Classic Children's Literature

Both Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, written in 1911, and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, written in 1868, have remained among the most read and best loved children's classics for decades. Although both novels are set in the times in which they were written and therefore do not provide modern readers with an intimately familiar setting, the characters and values the novels present are as real and as relevant today as they were when first created, and it is this quality which charms children of the 1990's as much as it charmed their great-grandparents. This research will explore the similarities between The Secret Garden and Little Women and identify the factors which make them such enduring children's classics.

One reason the books likely remain so popular is that both of them feature strong, independent-minded girls as their central characters. In The Secret Garden, the heroine is Mary Lennox, introduced as "the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen" (Burnett 1). The unwanted child of a well-to-do English couple living in India, young Mary is left to the care of servants who indulge her every whim out of fear; before long, Mary grows into "as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived" (Burnett 2). It is her domineering, egocentric nature, however, which allows her to survive the death of her parents and the long, solitary days she endures after relocating to Misselthwaite Manor. Young readers may not admire everything Mary says and does,

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ory, she has not only found satisfaction in her own life, she has helped Colin regain his strength--and that, in turn, brings him and his father closer together. The central character in Little Women is the dreamer Jo March, the tomboy who resents the fact that her gender prevents her from doing things she longs to do: It's bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boys' games and work and manners! I can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy; and it's worse than ever now, for I'm dying to go and fight with Papa, and I can only stay at home and knit, like a poky old woman (Alcott 5)! Like Mary Lennox, Jo is strong and independent; she likes to "do daring things" (Alcott 45), and she is "not afraid of anything" (Alcott 49). Another quality Jo shares with Mary Lennox is that she can be exceptionally temperamental and disagreeable. After her youngest sister Amy destroys her first manuscript in a fit of vengeance, Jo refuses to forgive her. Her fury is so impenetrable that when Amy follows her, uninvited, for an afternoon of ice skating, Jo fails to warn the little girl about a patch of rotten ice. Only when Amy falls through the ice and nearly drowns are Jo's softer instincts aroused, and so it took a ne

Category: Literature - C