Hollyhock House: A Story for Girls — Background and Themes

(2 User reviews) 505

In Category - Childrens Adventures

Authors: Taggart, Marion Ames, 1866-1945, Rogers, Frances [Illustrator] Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2021 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Girls -- Conduct of life -- Juvenile fiction; Girls -- Juvenile fiction; Sisters -- Juvenile fiction; Mothers and daughters -- Juvenile fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 70,474

Reading time 307 min

Text sections 25

For Hollyhock House: A Story for Girls — Background and Themes, the stored edition analysis reports 70,474 words, 5 hr 7 min estimated reading time, and 25 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 15.2 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Girls -- Conduct of life -- Juvenile fiction,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #65869

Marion Ames Taggart's 1916 novel follows the Garden sisters—Mary, Jane, and Florimel—through a summer of family dynamics and small-town life. The narrative moves between domestic interiors and outdoor spaces, using floral imagery and chapter epigraphs to frame the girls' growth and relationships.

Editorial Edition Score 4.9/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg65869

Read the Text

s small, slender, if one were polite, “thin” if not. She had red hair of the most glorious, burnished, brilliant red, masses of it, and it was not coarse, like much of the red hair, but fine and uncontrollable. It glowed and rose and flew above and around Jane’s startlingly white face till it might have been the fire around the head of an awakened Brünhilde. No one could have said positively what colour her eyes were. They possessed life rather than tint. They flashed and dreamed, laughed and gloomed under their arching brows of red gold, through their red-gold lashes, with much of the colour of her hair in them. Her face was long, with a pointed chin and a delicate little nose; its thin nostrils quick to quiver with her quickened breath. Her upper lip was so short that her small, even teeth always showed; her mouth was sensitive, not to say melancholy. Her neck was long and slender and swan-white. Her shoulders sloped; she was not more than five feet tall; her hands were long and thin, quick and fluttering, like her lips. Altogether Jane was exactly the opposite of her prim, old-time name.

These two Garden girls had received Garden names from their father and his family. He had been Doctor Elias Garden, doctor of letters and physics, not of medicine; a grave man, devoted to study, old of his age, and that age twelve years more than his wife’s, to whom he had left his three little girls, when Mary was four years old, by dying untimely.

The third child this girl-wife had named. The mother was but twenty-four, and she was understood to have been fond of sentiment and the ornamental; she named her baby Florimel, out of Spenser’s “Fairy Queen.” This proved to be a misfit name even more than Jane’s. Florimel was a dark little witch, black-haired, black-eyed, white of skin, with red cheeks and red lips, a tomboy when she was small, an absolute genius at mischief as she grew older, devoid of the least love of the sentimental. She whistled like the blackbird Mary called her, climbed trees, fell out of them, tore dresses, bruised flesh, got into scrapes, but also out of them, through her impetuosity. She was a firebrand in temper, yet easily moved to pity, exceedingly loyal and loving to those she loved, seeing no virtues in those she disliked. Thus she had stormed her way up to her thirteen years, a problem to manage, except that she adored Mary so much that she could not long grieve her, and was so true and affectionate that she was sure to come out right in the end.

Young as they were, the Garden girls were three distinct types, each beautiful. Mary least could claim actual beauty, perhaps, yet she was the loveliest of the three. Jane and Florimel were creatures for an artist to rave over; Mary was the type that men and women and angels love. When Florimel was a year old their mother had left them. She was English, an artist of some sort, they knew, and she had elected to respond to the call of her art, and had gone to England, leaving her children to the more than efficient guardianship of the Garden relatives, their legally appointed guardian, Mr. Austin Moulton, their father’s friend, and the devotion of Anne Kennington, the housekeeper, nurse--everything. It would have been hard to define Anne Kennington’s position in the Garden household, as it would have been hard to do justice to the way she filled it.

The girls had never thought much about their mother. The Gardens had been too well-bred to decry her to her children, but they had gathered the impression that she “did not amount to much,” a fearful indictment from a Garden! Mary had silently felt, in a hurt way, that _she_ could never have left three little girls, no matter to whom, and she had not talked about their mother, even to her sisters. As time went on, without being told so, the Garden girls came to imagine that their mother was dead. This impression of one whom only Mary remembered vaguely could not sadden them. They were motherless; but, though they envied girls with loving fathers and mothers, they had a great deal. Each in her way, the three Garden girls were philosophers and did not imagine they were unhappy when they were not, since no life holds every form of good.

