The Secret Garden

How often do writers really understand their own work? It's one thing if a writer puts out, say, three or four books in a lifetime. James Joyce wrote three novels and a bunch of short stories, and no doubt was fairly aware of the differences among them. They happen to progress in a straight line of modernism: you can read Portrait, you can struggle through Ulysses, and you can spend a week or two parsing the first page of Finnegan. Joyce had to realize that there weren't a lot of people who were going to think of Finnegans Wake as a good airplane read (or whatever constituted such in his day). So I would suggest that Joyce understood his own work.

What about Stephen King? He's written more books that he can probably remember. With that large an oeuvre, how can he possibly imagine which books will truly be his legacy? No matter what he happens to think, I'll bet he's wrong, simply because the odds are against him.

Look at Frances Hodgson Burnett. She wrote 52 novels and 13 plays. As primarily a writer for adults, no doubt she would be surprised to learn that she is now known for exactly one book, The Secret Garden. A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy may ring some bells among readers who like to go exceptionally deep, but that's about it. At the height of her quite extensive fame, Burnett moved into an estate in Kent:

Like her adolescent heroine, Burnett was led by a robin to the door hidden in the crumbling, ivy-covered garden wall; she executed a massive restoration project with the head gardener, expanding the view of the lawns, planting hundreds of flowers, and constructing a rose walkway. She settled into writing under a gazebo with her tame robin fluttering nearby. The book she worked on that first summer was not The Secret Garden, however, but one she had long labored over and was convinced would be her literary masterpiece, In Connection with the DeWilloughby Claim.

In Connection with the DeWilloughby Claim? Never heard of it. Burnett's story is an interesting one, especially if you're a fan of her work: Secret Gardens by Vanessa Blakeslee for the Paris Review.