A couple weeks now since I finished Burnett's The Secret Garden. Rather different from the 1993 film version, which had the manor's housekeeper Mrs. Medlock a somewhat adversarial figure in the lives of children Mary and Colin, and in making her that way trimmed the edges of a story to enhance both the magic that is wonder and the unification of parent (Colin's estranged father) and child (Colin). A second layer of the novel is ever-present today, and that of course is grief. Yet another is allegory: Mary's "return" from an ailing British colony (India), where she revives the hereditary Brit that is Colin (and thus -- patriarchy being what it is -- herself). At the untrimmed edges of this allegory is the fantasy we call Brexit.
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