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  • Noel Streatfeild's Secret Gardens
  • Sally Sims Stokes (bio)

The pleasant rhythms of Noel Streatfeild's formulaic children's novels often mask the intricate cadences of Streatfeild's creative process. A fresh look at The Painted Garden, published by Collins in 1949, reveals Streatfeild's abilities as a teller of tales, as a chronicler of her times, and, unexpectedly, as an artful transformer of an early 20th-century children's classic.

Noel Streatfeild (1895-1986) saw"'the place of the novelist in the world'" as directly tied to novelists' "'value as historians of their age'" (qtd. in Bull 180). She believed imagination could impart a sense of history at least as well as "'facts and yet more facts'" could (180). As her biographer Angela Bull points out, "her imaginative recreation of her own time . . . can swiftly transport a reader" to another place and period. Bull pronounces Streatfeild's wartime novels, especially, to be "excellent history" (180).

The Painted Garden focuses on Jane Winter, an English child with no acting experience who is cast as Mary Lennox in a Hollywood production of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. True to Streatfeild's credo, the plot is fused with a fictional travel commentary that provides a comprehensive picture of American popular culture in the 1940s. To experience the book fully, it is essential not only to consider this rich and inventive pairing, but also to discover that at the same time Streatfeild was overtly drawing attention to The Secret Garden by making it the basis of the film in which Jane acts, she was covertly interleaving her novel-cum-travel account with a reworking of Burnett's book. Streatfeild's self-styled role as recorder of her times; her life lessons, puckishly delivered; and her ability to fashion an intricate carryover of The Secret Garden all emerge from a new examination of The Painted Garden. 1

One of the most popular and prolific English writers of the mid-20th century, Noel Streatfeild produced scores of books for adults and children. Her best-known titles follow the professional, home, and school experiences of fictional children in the performing arts. Streatfeild's painstaking research into the lifeways of young performers was a hallmark of her work. Her thoroughgoing [End Page 172] study of the worlds of dance, tennis, the big tent, and the ice arena is evident, in turn, in Ballet Shoes, Tennis Shoes, The Circus is Coming (published by Random House in the United States as Circus Shoes), and White Boots (Skating Shoes), issued in 1936, 1937, 1938, and 1951, respectively. Her knowledge of the theatre comes through in Curtain Up(Theater Shoes; 1944), and of village pageants, in Party Frock (Party Shoes; 1946).

Having briefly covered the highs and lows of film studio life in Ballet Shoes, in which the character Pauline Fossil acts in a British motion picture, in the late 1930s Streatfeild began a series of trips to California to study and interview child film actors.2 By 1946 her thoughts were centering on a Hollywood story, for in October of that year Publishers' Weekly announced that Streatfeild, during her current stay in the U.S., planned "to do some preliminary research on her next juvenile, which will be about a child movie star" ("Tips" 2497). It was the filming of MGM's The Secret Garden, released in 1949, and the opportunity to watch its young star, Margaret O'Brien, at work, that aroused Streatfeild's muse in bringing about The Painted Garden: The Story of a Holiday in Hollywood. 3

Streatfeild's primary character, Jane Winter, is a touchy ten-year-old with a sensitive soul. Jane loves her dog, Chewing-Gum, more than she cares for any human being, and she harbors hopes of becoming an animal trainer. The lackluster middle child, Jane is stuck between two gifted siblings—Rachel, a promising ballet dancer; and Tim, a comedian and pianist of no small talent. Parents John and Bee Winter and a trusty factotum, Peaseblossom, round out the family group. From one fall to the following spring in the late 1940s, the Winters are the guests of John's sister, Cora Beeson, a widow who lives in Santa...

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