Kent’s role as the setting for children’s literature or the home of major authors in this genre is unparalleled. E Nesbit, Mary Tourtel, Clive King all lived in the country or set parts of some of their best known books here. Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) is one of the best known through the enduring popularity of her `The Secret Garden’ (1911). The references in that to the arrival after being orphaned from India of Mary Lennox at the large, gloomy house by the moors of a guardian have become linked to a real house in a somewhat different setting – Great Maytham Manor, south east of the village of Rolvenden in East Kent. This is described as it is today in the inimitably economic style of John Newnham in his Pevsner’s Guide to North East Kent and the Weald as `Neo-Georgian. Formal, handsome and extremely large’, with additions made after Burnett’s time there in the late 1900s by the great Edward Lutyens on a house from 1721. In the novel, Mary arrives in the dark at place which is an `immensely long but low-built house, which seemed to ramble round a stone court.’ (`The Secret Garden’, 2018 edition, London, 26). The description goes on: `The entrance door was a huge one made of massive, curiously shaped panels of oak studded with big iron nails and bound with great iron bars. It opened into an enormous hall, which was so dimly lighted that the faces of the portraits on the walls and the figures on the suits of armour made Mary feel that she did not want to look at them.’ This adds a degree of atmosphere which Newman evidently did not see – he dispatches the whole place with the lapidary `Disappointing interior’!
As Vanessa Blakeslee writing in the `Paris Review’ in April 2012 made clear, ` That [Burnett] is now solely regarded as a children’s book author would have stupefied her, for she produced fifty-two novels and thirteen plays, the majority written for adults. When Burnett moved into Great Maytham Hall in Kent, she was a far more popular success than her cohort Henry James, who lived down the road; with her plays bringing in more than a thousand dollars a week, she was her era’s equivalent of Rowling.’ (`Secret Gardens,’ 12th April 2012, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/04/09/secret-gardens/) Her life had been a remarkable one. Born in Manchester, the death of her father at the age of four impoverished her family. They moved in the era of the Civil War to the US in 1864, and were based initially in Tennessee. After her first marriage to Swan Burnett in 1873, she moved to Paris, and then, from the late 1880s, after frequent visits back to her native land, to the UK. It was in this period that she started living at the Manor near Rolvendon, a place that she was to rent till 1907, some years after the end of her second, somewhat briefer marriage to Stephen Townsend who died soon after her divorce of him in 1902.
Burnett’s success belied her struggles with a recurrence of depression after the death of eldest son Lionel in 1890 from tuberculosis. But it was clear that the period in Kent was a happy one for her: `It was living at Maytham,’ she wrote after giving up her lease in 1907, `which meant England to me, in a way … That place belongs to me—it is the only place I ever felt was home … It seemed a sort of outrage that I was not living there. It seemed so what one needed—that sense of being able to go out of one big room into another—to go down corridors into room after room—to go upstairs & walk about …’ (Quoted, `Paris Review’, Ibid).
Burnett wrote `The Secret Garden’ after her return to the US. Despite multiple trips back to Britain, she was to live in America till her death. Perhaps it was partly nostalgia for her Kentish home that prompted her to write of the spoiled, irritable Mary suddenly finding a kind of transformative solace in the rose garden that she stumbles upon when exploring the environs of the great house she is now living in. This had been relocated in Burnett’s imagination to the Yorkshire Moors. Even so, the connection with the real gardens in Rolvenden is clear. She had written to her other son Vivien after looking at the place before renting it that it had `a beautiful old walled kitchen garden.’ It his which Mary finally finds the key to and ventures in – `the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place anyone could imagine.’ (`The Secret Garden’, 64).
`The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stem of climbing roses, which were so think that they were matted together…All the ground was covered with grass of wintry brown, and out of it grew clumps of bushes which were surely rose-bushes if they were alive. There were numbers of standard roses which had so spread their branches that they were like little trees. There were other trees in the garden, and one of the things which made the place look strangest and loveliest was climbing roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains… “How still it is,’ [Mary] whispered. “How still.”’