The most delightful novel I’ve recently read is E. Nesbit’s The Wonderful Garden (1911), one of her later children’s books. I use the phrase “children’s book” loosely, since this little-known book is so whimsical that the humor might fly over the heads of its intended audience.
In this charming novel, there is not only a wonderful walled garden difficult of access (there is a “secret passage”), but a quaint, faded book, The Language of Flowers, often consulted by the three C.’s, Caroline, Charlotte, and Charles. They also discover two ancient hidden books of magic which have a profound effect on their Great-Uncle Charles’s research on the history of magic.
The thing is, Nesbit is very tongue-in-cheek here. When the three C.’s leave their vegetarian aunt and uncle to spend the rest of the summer with Great-Uncle Charles, they choose bouquets via research in The Language of Flowers as gifts for Aunt Emmeline.
Their reasoning is hysterically funny.
Caroline chooses balm, which means sympathy, because “those geography places you’re going can’t really be as nice as Uncle Charles’s.”
Charles’s bouquet was of convolvulus. “It means dead hope,” he explained; “but it’s very pretty, too.” He suddenly presented a tiny red cactus in a pot. “I bought it for you,” he said; “it means, ‘Thou leavest not.’”
Caroline, “who was almost hidden behind a huge bouquet of ivy and marigolds”:
“The ivy means friendship,” said Caroline, “and the marigolds don’t count. I only put them in because they are so goldy-bright. But if they must count, they mean cruelty – Fate’s, you know, because you’re not coming. And there’s a purple pansy in among it somewhere, which means, ‘I think of you.’”
Even if you are a Nesbit fan, you might have missed The Wonderful Garden. It was difficult for my mother to find when I was a child, and difficult for me to find a few years ago, too. The paperback edition pictured at the top is published by Read Books Ltd. The hardcover was published by Ernest Been Limited, London, and was the one I had as a child. Both editions have the original illustrations by H. R. Millar.
You may also be familiar with Nesbit from A. S. Byatt’s Booker-shortlisted novel, The Children’s Book, based loosely on the lives of Nesbit and her family, complete with gorgeous fairy tales by Nesbit’s fictional counterpart.
There are three biographies of Nesbit, the latest being The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit, by Eleanor Fitzsimons. The other two are also good, one by Doris Langley Moore, the other by Noel Streatfeild.
Nesbit was a radical; she socialized with Kipling, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and many well-known writers who had radical politics. In addition to being a poet, novelist, ghost story writer, and a children’s fantasy writer, Nesbit was a socialist and a founder of the Fabian Society.
And she was very unconventional in her married life.. Like many Victorian women writers, she supported her family: her husband, Hubert Bland, who was vivacious, popular, and a stylish dresser, their children, and Hubert’s mistress and her children by Bland.
Unfortunately, Nesbit’s adult books lack the charm and spontaneity of her other work. Her adult novel, The Lark, is the best by far of her adult books, and was reissued a few years ago with an introduction by Penelope Lively. It would pair nicely with The Wonderful Garden, because it is also about gardens.
Let me leave you with this witty passage from The Wonderful Garden.
If you are Jack Delamere, the Boy Detective who can find out all secrets by himself, pretending to be a French count, a young lady from the provinces, or a Lincolnshire labourer with a cold in his head, and in those disguises pass unrecognized by his nearest relations and by those coiners and smugglers to whom in his ordinary clothes he is only too familiar – if you can so alter your voice that your old school-fellows believe you to be, when dressed for the part, an Italian organ grinder or a performing bear.
I am sorry, but this sentence is too much for me. I give it up.
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