From The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

 

CHAPTER IX. THE STRANGEST HOUSE ANY ONE EVER LIVED IN

 

It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine. The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses which were so thick that they were matted together. Mary Lennox knew they were roses because she had seen a great many roses in India. All the ground was covered with grass of a wintry brown and out of it grew clumps of bushes which were surely rose-bushes if they were alive. There were numbers of standard roses which had so spread their branches that they were like little trees. There were other trees in the garden, and one of the things which made the place look strangest and loveliest was that climbing roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains, and here and there they had caught at each other or at a far-reaching branch and had crept from one tree to another and made lovely bridges of themselves. There were neither leaves nor roses on them now and Mary did not know whether they were dead or alive, but their thin gray or brown branches and sprays looked like a sort of hazy mantle spreading over everything, walls, and trees, and even brown grass, where they had fallen from their fastenings and run along the ground. It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made it all look so mysterious. Mary had thought it must be different from other gardens which had not been left all by themselves so long; and indeed it was different from any other place she had ever seen in her life. "How still it is!" she whispered. "How still!"

9) Watch the film “You’ve got mail” and write a composition named “When you read a book as a child it becomes part of your identity in the way that no other reading in your whole life does”.

10) Watch the film “Educating Rita” and formulate the main idea of the movie (in wtiting).

11) Try debating! Suggested resolutions:

· All paper books must soon be replaces by e-books.

· English literature (as well as English education) must be recognized as the most profound reading in the world.

· “Devouring pulp fiction is not being well-read”.

Follow-ups.

Suppliamentary reading.

The 20^th century English literature

1901-1939 Modernism

A major British lyric poet of the first decades of the 20th century was Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Though not a modernist Hardy is an important transitional figure between the Victorian era and the 20th-century. A major novelist of the late 19th-century, Hardy lived well into the third decade of the 20th-century. Another major modernist, a poet, Irishman W. B. Yeats's (1865-1939), career began late in the Victorian era. Yeats was one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. In his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize.

There were also many fine writers who, like Thomas Hardy, were not modernists. Irish playwrights George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and J.M. Synge (1871-1909) were influential in British drama. Shaw's career began in the last decade of the nineteenth-century, while Synge's plays belong to the first decade of the twentieth-century.

Novelists, who are not considered modernists, include: Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) who was also a successful poet; H. G. Wells (1866-1946); John Galsworthy (1867-1933), (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1932) whose works include a sequence of novels, collectively called The Forsyte Saga (1906-21); Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) author of The Old Wives' Tale (1908); G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936); and E.M. Forster (1879-1970). H. G. Wells is now best known for his science fiction novels. His most notable science fiction works include The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau all written in the 1890s

The most popular British writer of the early years of the 20th century was Rudyard Kipling, a highly versatile writer of novels, short stories and poems, and to date the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1907). Kipling's works include The Jungle Books (1894-5), The Man Who Would Be King and Kim (1901), while his inspirational poem "If—" (1895) is a national favourite. Strongly influenced by his Christian faith, G. K. Chesterton was a very influential writer. His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared only in short stories, while The Man Who Was Thursday published in 1908 is his best-known novel. Of his nonfiction, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906) has received the great praise.

Important British writers between the World Wars, include the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978), who began publishing in the 1920s, and novelists Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), E. M. Forster (1879-1970) (A Passage to India, 1924), Evelyn Waugh (1903–66), P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) (who was not a modernist) and D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was published privately in Florence in 1928. Woolf was an influential feminist, and a major stylistic innovator in novels like Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927).

An important development, beginning really in the 1930s and 1940s was a tradition of working class novels that were actually written by writers who had a working class background. Among these were coal miner Jack Jones, James Hanley, whose father was a stoker and who also went to sea as a young man, and other coal miner authors' Lewis Jones from South Wales and Harold Heslop from County Durham.

Samuel Beckett (1906–89) published his first major work, the novel Murphy in 1938. This same year Graham Greene's (1904–91) first major novel Brighton Rock was published. Then in 1939 James Joyce's published Finnegans Wake. In this work Joyce creates a special language to express the consciousness of a character who is dreaming.

1940 to the 21st Century

Among British writers in the 1940s and 1950s were novelist Graham Greene and poet Dylan Thomas. George Orwell's satire of totalitarianism, 1984, was published in 1949. Nobel Prize laureate William Golding's allegorical novel Lord of the Flies 1954, explores how culture created by man fails, using as an example a group of British schoolboys marooned on a deserted island who try to govern themselves, but with disastrous results.

An important cultural movement in the British theatre which developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s was Kitchen sink realism (or "kitchen sink drama"), a term describing art (the term itself derives from an expressionist painting by John Bratby), novels, film and television plays. The term angry young men was often applied to members of this artistic movement. It used a style of social realism which depicts the domestic lives of the working class.

20th century genre literature

Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was a crime writer of novels, short stories and plays, who is best remembered for her 80 detective novels as well as her successful plays for the West End theatre. Christie's works, particularly those featuring the detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, have given her the title the 'Queen of Crime' and she was one of the most important and innovative writers in this genre. Christie's novels include, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and And Then There Were None. Another popular writer during the Golden Age of detective fiction was Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957).

Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands 1903, is an early example of the spy novel. A noted writer in the spy novel genre was John le Carré, while in thriller writing, Ian Fleming created the character James Bond 007 in January 1952, while on holiday at his Jamaican estate. Fleming chronicled Bond's adventures in twelve novels, including Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die (1954), Dr. No (1958), Goldfinger (1959), Thunderball (1961), and nine short story works.

The Kailyard school of Scottish writers, notably J. M. Barrie (1869-1937), creator of Peter Pan (1904), presented an idealised version of society and brought of fantasy and folklore back into fashion. In 1908, Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) wrote the children's classic The Wind in the Willows.

An informal literary discussion group associated with the English faculty at the University of Oxford, were the "Inklings". Its leading members were the major fantasy novelists; C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis is especially known for The Chronicles of Narnia, while Tolkien is best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Another significant writer is Alan Garner author of Elidor (1965), while Terry Pratchett is a more recent fantasy writer. Roald Dahl rose to prominence with his children's fantasy novels, such as James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, often inspired by experiences from his childhood, which are notable for their often unexpected endings, and unsentimental, dark humour. J. K. Rowling author of the highly successful Harry Potter series and Philip Pullman famous for his His Dark Materials trilogy are other significant authors of fantasy novels for younger readers.

Essential vocabulary

decades – десятилетия

transitional – переходный

foremost – выдающийся

influential – влиятельный

sequence – последовательность, серия

recipient – получатель, номинант

inspirational – вдохновенный

coal miner – шахтер

stoker – кочегар

marooned – высаженные

derives from – происходит от

applied to – применяется к

depicts – изображает

noted – известный

the "Inklings" - «Инклинги» - неофициальная литературная дискуссионная группа в Оксфордском университете, существовавшая в период с 1930-х по 1950-е годы.

Prepare an artistic reading of the following poems: