Women's Rights by Ann Savage

Author:Ann Savage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO

Novelist and short story writer Edith Wharton was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence. Wharton is also widely known for her novel The House of Mirth. (Library of Congress)

Wharton mocked her reviewers’ squeamishness about Lily’s behavior. In her introduction to the 1936 edition of The House of Mirth, she wrote: “What picture did the writer offer to their horrified eyes? That of a young girl of their work who rouged, smoked, ran into debt, borrowed money, gambled, and—crowning horror!—went home with a bachelor friend to take tea in his flat!” (Wharton, 1936: 375). Wharton’s sarcasm underscores the strict social parameters within which Lily, and the women who were reading her story and perhaps even Wharton herself, were expected to operate.

Erica Robak

FURTHER READING

Beer, Janet, Pamela Knights, and Elizabeth Nolan, eds. 2007. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: A Routledge Study Guide. New York: Routledge.

The Edith Wharton Society. 2016. https://edithwhartonsociety.wordpress.com.

Wharton, Edith. 1936. “Appendix A: Edith Wharton’s Introduction to the 1936 Edition of The House of Mirth.” In The House of Mirth, 371–76. Edited by Janet Beer, and Elizabeth Nolan. Ontario: Broadview Press.

Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. 1994. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Perseus.

THE SECRET GARDEN BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT (1911)

With a garden metaphor, Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) examined nature’s healing power, described as Magic, throughout The Secret Garden (1911). Mary Lennox, the young protagonist, learns to care for herself and experience solitude in the garden. The secret garden becomes a room of her own, where Mary discovers how to enjoy her body, exercise her imagination, and expand her social circle.

The Secret Garden was published as a novel after being released as a serial in The American Magazine. During Burnett’s life, The Secret Garden was an overlooked part of her work. It was not even mentioned in her obituary. With the rise of children’s literature in the late 20th century, as well as an uptick in adaptations after the work’s U.S. copyright expired in 1987, The Secret Garden is now one of Burnett’s best-known works. Basing Mary on the popular English nursery rhyme “Mary, Mary Quite Contrary,” Burnett created a girl who was brash, hurting, and real. Mary claims, “People never like me and I never like people.” This is a stark difference from the Victorian notion that girls are quiet, polite, and unassuming.

We meet 10-year-old Mary in India during a cholera outbreak. As a spoiled, disagreeable, and sometimes violent child, she is unwanted by her parents and tyrannical to the Indian servants. During the crisis, her parents and nanny die. When she is discovered alone in the house, she is sent to live with her uncle in England. In contrast to other portrayals of girls of the time (Anne Shirley, Jane Eyre, Heidi), Mary Lennox is not a good-hearted orphan; she is willful and self-absorbed.

Upon her arrival in Yorkshire, Mary is lonely and far away from a life she understands. Though she is left alone by her uncle, Archibald

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