Childhood Books

[naomikritzer]

At World Fantasy Con, the year I was in Madison, I had a long conversation with blackholly and bgliterary about re-reading children's books as an adult. There are books that you really just should not ever re-read, because you LOVED them as a child and remember them as far better than they were. My #1 example of this is The Boxcar Children, which I loved and repeatedly re-read (and which Molly loves and has repeatedly re-read) as a child. As an adult, I realized that it was not very well written, and was loaded with implausibly convenient things that allowed the children to survive alone in the woods. (Barry's top example was the Chronicles of Narnia, which I actually rather enjoyed as an adult, but he's right, they're much better when you'er a kid.)

Another favorite book was A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, who's better known for The Secret Garden. I always liked A Little Princess better because Mary (in The Secret Garden) is such an ill-tempered brat at the beginning, whereas Sara is kind and polite and generally perfect, and I always prefered to identify with idealized heroines. (Weirdly enough, my favorite character in Little Women was not Jo -- if you grow up to become a writer, you're supposed to have identified with Jo -- but Beth. I always wanted to be sweet and quiet and lovable, even though I was loud and disruptive and people frequently got annoyed with me.)

I re-read A Little Princess today. And unlike the Boxcar Children, it stands up extremely well to re-reading. It's beautifully written, first of all. It brings the fogs, mud, and brutality of Victorian London to vivid life. The dialogue is frequently very funny, and there are bits that flew right over my head as a child that are hilarious to me as an adult. (At one point, thirteen-year-old Sara is saying to a friend that all the intelligence in the world won't do you any good if you aren't kind, and uses Robespierre as an example. A thirteen-year-old using the architect of the Reign of Terror as a comparison to her viciously nasty caretaker -- I did not get the humor here at all when I was a kid and had no idea who Robespierre was.)

I'm also much more attuned to some of the nuances of the story now. In one scene, Sara (who was reduced to poverty with the death of her father, and is now being used as a servant at the boarding school she had attended) finds a fourpence in the mud, and uses it to buy buns from a bakery, because she's ravenously hungry. But outside is a beggar girl who's literally starving. Sara gives her five of the six buns; the woman who owns the bakery sees this, and comes out too late to give her more buns. She then invites the beggar girl inside, feeds her a real meal, and offers her a warm place to sleep. As a child, I found Sara's actions incredibly moving and self-sacrificing; as an adult, I see that her gift of the buns caused the bakery woman to see the hungry children around her for the first time in a long time. As an adult living in Victorian London, she had learned to ignore them; Sara's generosity forced her to confront her own deliberate blindness. That particular story is a lovely parable about how good deeds can build on each other, and how a single act of mercy can change people's lives in ways you don't expect. (Sara, her fortune restored, returns to the bakery at the end; the bakery woman has wound up adopting the girl Sara fed.)

I will say that some of the plot twists are much less credible when you read it as an adult. Some time after Sara's father dies and she is reduced to poverty, a man moves in next door. He is, in fact, looking for her; he has the fortune her father thought was lost. Now, there's no particular reason for him to believe that the ragged girl next door to him is the girl he's searching for -- except that his Indian servant encounters her, shortly after she arrives, and she speaks to him in Hindi. Given that he knows the child he's searching for grew up in India, you'd think that particular detail might come out a lot earlier than it does.

There have been several movies made of this book. One stars Shirley Temple and is excruciatingly bad. More recently, there was a movie version set in New York. (I didn't much care for it. This is an intensely British setting and I don't think it works in the U.S. at all.) When I was living in England in 1986, there was a Children's BBC miniseries of it that was brilliantly done and wonderfully faithful to the book. That version actually had a plausible explanation of why it never occurs to them that the child next door could be Sara Crewe. A child suggests the possibility, and is told, "Oh, no. A respectable boarding school mistress would never turn an officer's daughter into a servant!" (The book is rich with Victorian British classist attitudes.)

I'm going to have to pick up The Secret Garden now. I like flawed heroines a lot more now than I did when I was eight.

Comments

I still love both of them

[romsfuulynn.livejournal.com]

What is even more interesting is reading Little Lord Fauntleroy. While some parts of it are nauseatingly sweet, there are some really sharp digs in it too, rather like what you are seeing as an adult in The Little Princess.

You can find it available online in several places.

