Do you think you can bear living here?

A Little Princess on Advent hope, A mother-writer bio, and also some links!

Hey! Welcome to the Just Beautiful newsletter, where I write about making space for beauty and justice to meet. This month I have an essay, a bonus section on a mother-writer, and some just beautiful links.

“If I go on talking and talking,” she said, “and telling you things about pretending, I shall bear it better. You don’t forget, but you bear it better,” - Sara Crew, A Little Princess

I have been re-reading A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett recently. I have picked it up and put it down about four times, interrupted by a series of upheavals— my grandmother’s funeral and the two rounds of international travel that entailed, the entire family getting covid and our 3-year old being hospitalized for a week, a crazy end to the academic year with work. I’m still coughing and falling asleep by 6:30pm and so the book lays on my nightstand, a few pages turned each evening. This is not my normal way of reading fiction. I tend to be a devourer. I am, perhaps, a bit like Sara Crewe,

“ never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is not easy to manage. “It makes me feel as if someone had hit me,” Sara had told Ermengarde once in confidence.”

But this time, I’ve gone gently through the book. And the part that jumped out to me this time is the power of imagination. Sara goes from having every luxury her heart desires (a doll the size of a small child with an entire miniature wardrobe) to living with rats in the attic and hardly having enough food. Her father is dead. She’s all alone. But somehow, she bears it. Somehow, she doesn’t turn into a bitter, depressed soul. She doesn’t despair. The trick? The way she copes?

Imagination.

When she was still well-off, her imagination gave her empathy for the lonely and outcast girls at her school. She could imagine what it felt like to be the dull-witted Ermengarde, or the little Lottie longing for her dead mother, or even Becky, the scullery maid. “Why,” she says to Becky, “we are just the same— I am only a little girl like you. It’s just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!”

She ends up feeding Becky cake and meat pies, and also telling her invented stories about fairies and mermaids. Her imagination leads to empathy, which leads to connection and friendship, which lifts the burden from Becky.

“When Becky went downstairs, she was not the same Becky who had staggered up, loaded down by the weight of the coal scuttle. She had an extra piece of cake in her pocket, and she had been fed and warmed, but not only by cake and fire…. In time, Becky began to lose her hungry, tired feeling, and the coal box did not seem so unbearably heavy. However heavy it was, and whatsoever temper of the cook, and the hardness of the work heaped upon her shoulders, she always had the chance of the afternoon to look forward to— the chance that Miss Sara would be able to be in her sitting room… Sara made her laugh, and laughed with her; and, though neither of them quite knew it, the laugher was as “fillin’” as the meat pies.”

When Sara’s father dies and she’s banished to the attic and worked to the bone by Miss Minchin, her imagination keeps her going. She talks about her trials honestly, saying she doesn’t actually see anything good about her sufferings. “But I suppose there might be good in things, even if we don’t see it.” Her imagination gives her perspective. She can believe in something she can’t see yet. Her imagination even helps build empathy for her persecutor, as she continues, “There might”— doubtfully—- “be good in Miss Minchin.”

Her friend Ermengarde then asks her a question as she gazes around the cold attic, “Do you think you can bear living here?”

Ermengarde and Sara had a conversation about bearing things earlier in the book, when Sara’s father first leaves. Sara points out that she can never forget the pain of her father leaving. But she can bear it.

I suppose there is a lot to be said for acknowledging suffering, for not living in denial of pain, for not creating some false alternative reality. (I mean, let’s not be delusional). But also, hope’s whole “thing” is that there is something good coming that we can’t see yet. There may even something good right here that we can’t see yet. But we will. And somehow, we have to get through until it arrives.

It’s Advent. This strange Christian practice of waiting and longing and hoping for resolution which we don’t see yet. Peace on earth! Joy to the world! And yet, instead of peace and joy we have asthma pumps and funerals and constant power outages, and government corruption and the irritation of wanting to slap people who interrupt our reading.

Sometimes, when everything in life seems to be falling apart on a grand scale (climate change! the entire broken system of politics in the two countries I care about the most! See also: gun violence and criminal justice reform!) I try to think about the small scale as a way to cope. Like, I can’t change the world, but maybe things can be a bit better right here, in my own little corner. But then sometimes, even your own little corner is a disaster. People you love make bad choices, you don’t have a working car, and no matter what you do, your toddler still ends up in hospital on oxygen.

Do you think you can bear living here?

I think the Little Princess is teaching me - yes. Yes, I can. And the recipe for how to do it is surprisingly the simple.

