The Girls in the Garden: A Novel

The literary concept of the green world is a realm of exploration and experimentation, especially in matters of love between young people. It refers to an unreal and magical space, where rules no longer apply. Northrop Frye described Shakespeare’s green worlds that appear in comedies such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It in 1948—the green world exists in parallel with the real world, which is more urban, and characters move between the two worlds (Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 183). For instance, Shakespeare uses the Forest of Arden as a green world where Rosalind can dress as a man, Ganymede, who pretends to be a woman in order to teach another man, Orlando, how to court her true female self. This forest is inspired by the real-life Forest of Arden in England. The literary green world is associated with the pastoral—an idealized rural space. The green world concept is used in the analysis of a wide variety of texts, from medieval to modern. In The Girls in the Garden, the green world is Virginia Park. It is located in London, with a direct geographical connection to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. (The real-life Forest of Arden was closer to the town where Shakespeare was born, Stratford-Upon-Avon.)

Jewell includes a map at the beginning of her novel of Virginia Park’s various features, such as the Secret Garden and the Rose Garden. The former is an allusion to the novel The Secret Garden (1911) by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The death of Phoebe before the main plot of Jewell’s novel can be compared with the death of Lilias Craven in the garden in The Secret Garden. The magical nature of Jewell’s green world is a “fragile alchemy” of the relationships between the children there. Leo describes its otherworldly nature, saying what happens there is “[j]ust a Virginia Park thing. Just history” (375). He felt free, as a 17-year-old, to date 13-year-old Cecelia in the park, as well as her 15-year-old sister, Phoebe. The green world is both positive and negative in Girls in the Garden.