49 pages • 1 hour read
Kate MortonThe Forgotten Garden
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Family Secrets
When Aunt Phyllis tells Cassandra, “What I’m about to tell you is our family’s big secret. Every family’s got one, you can be sure of that. Some are just bigger than others” (20), she’s expressing a central theme of the novel. Family secrets loom large in the history of the Mountrachet family. Every major character in the book has something to conceal. Hugh’s initial disclosure to Nell that she’s adopted is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Georgiana’s identity, and that of her children, is meant to be kept secret so she can protect herself from Linus. Linus harbors an unnatural attraction toward his sister, her daughter Eliza, and his grand-niece, Ivory. Eliza never tells anyone that she’s borne a baby for Rose. Later, she tries to keep Ivory’s whereabouts a secret so that the Mountrachets will never find her. Rose is so fearful of her daughter’s true parentage becoming known that she wants to relocate the entire family to America. Adeline doesn’t want anyone to recall that she comes from a working-class family. Nathaniel comes from a similar background, and Adeline does her best to cover that up, too. Finally, Adeline conceals Eliza’s death by burying her in an unmarked grave while she simultaneously stages a mock funeral for the still-living Ivory.
A few family secrets of lesser importance also factor into the plot. The Martin family harbors two secrets: Mary’s first pregnancy and William’s discovery of Eliza’s affair with Nathaniel. Eliza refuses to tell anyone about her brother Sammy after his death. While not precisely a secret, the identity of Cassandra’s father remains a mystery. Her mother’s motivation for ridding herself of her firstborn is primarily because Cassandra doesn’t belong in Lesley’s new family with her husband and their two children. Taken as a whole, the number of secrets in the novel confirms Aunt Phyllis’ observation that some families keep secrets on a massive scale.
Loss and Survival
The three principal characters of the novel have all lost the people closest to them at some point in their lives, and all have found a way to survive on their own. Nell first articulates this theme when Cassandra comes to live with her after the girl has been left behind by her own mother. Nell says, “You’re a survivor, you hear? You’re going to be all right. Everything’s going to be all right” (43). Nell makes an identical statement shortly after Cassandra loses her husband and child in a car accident.
For her part, Cassandra recognizes the same quality in Nell: “Something in her grandmother’s voice suggested that Nell understood. That she knew just how frightening it was to spend a stormy night alone in an unfamiliar place” (43). The reason Nell calls Cassandra a survivor is because it takes one to know one. In Cornwall in 1975, Nell reminds herself that she is a survivor, too. A century earlier, Eliza undergoes a similar trauma to that of her descendants: She loses both her mother and brother yet finds a way to carry on despite her grief.
None of these three women seems to have a problem with living a solitary existence. As Cassandra observes about her grandmother, “Nell was not one for friends and had never hidden her distaste for most other humans, their neurotic compulsion for the acquisition of allies” (52). Eliza isolates herself in Cliff Cottage to such a degree that no one thinks it’s odd when she disappears for long periods of time. When Nell goes to Cornwall in 1975, no one in the family even realizes she’s left. Even Cassandra longs for solitude on her own trip to England when faced with Ruby’s noisy friendliness. The experience of abandonment has given each woman a degree of solitary self-reliance that most other people will never know.
Finding Home
Eliza, Nell, and Cassandra are each on a quest to find their true home, and Cliff Cottage represents home to each one of them at a different point in time. However, the concept of home can’t simply be equated with a building, nor can it be equated with blood kinship. All three women are part of the Mountrachet family, yet none of them feels any emotional tie to Blackhurst Manor. Because each one undergoes a series of identity shifts over the course of the novel, their search for home is more like a search for completeness within themselves.
In Australia, Nell identifies with Hugh Martin’s family but detaches herself emotionally from them the minute she learns that she’s been adopted. Nell, as a 4-year-old girl named Ivory, is the scion of a noble family. However, Nell’s biological mother is the woman Nell scarcely knows and thinks of as a fairy tale character. It isn’t until Nell dies that she comes home to the waiting arms of Eliza and feels complete.
Eliza also undergoes identity changes over the course of the story. Initially, she’s a street urchin doing her best to survive. She is a twin who loses the other half of herself when Sammy dies. She is returned to a titled family to which she is biologically connected, yet she never feels that she belongs to them. She also becomes a mother but doesn’t allow herself to feel any connection to her own daughter until after Rose’s death. Eliza finally comes home when she claims Ivory as the other half of her missing self and runs away with her.
Cassandra, too, experiences identity shifts throughout the book. She doesn’t know her father, and her mother doesn’t want her. She can’t define herself as a wife and mother after her family is killed. By tracing Nell’s convoluted family history, Cassandra achieves a sense of purpose that literally and figuratively brings her home to Cliff Cottage, where she discovers her great-grandmother’s grave and brings final closure to the mystery of Nell’s past.
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