| | 1 | Author: | Burnett, Frances Hodgson | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Secret Garden  | | | | Published: | 2000 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle
everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was
true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair
and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she
had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father
had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and
ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to
parties and amuse herself with gay people. She had not wanted a little girl at
all, and when Mary was born she handed her over to the care of an Ayah, who was
made to understand that if she wished to please the Mem Sahib she must keep the
child out of sight as much as possible. So when she was a sickly, fretful, ugly
little baby she was kept out of the way, and when she became a
sickly, fretful, toddling thing she was kept out of the way also. She never
remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the
other native servants, and as they always obeyed her and gave her her own way in
everything, because the Mem Sahib would be angry if she was disturbed by her
crying, by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a
little pig as ever lived. The young English governess who came to teach her to
read and write disliked her so much that she gave up her place in three months,
and when other governesses came to try to fill it they always went away in a
shorter time than the first one. So if Mary had not chosen to really want to
know how to read books she would never have learned her letters at all. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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