The Heroine's Bookshelf: Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

center, first for the children who play there, then for a family reunion as intense as the romance that once closed it off. Secure in the bit of earth she has managed to clear inside herself, Mary is finally ready to let others in, starting with cousin Colin. A kind of reverse Bertha Rochester, Colin is a child who is as irritating as he is sickly, and pouty Mary seems tailor-made to rock his tiny, whiny world. But who would think that Mary of all people could bring a bit of magic to Misselthwaite?

Over the course of the book, Mary begins to use the word magic more and more, until it becomes a sort of shorthand for all that is great and beautiful. It’s not necessarily spiritual; it’s something you can reach out and touch. It’s a crocus pushing its way out of the ground, a cranky child becoming playful and generous, a gift of simple food enjoyed among friends, a father’s pride in his son. It also works on a grander scale, for Mary and for us, stopping us all in our tracks as we realize that a world of death, asphyxiation, and isolation has been turned into one full of light, air, health, and love. These qualities were all inherent in the dead, lonely garden itself; they were inside Mary, too, though if left to her own devices she might never have discovered them.

What Mary comes to see as Magic, capital M, is found in ordinary things: learning to love herself and others, seeing herself in a gentler and more flattering light. But magic is also nature, the things that sustain us but are bigger and more powerful than us. Magic is inside Colin’s wobbly, wizened legs and Mary’s reddening cheeks. It’s inside the whole world of breathless bees and climbing vines contained inside the secret garden’s walls. And, Frances insists, it is inside, too:

“Of course there must be lots of Magic in the world… but people don’t know what it is like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen.”

I don’t know about you, but I find the thought that we get to conjure our own magic to be a comforting one. Mary’s garden could never grow if she herself didn’t discover and believe in it. And we can’t possibly expand beyond ourselves if we don’t discover and trust that which we find within.

In one of the book’s most compelling scenes, colicky Colin, the child of “I can’t,” is so infuriated by the suggestion that his feeble legs are crooked that he stands in defiant anger. Energized by his belief in himself and the care and compassion he has received from others for the first time, he moves into a world of potential and possibility. Unsure he can, he does anyway… and we are led to believe that Mary’s own will and recognition of the power within this ugly child is part of the equation.

“Are you making Magic? “ he asked sharply.

Dickon’s curly mouth spread in a cheerful grin.

“Tha’s doin’ Magic thysel',” he said. “It’s same Magic as made these ‘ere work out o’ th’ earth,” and he touched with his thick boot a clump of crocuses in the grass…. He heard Mary muttering something under her breath…. But she did not tell him [what she said]. What she was saying was this:

“You can do it! You can do it! I told you you could! You can do it! You can do it! You can!”

Yes, heroines can make their own magic when they expect the highest and best of themselves and others. Magic summons up all of our secrets, turning them upside-down like old roots in fresh earth, uprooting the pain and isolation of an ugly, oppressed childhood and making it whole and good again in the light of day. Magic draws the sun up from its bed, calms anxiety, powers the insides of people who were shriveled, ugly, and small before their time. It embodies all the risk and potential of daily life, cyclical and obscure, a life that can and does mean something if we are brave enough to grow beyond ourselves. Magic occurs when, like Mary, we love others despite our deepest misgivings, pushing our boundaries even when, as for Frances, the world only offers us hurt and betrayal in return.

When I reread The Secret Garden, I hear echoes of the mockery Frances Hodgson Burnett endured for her idealism and her frivolity, her insistence on avoiding newspapers and the sad stories they contained. But to dismiss her, or her work, as unfashionable is shortsighted indeed. It’s the equivalent of dismissing ourselves during those awkward, ugly years, the years in which we had no idea of our own potential or our own futures. Whoever would think that Frances’s most enduring book would be among her last, the product in part of stress, despair, and heartbreak? To underestimate her would have been to deny a magical book.

Times of crisis usually mean that practical thinking trumps childish woes, crowding out magic as we return to grim reality. It’s hard to admit that we’re childish inside. We may turn back to girlish books like The Secret Garden, but we often do so in secret. After all, haven’t we been taught that we have to not only survive but master our unrelentingly adult world? No matter how successful or mature I become, I carry a smaller version of myself inside, and that spazzy, dramatic girl is always twitching for attention and for love. Too often as adults, as heroines who have seen their share of crises and chaos, we’re tempted to turn our eyes away from the smaller selves within. We’re taught to focus on what’s ahead; an admirable tactic, and one that can serve us well. But when we lose sense of that child, of the magic in our lives and inner landscapes, we risk losing the force that connects us irreparably to ourselves, to nature, to mystery, and to one another.

Frances Hodgson Burnett spoke up for the unappealing, peevish children among us, the ones who didn’t take well to the customs of school or public gatherings, the ones, like me, for whom curbing the emotions was a lesson learned late, if at all. Born of familiar concerns—sadness, isolation, overwork—her magical philosophy transcended a career on a downward trajectory and a personal life in shambles. In a story all too familiar to anyone who’s borne witness to the downfall of the Lindsay Lohans and Amy Winehouses of our day, her road from calico to literary superstardom gave her even further to fall. But unlike Britney Spears, Frances had a bit of magic to cushion her collapse.

Sometimes, mired in the unbalanced bank account and the lost job and the infuriating relationship and the dying relative, we get stuck in what’s in front of us, held captive by our own limited perspective and hard up to achieve even fumbling grace. Faced with heroines’ struggles, cholera, and freezing winters, sometimes all we can see through our adult eyes is an impenetrable wall with no door and no key. As adults in a grown-up world, we can choose to see what is in front of us or what could be all around us. We can ask what our favorite author would do, what would make the little girls we once were prouder, bigger, better. We can remember the women who came before us and the heroines they gave us. Bolstered by the stories and the strengths of women real and fictitious, we can bring a child’s eyes to the sight of the impossible. We can expect to see magic. Heroines and women all, we just might make some of our own.

READ THIS BOOK:

• When your stomach hurts, and grown-up remedies like ginger tea aren’t helping

• In a literary double feature with A Little Princess

• When you’re feeling contrary

MARY’S LITERARY SISTERS:

• Leslie Burke in Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson

• Gemma Doyle in A Great and Terrible Beauty, by Libba Bray

• Sara Crewe in A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Epilogue

In 1863 Louisa May Alcott, bedridden with typhoid after her ill-fated stint as a Civil War nurse, had a strange hallucination. She lay in her bed, sweating and moaning, trying and failing to look away from the dark Spaniard who claimed to be her husband, a man who hid behind curtains and closet doors and took her by surprise again and again. She cried out in agony; he responded with a terrifying “Lie still, my dear.”

One hundred and forty-six years later, I lay in my own bed, stricken with my third case of bronchitis in a year. I was nearing the end of the writing process on the book you have just read. Appropriately, through my codeine- and cough-syrup-induced haze, I hallucinated about Louisa herself, imagining her standing in my doorway, her hair