The Secret Garden Art Novel ™ by Frances Hodgson Burnett (review)

Reviewed by: The Secret Garden Art Novel ™ by Frances Hodgson Burnett Angelica Shirley Carpenter (bio) The Secret Garden Art Novel ™ by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Introduction and Annotations by Maria H. Frawley, Marion Gymnich, and Amy P. Wong. Bond & Grace Co., 2022. Here is a new kind of book inspired by The Secret Garden. Weighing in at almost five pounds, the 260-page, ten-by-thirteen-inch coffee table book is the first of a series from a new publisher, Bond & Grace. This "Art Novel™" is not a novel about art or artists; instead, it seems a distant cousin to an "artist's book," a work of art in book form. An artist's book is usually one project—book, content, and art—created by one person. This new, annotated edition of The Secret Garden, with a list price of $395, contains more than fifty pieces of widely varying original art by twelve different artists, eleven of them women. With their first Art Novel™, Bond & Grace hopes to carve out a special niche within the coffee table book market currently dominated by nonfiction, photo memoirs, and artist biographies. The three young women who founded the company, Jacqueline Bond, Ayana Christie, and Maggie Lemark, consider the featured artists to be not just illustrators but visual collaborators in the project. They hope to breed progress for women artists in a field where, they say, 87% of artists in museums, galleries, and art fairs are still white men. So this Art Novel™, if it becomes a genre, is unique. The hardcover book is handsome and well made. Even the mailing box is beautiful, with a black and white William Morris-like floral print on the outside and messages and elegant drawings on the interior. This opens to a white canvas bag with a drawstring closure of gray satin ribbons. The bag contains the book in a sturdy black cloth clamshell box, tied with white ribbons, along with a brochure and a sixty-eight-page color booklet titled Art Foreword, which is a catalogue with photographs and information about the artists and all the pictures from the book. This brochure, along with captions in the book, explains that the art pieces include oil and acrylic on canvas, photographs, set designs, hand-created sculptures, paint and thread creations, and fiber-based art, to name just some media used. On the publisher's website, the original artworks, ranging in price from $560 to $16,800, are for sale, with 80% of the sale price going to the artist. The book is bound in gray cloth with gold foil embossing and a light green vegan leather spine. Its pages and bindings are sewn. Floral end-papers in green, white, and lavender again echo William Morris and set a palate for the interior, publisher-designed decorations of leaves and flowers. A pink satin ribbon bookmark adds to a lush, feminine impression. "A trio of PhD scholars," Maris H. Frawley, Marion Gymnich, and Amy R. Wong, who specialize, respectively, in medical history, Victorian British literature, and identity formation, provide the introduction and annotations throughout the novel's text. The ten-page introduction contains photos of Burnett and her book covers, plus pictures of items and advertisements from her lifetime. [End Page 336] Annotations, printed in green to stand out from the novel's black type-face, come in two formats. The first highlights words or sentences (from the first page: "Her hair was yellow and her face was yellow . . . ."), and then explains them in sidebars on the same page ("Mary's yellow coloring is possibly a racialized representation, in which whiteness was reserved for native-born English children . . . ."). Other notes are mini-essays, indented within the text itself; the paragraph about Mary being found alone in India compares her to other orphans in children's literature and analyzes Burnett's use of Mary's selfishness. The inserted paragraphs seemed distracting; the sidebars did not. The art pieces, beautifully reproduced, were created by eight United States artists and four from Canada, India, Germany, and England. They cover wide-ranging subjects. Some pictures are easy to understand: a photo of a blossom-bedecked, modern wheelchair; flower pictures that look like botanical text...

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