The author apologises that these alternate plot lines are almost entirely based on the movie versions of these books, watched feverishly during an 18 hour flight over approx. 16 airplane desserts. The author’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
Mary, The Secret Garden
After an adolescence of playing Dickon and Colin off of one another (in exchange for pony rides and handmaid gowns, respectively) Mary and Dickon finally undress one another in the quiet of the Secret Garden, days before Dickon is sent to the trenches of World War 1. When Colin finds out (because Colin ALWAYS finds out, he reminds them, in third person) his largest complaint is that the deed was done in HIS mother’s garden, with HIS cousin, and therefore the right was inevitably his.
“It doesn’t work that way, Colin” Dickon says, gently.
“Dick on THIS, farm boy” says Colin, who has been saving this particular phrase for some time.
Dickon, obviously, is among the first to heroically perish, astride the only horse ever declared more stoic than War Horse while Colin’s various and non-specific ailments keep him out of the war and alive to comfort Mary throughout. Mary appreciates the gesture and has even let Colin kiss her with his mouth open several times.
Colin will interpret this as sex his entire adult life.
A life of quiet scholarship and a fascination with back lumps has made Colin England’s foremost expert on lumps, and he travels the country lecturing on the topic frequently. Mary mourns, manages her cousin’s estate, and writes. She has been published widely under the nom de plume “P. L. Travers.”
Maggie Smith’s character becomes the first woman to be formally diagnosed with Munchausen by Proxy. Martha finally gets her real estate license.
Becky, A Little Princess
After Sara Crewe and Becky are whisked back to India by the newly-alive Captain Crewe, the two develop the co-dependent romantic relationship typically born of two girls enslaved in an attic together. Their relationship is somewhat of an open secret in New Delhi, and the subject of much gossip among their household. “Give a fuck,” says Sara, grabbing her own crotch and flicking her cigarette into the sand.
Sara’s heinous wealth, colourful imagination and incredible egotism has quickly made her an unbearable human being. Her “princess” tramp stamp is a source of incredible shame for her father, who is still not quite sure what’s happening or who he is or if the war is indeed over.
Becky struggles to hide her newfound disgust in the girl she once cherished so. Becky is young, but Becky spent her formative years cleaning rat shit out of a third-hand toothbrush, and so Becky knows herself. Becky knows herself well enough to know when Becky is not in love any more.
The Crewes plead with her to stay. Sara, because she cannot bear to lose someone she loves yet again, and Captain Crewe because he is terrified to be left alone with his terrible and confusing daughter.
“I need to find out who I am,” lies Becky, eager to escape these rich white weirdos. “I need to find my parents.” More lies. Becky’s parents are dead and she has never given them a lick of thought until that momentary rush of inspiration. Becky leaves, and, as always with the Crewes, there is a weird moment with a doll.
Becky’s white person clothes and black person everything else immediately makes her a much sought after dinner guest in New York. She becomes a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, has a brief fling with Nella Larsen and tells people that Passing is so obviously about her.
Black Beauty, Black Beauty
The fact that he is a horse who has written a book notwithstanding, the problems that affected Black Beauty as a non-book writing horse continue to affect him today. Like every human that loves Beauty, Joe eventually grows sickly and his doctor implores him to move to a warmer clime, France probably, always France, leaving B.B. to live by his own wits yet again. Suspecting now that all doctors have a personal vendetta against him, B.B. begins work on his second book, which famously renounced Victorian medical practices.
“If you find yourself with bad air, violent emotion, irregular bowels or cases of extreme heat and cold,” writes B.B. “perhaps do not leave your entire life behind you. Perhaps do not leave your business, your lands, and your horse as if on a sudden whim. Perhaps take the smallest amount of effort to regain your health. Eat an orange. Wear a scarf. Take practical measures to not ruin your horse’s life.”
There is a sharp decline in horse-owning Victorians suddenly moving to France. Infant mortality soars. The human population, within two decades, begins to fall.
Within one hundred years, talking horses are the dominant class. They own large estates, and when they move to France, ensure their pets are cared for. The general consensus is that it is a better world.
Tags: books, caroline o’donoghue, humor, nostalgia
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This speaks to me on a deep, personal level.
Also, now I don’t have to write that short, erotic fiction about Mary and Dickon getting it on while Colin seethes with jealousy that’s been knocking about in my mind forever!
That is something I never knew I wanted……Now I’m going to have to wade through ff.net for something well-written (is that still the site the cool kids use? It’s been a while).
I know AO3 has at least one very good Secret Garden fic (probably more, but I can only remember the one); check there, as well!
ETA: I just went to look…58 fics, dear god, I was off by a lot.
I realised someone had already done it when I read The Secret Garden and Lady Chatterley’s Lover in quick succession.
Wow I never thought of that but that’s so true. Lady Chatterly’s Lover is Secret Garden erotic fanfic. I am profoundly disturbed, impressed, weirded out, and a little turned on.
I should have you know that I was convinced that Mallory wrote this, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can pay. I kept snorting at myself because “Dick on THIS.”