Continue Reading →

The Garden sisters—Mary, Jane, and Florimel—are introduced with a playful naming conceit that immediately establishes the novel's floral motif. Their mother, Lynette, is a distant figure, more concerned with her English past than her American present. The story opens in Vineclad, a town whose name itself evokes greenery, and the girls' home is called Hollyhock House. The narrative voice shifts between affectionate observation and gentle irony, as when Jane declares that Mary "looked it"—meaning she looked like a Mary—while Florimel's name is a nod to Spenserian romance. The first chapter's epigraph, "The Rosebud Garden of Girls," sets up a framework of growth and cultivation that the novel will explore through its structure of departures and returns.

Movement Between Home and Away

The novel's early chapters establish a pattern of leaving and coming back. When Uncle Win takes Jane and Florimel to New York to buy an automobile, the narrative follows the preparations, the journey, and the anxious waiting at home. Mary, left behind, is described as an "anxious little hen in the Garden patch," a metaphor that ties her domestic worry to the farmyard. The telegram that anchors the girls in a definite location contrasts with the "space which had swallowed them up"—a phrase that captures the uncertainty of distance in 1916. This movement is not just physical; it reflects the sisters' varying degrees of independence. The automobile itself becomes a symbol of modernity and mobility, a new element entering the settled world of Hollyhock House.

Floral Framing and Chapter Epigraphs

Each chapter is headed by a quotation, many from poets like Tennyson or Wordsworth, that often reference gardens or nature. For example, Chapter I uses "The Rosebud Garden of Girls," and Chapter II quotes "Who Loves a Garden Loves a Greenhouse, too." These epigraphs serve as thematic anchors, linking the girls' actions to broader ideas of cultivation and growth. The novel's title and the house's name reinforce this botanical lens. The illustrations by Frances Rogers, as listed in the front matter, depict key scenes—such as the frontispiece showing the mother saying "Not such tall, tall girls, my daughters!"—which visually echo the text's emphasis on stature and development. The recurring floral imagery is not merely decorative; it structures the reader's expectations about character development.

Voice and Dialogue as Character Markers

The three sisters are distinguished by their speech patterns. Mary speaks with measured concern, Jane with playful irreverence, and Florimel with impulsive enthusiasm. When Florimel begs Mary not to mind their trip, she kneels and wraps her arms around Mary's waist, her dialogue punctuated by dashes and exclamations: "Mary, for goodness' sake, say quick you won't mind for just three days!" Jane, in contrast, turns their excitement into doggerel: "I want to dance and shriek and purr! We're going to buy a car and chauffeur." The mother, Mrs. Garden, speaks with a detached, almost petulant tone—"I should think it would be very pleasant for you to go—and an awful nuisance to Win to take you"—which reveals her emotional distance. These vocal contrasts create a dynamic family portrait without explicit authorial commentary.

The Role of Secondary Characters

Beyond the immediate family, the novel introduces a network of neighbors and relatives who shape the girls' world. Mr. and Mrs. Moulton appear as concerned friends, their dialogue overlapping with Mary's worries. Anne, the housekeeper, reacts to the girls' excitement with "annoyance relief always seems to call forth," a wry observation that hints at her role as a foil. The four girls who come to tea—Dorothy, Nanette, Gladys, and Audrey—are listed without further description in the excerpt, suggesting they may serve as a social chorus. Uncle Win, the young uncle who escorts the girls, is treated as a peer: Jane waltzes with him and takes him by the ears. These secondary figures provide texture and contrast, grounding the sisters' adventures in a recognizable community.

Structure of Waiting and Return

The narrative rhythm alternates between action and pause. After the flurry of departure, the story settles into a quieter sequence: Mary's loneliness, the tea parties, the waiting for telegrams. This pattern mirrors the novel's episodic structure, with each chapter marking a new phase. The excerpts show a clear break after the trip to New York, suggesting that the book may follow a seasonal or holiday framework. The title page lists 18 chapters, each with its own epigraph, implying a carefully balanced progression. Readers attuned to structure will notice how the novel uses these intervals to develop character relationships, particularly between Mary and her mother, whose dynamic is tested by absence.

Readers approaching Hollyhock House will find a story that rewards attention to its framing devices—the chapter epigraphs, the floral metaphors, and the careful alternation of scenes. The novel's structure, built around departures and returns, gives shape to the sisters' gradual emergence into independence. Pay particular attention to how the dialogue reveals character and how the setting of Vineclad functions as both a refuge and a stage. The book invites comparison with other early twentieth-century girls' series, but its specific use of botanical imagery and its focus on a single summer distinguish it.

There’s a particular ache in rereading Hollyhock House—that summer never quite ends, even when you close the book. I often wonder if the Garden sisters’ quiet turning toward one another echoes what I found later in Forge of Foxenby — Story, Setting & Ideas, where the place itself seems to hold time differently. Just a thought.