[alirose.livejournal.com]

I am going to have to re-read that now. I really liked it as a child and adored the BBC series as well. I re read The Secret Garden a few years ago and it was fun, although not quite as "deep" as I felt it was when I was 8. ^_^

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

I re-read A Little Princess recently, too, and I agree with everything you say (except I haven't seen any of the film versions. I would like to see the BBC one). I adored The Secret Garden, too, but I can't find my copy of that one.

Hmmm ... should I also re-read Little Lord Fauntleroy? I hated it when I was a kid, but maybe I would like it now. Or maybe not.

I also re-enjoyed most of the E. Nesbitt books (The Story of the Amulet, Five Children and It, et al.) not too long ago. I do NOT recommend re-reading any of the books about the Five Little Peppers. I loved those between the ages of, say, six and twelve, and even named a character in an interminable story I was writing in a long series of exercise books in about grade five or six Polly, after Polly Pepper; and I got a few of them from the library a few years ago for re-reading purposes, and found them preachy, annoying, soppy, and full of people bursting into tears. Feh.

I also wanted to be Beth March. For some reason, I always wanted to be whatever character in a book ends up deathly ill, or dead, or unconscious. (David Balfour in Kidnapped, for instance, when he collapses in a fever up in the mountains with Alan Breck. Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island when he's knocked unconscious. Et cetera.) I'm sure that means something, but I'm sort of afraid to wonder what.

[naomikritzer]

Ohhhhhhhhhhh yeah, the tragic, lingering death was a big appeal, too. I have also hesitated to consider too deeply WTF that was about.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

In my case, the obsession generated a lot of truly cringe-worthy juvenilia. People in my stories were always being crippled by polio, succumbing to mysterious psychosomatic fevers (generally caused by Unrequited Love), and being ravaged by consumption.

Ick.

[naomikritzer]

When I was 13 years old I wrote an episodic story about a girl my age in WWII Europe. I wanted her to participate in absolutely everything interesting that happened during the entire war -- like some sort of cross between Anne Frank and Forrest Gump -- so the episodes were wildly inconsistent, to the point that her nationality changed from story to story. Then, in a bizarre and incredibly contrived twist of fate, at the conclusion of the war she got sent to a British boarding school (I'd been reading British boarding school stories and was always fascinated by them, probably from the time I read A Little Princess, come to think of it) where she got to wander around being angstful and saying dark, mysterious things to her classmates.

I wrote hundreds of pages of this. I still have it. It's in a box four feet from where I'm sitting. Talk about cringe-worthy juvenilia.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Ouch.

One of my longest-running narratives (well, if you can call it a narrative ... it started out epistolary, and got worse), begun as a school project when I was 11, concerned a girl my age in New York in the years before and during World War I. Since I had never been to New York and had, obviously, no personal experience with World War I, it cribbed heavily from two of my favourite authors of the time: Sydney Taylor and L.M. Montgomery. I'm sure much of it is still extant, probably on the bottom shelves of one of the bookcases in what used to be my bedroom at my mom's house. I shudder to think.

I have one about people at a boarding school, too. I'm much more embarrassed by that one, because I was a lot older when I was writing it.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I forgot to mention that when I first read A Little Princess, I knew exactly who Robespierre was. Why? Because one of the things my dad read me as a bedtime story was The Scarlet Pimpernel.

And that sort of thing is why I am such an enormous geek.

[a-c-fiorucci.livejournal.com]

Somewhere I have a book with all three of these novels in it. I'll have to hunt it up and see what I think now. (I hate trying to find books when the libraries are migrating.)

The scene outside the bakery haunts me.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I loved A Little Princess too. (Embarrassingly, it turns out that I am a hurt/comfort fan, and have been since long before I ever knew there was a term for it.) I still like to pick it up sometimes and re-read the chapter where the Magic happens.

The classism was over my head as a child. Now it's hard not to notice that, despite Sara's noble speech to Becky about how "we're just the same - only two little girls", Becky's mega-happy ending is that she gets to be Sara's servant.

[naomikritzer]

Ha. Yeah. Though if I were writing a historical novel set in that period, and wanted to be somewhat realistic, that would probably be my happy ending for Becky, too. Being a ladies' maid was an enormous step up for her, from the bottom of the servant pecking order nearly to the top. Victorian England was not exactly a highly class-mobile society.

