I’m participating in the A-Z Blogging Challenge, where I post every day in the month of April (except Sundays) and each day is a letter.

My theme for the month is a series of posts about the things that shaped me.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Hodgson Burnett is another writer who loomed large in my childhood.

Just like Anne of Green Gables, my copy of The Secret Garden is tattered and falling apart. Many times, I have read and imagined Mary Lennox’s wonder when she discovers the locked door and the secret world beyond it. (The 1993 movie is a reasonable version — though, you put Dame Maggie Smith in anything and it’s worth watching.)

I don’t quite remember which one I read first, and if you ask which I liked better, I’m not sure if I could choose between The Secret Garden and A Little Princess. I think I met Sara Crewe first; I quite clearly recall her vivid imagination and her friendship with Becky, the poor Cockney maid she lives with in her garret (I remember asking my mother what that was, and now every “garret” I’ve ever read is a variation of Sara’s in my head).

It really is quite remarkable how many wonderful young girls exist in literature — the farther along in the alphabet I get, the more I remember and the the more I want to go back and reread these books that factored so strongly in my childhood.

I feel sorry for anyone who didn’t have (or worse, want) access to these wonderful stories growing up. I fully agree with the George R. R. Martin quote:

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

Though, of course, replace “man” with “girl”, and there’s my childhood.

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

And here is yet another entry — and like every young person who reads From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, I wanted to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Again, I don’t remember when I read it. I don’t even remember the first time I picked up the novel. But I reread it just a few years ago, and I still remembered every beat in the story.

There are just some books that stick with you your entire life, and even though you don’t remember the first you heard of it. I’m a little sad I don’t remember the first time I read it, because that means I don’t remember being excited or surprised by any of it. But I had to have been, to have reread as often as I did.

Fried Green Tomatoes

Yes, I saw the movie first. And I loved it. I still don’t understand why people eat fried green tomatoes, but Jessica Tandy was magical and I saw it was based on a book in the credits, and well, so it goes.

The movie and the book certainly have their differences. In many cases when I read a book after I see the movie, I picture the actors as the characters. But there’s such a difference between the characters in the novel and the way they were depicted in the film, I think only Kathy Bates stuck in my head, as the repressed housewife who discovers herself and her strength through the stories of the Whistle Stop Cafe.

It seems that the letter “F” is ultimately for “female” in my personal history; today has an awful lot of strong women role models — Sara Crewe and Mary Lennox, Claudia Kincaid and Mrs. Frankweiler, and 95% of the characters we meet in Whistle Stop — not to mention the women writers who gave us these stories.

Now, go read!

What do you think? Any strong women (characters or writers) I’ve missed so far?

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