Secret Garden, A Little Princess, and Little Lord Fauntleroy

Secret Garden, A Little Princess, and Little Lord Fauntleroy

It’s astounding to see three novels by Frances Hodgson Burnett, written years apart, working positively for children and adults alike. The backgrounds of these novels feature heartfelt actions of people as deus ex machina. That’s also the biggest hurdle with these books, and it, along with other first-time met difficulties, decreases as you read the books chronologically: In Little Lord Fauntleroy, published late 19th century, the hero is a little boy who is kind and heroic indeed, and he loves everybody around him both as an ordinary American boy in the US and in his newly-found grandfather’s castle in the UK.

 

At this point, you and I could make early comparisons between the two “little” books and the Secret Garden. Suppose the Little Lord Fauntleroy is a tiny, lovely Minuette, and the Little Princess is a dramatic Sonata, then the Secret Garden is a multiple-voiced and natural Symphony. The senses of complexities of the three texts are developed as such. I can safely say I know a lot of what’s in the books, having read them several times as e-books in my phone.     

 

Anyway, on to the Little Princess, printed for the first time in 1905. In this book is a girls’ boarding school in London, and I like to say that there are two very good C’s. The one C is Carrisford, the rich owner of a diamond mine, who was a friend of the brave and imaginative heroine Sara Crewe’s father, fervently looking for Sara. The other C is Carmichael the Lawyer, who works for Carrisford and lives near Ms Minchin’s seminary, where Sara Crewe hungrily toils for two years after being treated at the school like a princess and changing when her father suddenly dies. The main characters are given rich contemplation and multi-layered characteristics. The plot gears towards wonderful and fortunate well-being life for children.  

 

The Secret Garden, the last and the most evocative of these jewels that was born in a printed form in 1911. In this book, a vibrant girl from India, Mary, and a bed-ridden boy, Colin, explore the garden on downhill from Colin’s rich father’s Yorkshire mansion. The bit of the garden has a sweet and sad secret and Mary, Colin, and a friendly boy from a cottage called Dickon submerge in it, by taking care of the garden by themselves. The description of nature is beautiful and thorough, and all the characters fit into vivid roles. In comparison, in Little Lord Fauntleroy the boy’s talkative house servant Mary disappears once the boy’s mother settles into the lodge offered by the boy’s grandfather the Earl. In A Little Princess, the rival girl Lavinia is about 11 years old when Sara arrives at 7, and has stayed – a little too long - in the school until Sarah was 13. When Sara goes hungry and works at the school as a kind of a maid, there is no mention of Sara, or other servants, going to church or not. For your information, middle-aged women feature as head of the household in all three of the books, but as an evil character only in A Little Princess.