At Wiscon last year I was on a panel on fairy tales, and there was a discussion of the "and then she married the prince" ending. I noted that for the period these stories were written, this was shorthand for, "and then she was rich and never had to be hungry, ever again." Modern takes like "The Paper Bag Princess" are cute and funny to us now, but would have seemed utterly nonsensical in a society where a woman on her own was incredibly vulnerable to a long list of dangers, some of which were as simple as, "you can't run a farm as a single person living alone, so how are you going to eat?"

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Well, it is pretty mega-happy compared with her previous circumstances, you must admit. She'll be well fed, properly dressed, warm and sheltered; nobody will scream at her; instead of carrying huge coal scuttles up and down hundreds of stairs and scrubbing floors all day, she'll be helping Sara dress and doing her hair and such; she'll get to go to all sorts of interesting places with Sara; and, Sara being Sara, no doubt she'll get quite an education.

Within the parameters of Victorian class structure, where Birth was (almost) Everything, it's difficult to imagine a more positive outcome for a scullery drudge.

Not that it's not jarring. I've been re-reading some Ellis Peters novels written in the 1950s, and the casual treatment of physical punishment of children creeps me out rather, because it's portrayed (or, more often, just mentioned in passing by the characters) in the context of serene, devoted, loving families ...

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

I liked the Secret Garden more as a kid for the reason you cite: Mary was a brat. (But then I like Captains Courageous too, and was rooting for Harvey Cheyne, brat of similar proportions.) Of course, I wanted them to forego their brattiness, and they eventually do, and that's part of the story.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I suspect Eragon, which many of my students adore but I found merely passable and derivative, will be such a book, when its current readers are adults.

[naomikritzer]

I think Eragon may have come up in that conversation, as a matter of fact...

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

I had different reactions to those books as a kid--I really liked Mary in The Secret Garden until she got religion. I think I liked the mystery aspects--where was the crying coming from? etc.

And A Little Princess--I didn't like it as a kid because it was too devastating when Sara's father died and she was treated so cruelly by Miss Minchin. I dreaded reading the scene where Miss Minchin comes up the stairs and breaks up their pathetic little party.

You know which book really didn't stand up to rereading for me? Charlotte's Web. I was crazy about that book as a kid. I reread it in college and was appalled at how Charlotte sacrifices everything for the male, who is literally an unappreciative pig. Ugh!

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

I have the most beautiful version of the Little Princess, some thick paperback with big full color, full page illustrations (My favorites are tied between the doll she got and her room after the magic.)

Unfortunately, the only movie version of this that I've seen was the Shirley Temple version (oh! The wonderfull cheesiness of that movie!), but that's by choice as I flatly refused to watch the more recent version of it. I'll have to look and see if the BBC version is available anywhere.

On the other hand, the Hallmark version of A Secret Garden is actually very good--I didn't like the framing story very much at all the first few times I saw it, but I think that's because it forces an unhappy ending on some of the characters--but within the story I thought it was lovely, though now that I think about it, I haven't read the book in years, so it may be less true to it than I think.

[naomikritzer]

I found the BBC version last night and ordered a copy. It's no longer available but you can find it used on VHS. The page is full of reviews from people saying "PLEASE SOMEONE PUT THIS OUT ON DVD! THIS IS THE DEFINITIVE VERSION THAT EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH!" But no DVD version yet.

I liked the Hallmark Secret Garden okay except for the very end where they tell you Dickon dies in WWI. A kid I babysat for at the time (this might even be jedilawyer, I can't remember) was UTTERLY INCENSED by this to the point of sending hate mail to the producers. Between those bits, though, I remember it as being lovely and faithful to the book.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

The Little Princess was my favorite Burnett, too. I loved the way 'make-believe' was used as a genuine tool for survival.

Have you seen the Warner Brothers, 1995 version of the movie? Definitely a step above the Shirley Temple version (Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs up, fwtw) but I haven't seen the BBC version so can't compare it to that. It is beautifully produced.

[naomikritzer]

I've seen it. I thought it was okay, but disliked the fact that they moved it to New York and revved up the ending to make it more exciting. The New York thing particularly bugged me because this is such a British book.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

I hate when movie producers (or whoever it is that decides these things) move British stories to an American setting. (I'm sure I'd hate it if someone did the reverse, too, but I can't recall ever seeing that happen.) It's as though someone has said, listen, American kids won't relate to it if they don't recognize the setting! Then they won't want to see it again!! And they won't make their parents buy the DVD!!!