A friend. A bit of human connection.

Some beauty, like the flowers a friend brought me at the top of this post.

Some cake and meat pies —or, in my case, dozens of meals delivered by various friends over these past few weeks.

And of course, the imagination to see that there might be good in things, even if I don’t see it yet. I can’t gloss over my reality with a fairy story as a way to cope. I can’t turn my cold attic into an imaginary castle like Sara. But there is a story I can tell that is true, even if it hasn’t come true yet. And one of the ways I can bear living here until all things are made new is by telling that story.

Imagining the scandal of a God become baby.

Imagining Jesus healing a blind man, an untouchable leper, a despised tax collector.

Imagining my whiney child must be suffering, and imagining what it would look like to respond patiently every time.

Imagining no more sickness or dying or pain.

Imagining the resurrection of lost birds and extinct butterflies.

Imagining a very long table, much longer than our Thanksgiving table, with my grandmother on one side and Saint Paul on the other, while she rakes him over some finer points of doctrine and quotes his own words back better than he can.

Imagining creation healed and whole.

So I hope, this Advent, with all the very real pain and suffering you witness in the world around you and in your own little world, that you’d be able to bear living here. That you’d remember Christ bore it. And that he will come back and make all things new.

Just Beautiful Links

• I love the way this version puts, “Surely he has born our griefs and carried our sorrows,” so close to the triumphant, “And he will reign forever and ever!” of Handel’s Messiah. (On Spotify here).

• The Lost Birds by Christopher Tin (recommended by Joy Clarkson) - I listened to this on repeat in hospital. The whole album is just a beautiful piece of mournful lament for the earth, taking words from 19th Century poets who saw lots of destruction of nature with the industrial revolution. But also some hope.

• These Advent readings from Oscar Romero, collated by Plough Mag

• Learning about Clarence Jordan (also from Plough) and his interracial farm he set up in Georgia, which faced persecution from the KKK (Catholic Worker Dorothy Day was shot at for the first time on night watch duty there!) Super inspiring perseverance. I also didn’t realise that Habitat for Humanity resulted through Jordan’s impact.

• Loved this article on the witness of the Black church working against gun violence, and this belief that “you draw near a wound to heal it”.

• How is song this for a vision of peace? I love this image of God, “You are mothering and feeding in the wee hours of the night. Your gentle love is patient, you never fade or tire, your peace will make us one.”

A mother-writer: Frances Hodgson Burnett

FHB is most famous today for The Secret Garden. But she started out writing fiction for ladies magazines because her father was dead and her mother had immigrated with the family from Manchester to America when she was 14. They were quite poor, and it was Francis’ writing which kept them afloat. She wrote like a machine. She ended up marrying a neighbour, and had two children. Her husband was studying to be a doctor and had no income and so her writing managed to support the household. (Apparently, she was also quite a doting mother. Little Lord Fauntleroy’s stylish curls and lace collars were based off of her frilly ways of sewing for and styling her own boys).

She was a pretty successful writer, but it wasn’t until she met (WAIT FOR IT, WHO DO YOU THINK?? DO YOU EVEN KNOW ME?) Louisa May Alcott (!!) on a trip to Boston that she decided to try her hand at children’s fiction. It was after this that Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden were written. She experienced periods of ill health, exhaustion, and depression as she battled with managing a household, caring for young children, and keeping up a demanding writing schedule. Her writing success allowed her to travel back and forth between England and the US for most of her life, but she lived the last few years of her life in US soil. She ended up divorcing her husband after her kids were grown, and had a brief second marriage. Also, her oldest son was sickly and died as a young man.

On a more personal note -  When I studied Burnett’s work on a mini-term in Oxford, my tutor pointed out that Burnett grew up between different classes and cultures. She had great success later in life, but the poverty she experienced after her father died was probably quite extreme. Also she continually bounced between America and England. I wonder if all that crossing of cultures and boundaries made her a more empathetic writer. It’s interesting that Sara Crewe and Mary Lennox have lived the early portion of their life in a different culture. My tutor also pointed out (over a jam scone at a tea shop, which she very kindly bought me, the general impression on this Oxford trip being that I was the penniless one of our group, which was not exactly wrong).

“Burnett sets her books in England, but she writes quite American heroines,” my tutor told me. “All her ladies eat. Lovely descriptions of all the food, and the heroines actually eat it. Not in the British lit of the time. But we get these lovely hearty American girls.” Yes.  

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Thanks for hanging with me this year!

X Steph