"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

In The Closed Room

Frances Hodgson Burnett, born in Manchester and relocated to America during her adolescence following the death of her father, swiftly became the breadwinner for her family by crafting fiction for popular magazines. Hodgson demonstrated a talent for transforming clichés about England into captivating narratives tailored for the American mass-market: though she initially focused on creating dialect stories featuring North Country working women, she started writing stories about children after her marriage to Swan Burnett, an American, and the birth of her two sons. She will unfortunately lose one of them to tuberculosis. Aside from The Secret Garden, her other renowned masterpiece is Little Lord Fauntleroy, the epitome of the Beautiful Child genre.

This short story features a garden too, and children of course, in a charming way that can only be compared to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel “The Scarlet Letter”. Only the garden is open, endless, and it’s hidden in a closed room.

You can download an eBook today on my Patreon.

Summertime

Marianne Moore’s Real Toads

Marianne Moore was an American modernist poet, critic, editor, and translator known for her wit and formal experimentation. She was born in Missouri in 1887, studied at Bryn Mawr College, and became one of the major voices of 20th-century American poetry. Selected Poems is one

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Classic Stories of the Sea

A charming collection of tales on the sea in various forms, curated by Harrier Sanders, all delightful if a bit too heterogeneous for my taste. You go feom tales of sailors (“The Captain’s Arm”, “Hornblower and the Widow McCool”) to tales in which the sea

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Ten Windows

Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator, widely admired for work that bridges lyric poetry, meditation, ecology, and philosophy. She’s also known as a lucid critic of poetry and has written influential essays on how poems work and why they matter. Ten Windows:

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Marianne Moore’s Real Toads

Marianne Moore was an American modernist poet, critic, editor, and translator known for her wit and formal experimentation. She was born in Missouri in 1887, studied at Bryn Mawr College, and became one of the major voices of 20th-century American poetry. Selected Poems is one

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