The Magic Garden

• The last novel of naturalist and best-selling romantic author, GENE STRATTON-PORTER. • ‘Her narrative is entertaining, her enthusiasm catching, and her revelations so stimulating’ NEW YORK TIMES. • ‘One of the small group of writers whose success, both in England and in America, was enormous… It is rare indeed for a writer to appeal, as she did, both to experienced readers equipped with standards of literary taste and to the most unsophisticated, who live apart from the world of books’ THE TIMES. At the age of five Amaryllis had been separated from her family by the ‘judge with the big knife’ – who had put her in one big house and her brother in another, while her selfish father and frivolous mother went their ways. But Amaryllis ran away to the magic garden. There she found John Guido, who played the violin to her while she danced in the moonlight. One happy hour, that was all ¬– and then she was brought back. But Amaryllis came again to the magic garden, and the bud of childhood friendship blossomed there into the flower of perfect love. There is happiness in THE MAGIC GARDEN, filled as it is with the glory of flowers and music; with laughter and tears, and with the inspiration of this best-loved writer, GENE STRATTON-PORTER. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gene Stratton-Porter was as famous an author in the 1900s as J.K. Rowling is today, publishing five million-selling books before she died tragically in a car accident in 1924. She wrote twenty-six books including twelve novels and eight nature studies and is best remembered for her romantic novels FRECKLES (1904), A GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST (‘Eminent’ NEW YORK TIMES), and THE HARVESTER (number one on the best-seller list in 1912). Her novels were adapted for the silver screen – some many times over – and translated into over twenty languages bringing her worldwide recognition. Born Geneva Grace Stratton, on a farm in Wabash County, Indiana, in 1863, the youngest of twelve children, she described her childhood as one ‘lived out-of-doors with the wild.’ Many of her books have a strong environmental message, and long before the campaigning organisations we know today, Stratton-Porter was a strong advocate of the wilderness lands in her native state of Indiana, campaigning to preserve the Limberlost swamp and wetland from commercial exploitation. Read more