A number of classic children’s stories start with death or dislocation: Anne leaves her orphanage for Green Gables, Mary crosses the ocean to arrive at Misselthwaite Manor and discover the Secret Garden, Papa Alcott is absent at the Civil War front, leaving his Little Women to fend for themselves–and, in a more explicit early twentieth-century influence of Johnson’s, the orphan and impoverished Bettany sisters head to the Austrian Alps to start the Chalet School. The disruption of normal life, and a stable family unit, is […]