To which I reply, well, is it a good story? If it is, then American kids will relate to it just fine, even if it's set in Britain. (I really don't think publishers and movie producers give American kids enough credit.) If it isn't, then why are you making it into a movie in the first place??

[naomikritzer]

Being English (complete with Britishisms like "torch" instead of "flashlight") hasn't hurt the sales of the Chronicles of Narnia any. *sigh*

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Q.E.D.

("Bother!" said Edmund. "I've left my new torch in Narnia.")

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Yeah, American kids totally don't relate to British boarding school stories. You know, the sort with wizards and stuff. Not at all. ;)

Silly publishers and producers.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

And I say again, Q.E.D.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

It would definitely have been better if the British setting were preserved; that said, the rest of it worked pretty well for me (production values, acting and true to the story up until the end) - although I recall being outraged at the contrived chase-scene with life-endangering acrobatics at the end.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Maybe there's some secret pact among American movie makers requiring chase scenes and danger regardless of the original material the movie is based upon?

[naomikritzer]

The life-endangering acrobatics are unfortunately what I remember most about this movie.

And I think American movie makers are absolutely convinced that no one will go see a movie without a sufficiently exciting final act.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Probably the single most annoying thing they do. Well; maybe second to the maiden in distress ploy.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

yes, that's the thing I hated the most of all. Hated hated hated. Though, as I was typing the comment the first time, I wanted to complain about that but I realised that it probably was truer to life than I wanted it to be--he probably would have died in wwi or of the flu.

[naomikritzer]

Yeah. I was thinking about this a bit today -- there are a number of children's books I've read as an adult where I've flipped to the copyright date, checked the technology in the illustrations, and thought something like, "Wow. Madeline was first published in 1939. That doctor who's called to the school when she gets sick is Dr. Cohn. Poor Dr. Cohn. I bet Miss Clavel didn't offer to hide him when the Nazis started rounding up the Jews. She was probably too busy trying to keep Madeline from mouthing off to the Gestapo..."

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

I remember being peeved by that -- but they made Dickon occasionally act very fey, in portentious ways, so that by the time the framing story mentioned he'd died I was thinking, "Yeah, you telegraphed that already." not "How DARE you!" Not that i was less annoyed by the arbitrary killing.

Another more subtle thing incensed me, too, though; the final version of the now not-secret garden is a perfectly tamed manicured garden area. Mary and Dickon actually talk about hoping it will always stay just a little wild, for various symbolic reasons.

They made another movie version of it about the same time they made the American Little Princess that I rather like, though it's not entirely faithful. (And like the musical, it manages to link Mary back into the main story at the end when she kind of sinks into the background in the book.) The only moment that annoys me, really, is a moment of implied prelude to romance/jealousy among the three kids. But the change they made to the dad and Colin's reunion actually stopped my breath.

[naomikritzer]

Also, I love the illustrations. They're stunning. My favorite is the one where Sara is in her dancing dress, returning to her room to find Becky sleeping in her chair.

[yankee-in-texas.livejournal.com]

I LOVED The Secret Garden and I adored Mary's brattiness and how the garden and trees and skipping rope made her well...

I also loved Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess.

There is a stage musical version of The Secret Garden which is quite excellent. It solves the "got bored with Mary and made it into a book about Colin by the end" problem. The end is actually about Mary (Colin's father gives her the garden and says that he, Colin, and Mary are a family now) and the religion is toned down into a sort of child's idea of magic and growing things. The problems are that Colin's gray eyes are transplanted into Mary's face; Mary calls Mr Craven "Uncle Archie" which grates on me; and the ghosts are... well, they grow on me, really, so now I like them. Mary's father is a ghost who follows her to England and helps with the narration. Lilly, Colin's mother, is also a ghost, but then she almost is in the book too. The kids never see or talk to the ghosts or anything hideous like that.

And the songs are really great.

The CD of the musical has enough dialog that you can follow the whole story, if you already know it. With a little explanation between songs and dialog bits, my kids knew the whole story.

[stargoatpdx.livejournal.com]

My sister played Lily for the North Carolina Theatre... maybe around 2002 or so? Not sure.