Frances Hodgson Burnett actually knew a tame robin in her garden, just like the one in The Secret Garden, her famous children’s book. In The Writer’s Garden by Jackie Bennett, the reader discovers many such connections. The book offers short essays on authors and their gardens, accompanied by lavish photographs. Some authors were inspired by looking at their gardens, some supervised construction, and a few dug in themselves.
This new volume is a second and heavily revised edition. The Miller Library has both books. In the 2014 first edition, the 19 authors are all British – the subtitle is “how gardens inspired our best-loved authors.” This new book presents 28 writers from several countries. I imagine Jackie Bennett enjoying visits to Germany (Hermann Hesse), Italy (Antonio Fogazzaro), and even the U.S. (William Faulkner). Besides adding non-British authors and gardens, Bennett also deleted some lesser-known British ones. Farewell, Rupert Brooke and Laurence Sterne.
Bennett heavily re-edited the entries in the new edition. For Jane Austen, she reduced the number of pages from ten to eight. The new version has a different photo of the Wilderness that figures prominently in Pride and Prejudice and different illustrations for Chawton Cottage, where Austen lived for several years. For Beatrix Potter, eight pages in the first edition became ten in the second. Many photos are the same in each volume but laid out in different designs. Editorial changes include eliminating a sentence that said Potter acquired plants, “shamelessly taking them from other people’s gardens,” and removing “slightly ill-timed” from the description of a gift plant. Maybe Bennett wanted a kinder effect.
Especially for a reader who combines love of gardens with love of literature, these are both charming and elegant volumes.
Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy, published in The Leaflet, Volume 11, Number 1, January 2024.