Last night I sat up late reading
My first Folio Society edition,
having boards and spine decorated by the artist comes in
a slip case bearing one of her drawings.
This delightful book, in fluent descriptive prose, charts the journey of Mary Lennox, born to an ex-pat English couple in India, until the age of ten when she was transported to Yorkshire. It is a tale of her transition of cultures and the consequent adaptations.
There is a touch mystery apart from that of the eponymous garden.
The prose contains many similes and metaphors, yet is itself a metaphor to the resurgence of neglected yet apparently pampered lives upon the introduction of loving kindness.
We learn how Mary encounters a kindred spirit with similar experience and emotional deprivation in the midst of wealth; and how this is balanced by a loving family with very slender means, but with a generous maternal mother who really knows children and their needs. Two of her children in particular are instrumental in Mary’s gradual learning to love.
We learn how crushingly destructive grief can be, but how it is possible to be helped to rise from despair.
I often find attempts at reproducing vernacular accents in speech, but Burnett uses it as a method of bridging cultures and engaging her characters. As Mary becomes closer to the Yorkshire people she learns their language. The dialogue in this book is faithfully rendered with the author’s perfect control.
The garden of the story, largely neglected for ten years, through the changing seasons, the gradual resurgence of plant life, and the lives of small living creatures, is the metaphor for life.
The robin, a particularly significant character threading a link through the story, first became imprinted on Ben Weatherstaff as a fledgling. Masterman’s drawings, although including many of the robin do not include a fledgeling. I am therefore taking the advantage to feature my
3rd August 2019 drawing of Nugget, who, still with blueish feathers and lacking his adult red breast, first arrived in our garden a short time before. Longer term readers will remember the many photographs in those earlier posts featuring him.
I have not included my usual quotations from the text, because there are many examples of the author’s prose alongside this selection of Dodie Masterman’s drawings. Those not taken from within the text are smaller tailpieces from most of the chapters except for the final one which might give too much away. I recommend enlarging these pages in the gallery.