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Фрэнсис Элиза Ходжсон Бёрнетт

Таинственный сад / The Secret Garden. B1

© Грек А. А. , адаптация, словарь, упражнения, 2023

© ООО «Издательство АСТ», 2023

Burnett’s Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) was a British-American writer. She started her writing career at the age of seventeen in order to support her family and turned it into the main source of her income. She wrote stories for both children and adults and worked as a playwright by turning them into theatre plays.

By the time Burnett published The Secret Garden (1911), she had become a well-known author. Her bestselling books Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess had sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Still, the writer called The Secret Garden her favourite.

It is interesting to know that the little robin – one of the vital and most charming characters – was in fact inspired by a real English robin. The bird often joined Burnett while she was writing in the rose garden near Maytham Hall, Burnett’s house in England. The writer became friends with the bird and even tried to speak to it!

Before-Reading Questions

1.  The novel’s working title was Mistress Mary. Later, the author changed it to The Secret Garden. What is the difference between the two titles? What plot would you expect from a children’s novel titled Mistress Mary?

Chapter 1

Little Miss Mary

Nobody seemed to care about Mary. She was born in India, where her father was a British official. He was busy with his work, and her mother, who was very beautiful, spent all her time going to parties. So an Indian woman, Kamala, was paid to take care of the little girl.

Mary was not a pretty child. She had a thin angry face and thin yellow hair. She was always giving orders to Kamala. Mary never thought of other people, but only of herself. In fact, she was a very selfish, disagreeable, bad-tempered little girl.

One very hot morning, when she was about nine years old, she woke up and saw that instead of Kamala there was a different Indian servant by her bed.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked crossly. ‘Go away! And send Kamala to me at once!’

The woman looked afraid. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Mary, she – she – she can’t come!’

Something strange was happening that day. Some of the house servants were missing and everybody looked frightened. But nobody told Mary anything, and Kamala still did not come. So at last Mary went out into the garden, and played by herself under a tree. She pretended she was making her own flower garden, and picked large red flowers to push into the ground. All the time she was saying crossly to herself,

‘I hate Kamala! I’ll hit her when she comes back!’

Just then she saw her mother coming into the garden, with a young Englishman. They did not notice the child, who listened to their conversation.