She was stronger than they were, even when they cut her head off.”

This is off topic, but I read this book right around the time we were learning about the French Revolution in school. So I’d come across Marie Antoinette, but she was portrayed in a very negative light in my history textbook, with the infamous quote: “If they don’t have bread, let them eat cake.” So my initial notion of her jarred completely with what I read here. And that was how I ended up reading and researching more about Marie Antoinette, and got to know that she was an Austrian princess married off very young to a French prince, and mocked for her foreignness. She had several miscarriages and fertility struggles, and she loved kids and adopted a few! True, she did spend rather extravagantly, but she was not quite the villain I took her for. That’s when I realised that history textbooks, more often than not, show only one side of the story.

#A Little Princess #Sara Crewe #Miss Minchin #Frances Hogsdon Burnett #Books

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“The Secret Garden” by Frances Hogsdon Burnett, is one of those novels whose plot nearly everyone seems familiar with—and yet there’s so much more to it than a lonely little girl stumbling upon a forgotten garden and tending to it, transforming herself in the process. At the beginning, Mary Lennox is spoilt, sullen and unlikable. Few protagonists have ever been introduced in such an unappealing light. When she is sent to her reclusive uncle’s mansion in Yorkshire, she resents life more than ever. Until the day she discovers the hidden garden behind the locked iron door, that is haunted by a great tragedy. The garden gives Mary a purpose, something to live for and care about for the first time in her life. As it begins to come to life again, so does she. Misselthwaite Manor is a mansion shrouded in mystery, secrets, rumours and lies; its corridors echo with a mysterious wailing late at night that instantly excite her curiosity. Mary and the secret garden are kindred spirits, in the sense that they have both been abandoned, neglected, and allowed to succumb to decay. Both have known tragedy. And both are capable of redemption. The garden eventually ceases to be a shrine of grief, and becomes a relic of the memory of the woman who once tended it long ago. It becomes the embodiment of her spirit, in more ways than one; tangible proof that life can still simmer beneath something presumed to be long dead. The slow, steady recovery of the garden from its decade-long neglect, and reclamation of its lost beauty, is a metaphor for the parallel reawakening of Mary, and other characters inhabiting the manor, still tortured by loss. “The Secret Garden” is, at its heart, a book about the consequences of neglect and the spiralling effects tragedy can have, coupled with the reminder that wounds do heal, and it’s never too late to mend. By the end of the novel, the people the characters become fully align with the people they might have been.

#book reviews #the secret garden #frances hogsdon burnett #really like this book #posted on instagram too #please do follow me there for more reviews!