When Marianne learns the boy in the dream-house is also called Mark, she realises her dream world isn’t entirely her own. In her waking life, because she can’t attend school till she’s well again, she’s being taught by a governess, who mentions another home-visit pupil, a boy called Mark whose illness has left him too weak to walk. So Marianne starts working on interior drawings, too. Both details have been added to the house when she next dreams, but the boy at the window can’t answer her knock because the house has no stairs inside and (something he doesn’t admit immediately) he can’t walk. When she wakes, she adds a knocker to the door, and, for someone to answer it, a face at an upper window. With it, she draws a standard child-style house, and when she sleeps, dreams of walking up to this very house, but being unable to get in. Bed-bound for weeks after an unspecified illness, she finds a special pencil (“one of those pencils that are simply asking to be written or drawn with”), thereafter referred to as The Pencil, in her grandmother’s button box. In Storr’s book, the “Secret Garden” is a dream world 10-year-old Marianne creates through drawings made in her waking life. Catherine Storr’s 1958 novel Marianne Dreams contains a perfect example of what Humphrey Carpenter calls the “ Secret Garden”, found in so many classic kids’ books from Alice in Wonderland onwards - those Arcadian pocket-worlds that encapsulate an idealised childhood, part fantastic imagination, part golden-tinged nostalgia.
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