Across the lawn came the Master of Misselthwaite and he looked as many of them had never seen him. And by his side with his head up in the air and his eyes full of laughter walked as strongly and steadily as any boy in Yorkshire--
Master Colin!
Enter the World of The Secret Garden
Meet Frances Hodgson Burnett
Frances Hodgson Burnett was the author of The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Little Lord Fauntleroy, and many other favorite children's books. She was born in Manchester, England, in 1849, and had two brothers and two sisters. Her father, a prosperous merchant, died when Frances was just four years old.
There were several gardens near the homes where Frances grew up that one day would provide part of the inspiration for The Secret Garden. The first was the garden behind her home at Seedley Grove, a place Frances called the "Back Garden of Eden."
Later, when the Hodgson family moved into their house on Islington Square, another garden caught Frances's interest. It was a neglected garden behind an abandoned home called Page's Hall, and it was surrounded by a high brick wall. In her autobiography, The One I Knew Best of All, Frances described how, one day, the little green door in the wall was open and she "passed through the enchanted door and stood within the mysterious precincts looking around her."
In 1865, Frances and her family sailed to America, settling in Tennessee, where they could be near her uncle and his family. Frances loved Tennessee, although the family struggled to make ends meet. She published her first story, "Hearts and Diamonds," in 1868. She was nineteen years old.
On September 19, 1873, Frances married Dr. Swan Burnett. The couple had two sons, Lionel and Vivian. The family traveled a great deal and lived many places, including Tennessee, Paris, Long Island, London, and Washington, DC.
In December of 1895, Frances received an invitation to a house party at the home of the Earl of Crewe. The sixteen-hundred-acre Yorkshire estate, Fryston Hall, was south of the city of York, in the parish of Ferry Fryston, near Castleford. Frances later described the house in a letter to her son Vivian as "a big, substantial, lovable house in the midst of a park." Though not located in the part of Yorkshire where the moors are, Fryston Hall would later provide Frances with her model for Misselthwaite Manor in The Secret Garden.
Frances was very moved by the earl's family circumstances. The earl's young wife, Sybil, had died seven years after their marriage, leaving him with their three daughters. Frances wrote to a friend that the couple had been "radiantly happy and inseparable," and Frances believed that "his eyes are always looking for her and thinking of her." She also observed that "a picture of a pretty, slender girl in a white frock" hung in the Fryston Hall drawing room. It was a portrait of Sybil, painted just before she died.
Frances's memories of the earl who lived at Fryston Hall furnished the basis of Archibald Craven's story in The Secret Garden. She even placed a portrait of Colin's mother, who had died when he was born, in Colin's room at Misselthwaite Manor, reminiscent of the one of Sybil in Fryston Hall.
In 1898, Frances and Swan Burnett divorced, and she leased a large estate in the village of Rolvenden, Kent, south of London. It was called Great Maytham Hall, and it would be her home for the next nine years. She was particularly fond of the old walled garden at Maytham and worked in it often. It became the primary inspiration for The Secret Garden.
The gardens of Maytham had been installed when the main house was built in the eighteenth century. There were walled kitchen gardens as well as a walled orchard. When Frances moved into Maytham, the walled orchard was quite overgrown and neglected. Frances was enchanted by the secluded garden and began to clear the weeds away from the trees. She added grass seed and climbing roses, creating a "bower of incredible beauty and fragrance," as her son described it.
Frances's own experience with a robin in her walled garden at Great Maytham Hall provided the inspiration for the robin in The Secret Garden. She wrote a little book about him called My Robin in 1912, after a reader of The Secret Garden asked her, "Did you own the original of the robin?"
Frances explained in My Robin that, indeed, there was a robin in her rose garden in Kent and that "the surprise was not that he was there but that he stayed there." He hopped close to her worktable under one of the trees, he followed her as she strolled about the garden, and he even perched on the wide brim of her hat one day.
While her house and garden were under construction, Frances began writing The Secret Garden, starting it in the spring of 1909 and finishing it about a year later. The Secret Garden was published in 1911.
Frances died on October 29, 1924, at the age of seventy-four. She had written over fifty books, as well as numerous plays, short stories, and poems, but she is best remembered for her novel of renewal and redemption, The Secret Garden.
From Inside the Secret Garden: A Treasury of Crafts, Recipes, and Activities. Copyright (c) 2001 by Carolyn Collins and Christina Eriksson. Used with permission of the authors.
Crumpets
At the first secret garden afternoon tea, Dickon's black crow, Soot, "took the entire half of a buttered crumpet into a corner and pecked at and examined and turned it over and made hoarse remarks about it until he decided to swallow it all joyfully in one gulp."
Teatime manners dictate that crumpets be nibbled a bit more daintily than Soot demonstrated that afternoon. But crumpets are so tasty that sometimes it is hard to remember good manners!
TO MAKE CRUMPETS YOU WILL NEED:
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup milk
1/2 ounce fresh yeast (or 1 teaspoon active dry yeast and 1/2 teaspoon sugar)
1 egg
11/2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter
Optional:
butter and jam
INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Mix the water and milk in a saucepan, set it over medium heat, and heat the mixture until it is lukewarm (or 110-115 degrees F, if you are using a cooking thermometer).
2. Remove the pan from the heat and crumble in the fresh yeast, stirring it until it dissolves. If you are using dry yeast, sprinkle it and the sugar into the warm milk and set it aside for five minutes or until the mixture begins to thicken and bubble.
3. Pour the yeast mixture into a large mixing bowl and stir in the eggs, flour, and salt. Beat the mixture heartily with a wooden spoon until it is smooth. (The more you beat it, the more holes will form in the finished crumpets.)
4. Cover the bowl with a towel or plastic wrap and set the mixture aside in a warm place for about one and a half hours, or until it has doubled in bulk.
5. When the mixture is ready, heat a griddle or skillet over medium heat. Melt the butter on the griddle and set as many muffin rings on the griddle as will fit comfortably.
6. Drop a spoonful of batter into each ring. When bubbles form and break on top and the bottoms are golden brown, take the muffin rings off (using oven mitts). Slip a spatula under each crumpet, turn it, and cook it briefly on the other side. Repeat with the remaining batter.
7. Serve the crumpets hot from the griddle with plenty of butter and jam, if desired. Leftover crumpets can be cooled on a rack and toasted later.
Makes 12 crumpets.
From Inside the Secret Garden: A Treasury of Crafts, Recipes, and Activities. Copyright (c) 2001 by Carolyn Collins an Christina Eriksson. Used with permission of the authors.
Pressed Flowers
If Mary, Colin, and Dickon had not been so busy working in the secret garden all spring and summer, they might have thought of pressing some of the pretty flowers and leaves to look at through the winter months, when the garden would be "wick" but resting. Pressing flowers was a very popular hobby in Victorian times. The pressed flowers were carefully arranged in elaborate designs on fine paper and framed or placed in scrapbooks.
It is easy to press flowers and leaves from your garden. They make beautiful decorations for greeting cards, place cards, bookmarks, and many other th
ings. They also provide a record of the kinds of plants that you have planted in your garden from year to year if you keep samples of them in a flower scrapbook.
TO PRESS FLOWERS YOU WILL NEED:
A thick, old telephone book or dictionary
Fresh flowers and leaves (Flat leaves and easy-to-flatten flowers such as pansies, daisies, and violets work best. You can also gently pull petals from more complex flowers such as roses, marigolds, and geraniums and press the petals individually.)
3 or 4 heavy books
Tray or newspapers
Wax paper (optional)
INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Open the telephone book or dictionary.
2. Place a flower facedown on a right-hand page toward the back of the book. If you are using wax paper, which may prevent the flower from sticking to the book, place the flower between two pieces of the paper. Flatten the flower slightly with your finger. You can put several flowers and leaves on one page, but do not let them touch one another. You may wish to mark the pages to help you find the flowers later.
3. Carefully turn several of the left-hand pages over the flowers and leaves. Add more flowers to another page of the telephone book.
4. Continue steps 2 and 3 until you have all your flowers pressed.
5. Close the book and stack several heavy books, such as encyclopedia volumes, on top of it.
6. Wait at least a week before removing the heavy books and opening the telephone book.
7. Carefully open the telephone book to the pages where you put the flowers. They should be flat and dry by now. Gently remove them to a tray or flat newspaper.
The pressed flowers are ready to be used as you wish.
From Inside the Secret Garden: A Treasury of Crafts, Recipes, and Activities. Copyright (c) 2001 by Carolyn Collins and Christina Eriksson. Used with permission of the authors.
Jump Rope Rhymes
"The skipping-rope was a wonderful thing. She counted and skipped, and skipped and counted, until her cheeks were quite red, and she was more interested than she had ever been since she was born."
Although Mary wasn't familiar with them, there were a number of popular rhymes that English children used to chant while skipping rope. Here are a few examples of traditional skipping rhymes that you can still use while jumping rope today!
Mistress Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.
Bluebells, cockle shells,
Eavy, Ivy, Over!
This is how the alphabet goes,
A, B, C, D...
Black currant, red currant, raspberry tart,
Tell me the name of my sweetheart.
A, B, C, D...
(When you miss a step, that letter is supposed to tell you
the first letter of your sweetheart's name.)
Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
Mix it up and make it nice,
Pop goes the weasel!
Jelly on a plate,
Jelly on a plate,
Wibble, wobble, wibble, wobble,
Jelly on a plate.
Sausages in the pan,
Sausages in the pan,
Turn them over, turn them over,
Sausages in the pan.
I am [your name], dressed in blue,
These are the actions I must do,
Salute to the captain, bow to the queen,
Twist right round and count fifteen.
1,2,3,4...
(Try to jump all the way to 15 without
missing a step.)
About the Author and the Illustrator
Frances Hodgson Burnett was a born storyteller. Even as a young child, her greatest pleasure was in making up stories and acting them out, using her dolls as characters. She wrote over forty books, including the classic A LITTLE PRINCESS, also illustrated by Tasha Tudor.
Tasha Tudor's detailed, delicate artwork has been cherished by millions of readers. She illustrated nearly one hundred books, and received multiple awards and honors, including two Caldecott Honors.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Credits
Cover art (c) 1962 by HarperCollins Publishers
Cover design by Alison Klapthor
Copyright
THE SECRET GARDEN. Text copyright 1911 by F. H. Burnett. Copyright renewed 1938 by Verity Constance Burnett. Illustrations copyright (c) 1962 by J. B. Lippincott Company. Illustrations copyright renewed 1990 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-17457
First Harper Trophy edition, 1987
EPub Edition (c) January 2011 ISBN: 978-0-06-206295-6
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Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
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