The Secret Garden: On the loss of nannies in fiction and life

Abstract

This article focuses on The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic novel for children. British childcare customs of the upper-class parents of Mary Lennox and Colin Craven in Victorian-Edwardian England and the British Raj in India are underscored. Overlooked psychoanalytic data on developmental consequences of the loss of early primary maternal surrogates and the arrest of mourning are applied to the novel's main protagonists.

Keywords:

• British Nanny
• Children's Story
• Clinical Findings
• Early Primary Surrogate Mother
• Loss
• Psychoanalytic Theory