Also I was super confused for a minute and had to go read up on Wikipedia, because I kept going “Becky was black???” and thought I had missed some crucial part of information in the book. But now I want to go watch the 1995 adaptation instead!
As the young book purist (and avid Little Princess fan) I was, I hated that adaptation when I was a kid because of the changes. As an adult? Dear old dad being alive at the end makes me sob with tears of joy every freaking time. It’s getting embarrassing.
I missed the little disclaimer at the top and now this all makes much more sense to me.
Because clearly, if you go with the book version, Sara Crewe rents a charming flat in Piccadilly to share with Becky and wanders the London streets, handsomely cross-dressed, handing out coins and gifts of food. She’ll wink at the flower-sellers and the maids and the ladies who wonder about this dapper gentleman, but she always returns faithfully to Becky, a hot fire, and an excellent Scotch.
#teamdickon but mostly because I had a big ol’ crush on Barret Oliver in the 1987 Hallmark Hall of Fame adaptation.
Edited to add: holy shit Colin Firth plays adult Colin in that movie!
(NO FUCKING WAY OMG Colin Firth)
I recorded that on my trusty vcr and promptly WORE IT OUT. #teamdickon for life
trust me that I know exactly how unpopular a sentiment this will be among the sorts of people who will be reading it when I say:
fuck Dickon. fuck all sensitive humble country boys like him.
Mary ends up with neither of them, but not because Colin isn’t great (he is) but because Mary needs someone she can dominate with her whole heart, and Colin is too easy. and Dickon, well. why would you bother.
& I like your vision of Sara a whole lot but I don’t get why anybody would ever leave such a wonderful woman
#teamcolin, for his witchy fire-chant alone.
yeah! plus Dickon works happily with the world and Colin fights feebly and petulantly against it. be a Colin, not a Dickon. it’s the only way.
I always loved A Little Princess but barely made it through The Secret Garden (though I loooved the movie). Possibly because Mary was so aggressively unpleasant for most of it that I couldn’t put up with her. She, like Emma Woodhouse, is more bearable in adaptation.
So into Becky’s fate here. Queen of the Harlem Renaissance right there.
In my dream world she eventually punches Dad-from-Fall-On-Your-Knees in the nose.
These are EPICALLY real to me. Especially Black Beauty advising Joe to eat a damn orange or wear a fucking scarf, for shit’s sake. SERIOUSLY JOE.
Within one hundred years, talking horses are the dominant class.
you know how there are all these post-apocalyptic fantasias about how humans must cope in a blasted world where all manual skills have been lost since everything is made by and of machines in factories and no one knows how to work a lathe anymore? I bet in this future talking-horse-dominated England there is a whole category of anxiety literature about what it would be like in a dystopian future where everybody depends on humans and their clever hands and thumbs but then there is some kind of disaster like a potato blight but for humans, and all the talking horses have to wander through the streets trying to figure out how to turn doorknobs on their own. what nightmares they would have.
Maybe you might wanna check out Clifford Simak’s City. It’s dogs, not horses, and the humans are gone, but there’s a humanoid robot…anyway. I’m not selling it very well, but it’s one of the few pieces of old SF I can read without flying into a rage.
wait, the talking dogs are vegetarians? I think I need a minute.
anyhow I haven’t read it but I think I have a copy of it around somewhere. I didn’t know about the dog business, which is, I guess, the entire point. I will be reading that soon for sure.
the talking dogs are vegetarians
Shhh. Shhhhhhh. Just *waves hand* never mind parts of it. LOOK! DOGGIES!
Clifford D. Simak is the bomb, and I recommend anything he writes.
I don’t think I’ve read City, but I am an amateur collector of Golden Age science fiction, and Simak is definitely one of my top one or two dozen favorite authors. (That sounds like faint praise, but it’s really not: I just love reading so much that I can’t whittle down my favorites lists.)
Oh my word, also check out The Mount by Carol Emschwiller. It’s the reverse: a dominant culture makes humans into horses and you will somehow end up worrying about how they will make it without humans to ride after the inevitable human revolution.
Holy wow, how have I never heard of this before? Thank you!
Was this a theme with Emschwiller? She also wrote Carmen Dog, about a dog who turns into a human. Sort of. I think.
oh and you can bet that in Talking Horse The Magician’s Nephew there is a whole lot of King Strawberry and not so much of his lowly subjects Frank and Helen. and then there is “A Boy and his Horse,” whose title is, of course, ironic.
(I had to look up what King Frank’s horse’s name was. sorry, talking horses. no wonder you rewrote those books.)
Isn’t it Fledge after he becomes winged? Or is Fledge another winged horse in that book? (I JUST listened to these on audiobook not long ago and now I’m like “who?” again, so clearly my memory is not the best.)
oh, you’re right! He gets a new name and becomes the father of all flying horses even though Aslan didn’t bother calling an afterthought lady winged horse into Narnia to make that a little more feasible. it is like the problem of Cain’s wife all over again.
edit: oh and the part how when he gets the power of speech he gets to tell everybody how much he fucking hated being a cab horse, if Black Beauty wrote self-insert fanfic he would absolutely project himself onto Strawberry/Fledge real hard and not only that it is made to order wingfic or whatever you call ‘wingfic’ when it is ‘canon’
(I do not know what “wingfic” is but I know it’s something)
Original comment deleted. I’m a dummy. I love this Talking Horse world.
Dickon definitely dies when his meth lab explodes
I laughed out loud at this. “LOLed” as the kids might say.
THIS IS BLASPHEMY DICKON WILL LIVE FOR 1000 YEARS
Take practical measures to not ruin your horse’s life.
Sound advice for all.
Ugh, Dickon, so sanctimonious. Ugh, Colin you entitled twit. Forget them both, Mary. Go see the world, hold on to your skepticism, enjoy being a rich old spinster, and when people ask you about your parents tell them “They were assholes who died of their own stupidity and nearly took me with them.”
Like every human that loves Beauty, Joe eventually grows sickly
I’ve never read/seen Black Beauty and this sentence makes it sound like Black Beauty is a sinister wizard-horse who deliberately infects the humans around him, possibly as revenge for neglecting it or punishment for not eating oranges and wearing scarves.
Whither Harriet the Spy tho?
Bryn Mawr, graduate work on the Sorbonne, postdoc at Ole Miss where she revisits her childhood alienation from others in excruciating detail, two moderately successful novels about observing others published under an assumed name written during said postdoc, series of feckless adjunct jobs supported by her parents’ money and her occasional writing, eventually a non-profit gig set up by Sport’s inherited millions. Bird watches as cover for people watching, still hangs out with Beth Ellen so they can stage elaborate disquieting pranks.
Writes the Great American Novel in her mid fifties.
IF you liked “The Secret Garden” and IF you also enjoy having your wicked little heart snatched from your bosom and pulled slowly into tiny wet shreds, give FH Burnett’s “My Robin” a try. It is the true story of the bird from the garden.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5304
The only other thing that makes me weep so reliably is the death of Jean Valjean (any media, any version).
I had no idea that this existed before now. Thank you so much for linking it.
“Eat an orange. Wear a scarf. Take practical measures to not ruin your horse’s life.”
This is sage advice in any context.
All of this made me laugh, but rarely has my mirth been so melancholy as when I read, “Colin will interpret this as sex his entire adult life.”
There is in fact a sequel to the Secret Garden (modern, unauthorized sequel) that I read when I was smallish not realizing it was actually basically a romance novel, and it was one of my first experiences with sexy feelings. I believe Mary does get with Dickon, but maybe he dies like Mallory says? And Colin maybe turns out to be gay? The only thing I remember clearly is that Mary goes to India and has elicit sex with someone in the grass.
A ha!
I came here to post about that book! Colin does turn out to be gay–I think there is a scene of Mary seeing him and a bunch of other young gay men skinny dipping.
This whole Secret Garden thing sounds like a mashup of D.H. Lawrence and ‘Maurice’ by E.M Forster!
I loved A Little Princess and read it over and over, but Burnett uses “ejaculate” several times, meaning, in that context, to speak up. I remember using it in conversation without knowing it has another meaning. Thanks, MOM (could have corrected me the first time I did it. She is probably still laughing).
I also did this, in a classroom setting. Thanks for nothing, Frances.
OMG. The pain of being a child that learns too many words from old books.
stifling my laughter at work, ahhhh
I read the book first and didn’t discover that the movie ending to A Little Princess was different until I was in the middle of auditions for the play version. Everyone trying out was asked what her favorite part of the story was. Imagine my confusion when something like 90% of the girls ahead of me answered, “When her father comes back!”
My answer, after my mom explained what they were talking about, was to say I had read the book and liked the REAL version better because her dad was supposed to die and stay dead.
Needless to say, I did not get a part.
he does kind of come back though. The friend of the dad is BASICALLY THE EXACT SAME AS THE DAD, plus a monkey and a servant to climb around on the roof leaving snacks for Sara. I mean, sucks your dad died sarah, good thing the exact same thing as your dad shows up to be your dad, plus he has diamonds.
He’s objectively better, because he doesn’t live outside his means and he takes practical steps to support those who depend on him.
Which is to say that he’s not the same at all, because obviously the incompetence about household management and maintaining appropriate social contacts is why Sarah is insane precocious and very very emotionally committed to her dad.
Does everyone know about the Shirley Temple version of [The] Little Princess? Dad doesn’t die in that one either. It’s also very bizarre.Also all the online versions have that crappy colorization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyCzOTRbPug
and there’s a teacher/some dude love interest, with a musical dream sequence!
Can someone please write some Black Beauty / Gulliver’s Travels crossover where Black Beauty ends up in the land of the Houyhnhnms and realises his true personhood? (Or should that be horsehood?)
Caroline, I love this. I picture Mary as a tough old broad asking people if there’s something wrong with their arms if they’re too slow pouring her whiskey.
Oh my god how am I just reading this, these are fucking incredible. “Give a fuck,” says Sara, grabbing her own crotch and flicking her cigarette into the sand.” I just woke up my sleeping bed partner LOLing at this.