The Secret Garden

About this book

The Secret Garden is Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel about an unloved, bad-tempered orphan who is sent to live in a large house on the Yorkshire moors and finds a locked garden there. It was first serialized in an American magazine in 1910 and published as a book in 1911. Burnett had already written two very successful children’s novels, Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess, and in her lifetime The Secret Garden was less celebrated than either. Its reputation grew steadily through the twentieth century, and it is now the book for which she is best remembered.

What has kept the book alive is its honesty about unpleasant children. Mary Lennox begins the story sour, spoiled and friendless, and Burnett does not soften her quickly. The novel’s slow account of how fresh air, work, company and a purpose change her is more persuasive than most moral tales because it is so unhurried. The garden itself, going from dead to living across a spring, carries the whole arc without the author having to say much about it.

The story

Mary Lennox is born in India to parents who ignore her and raised by servants who obey her. When a cholera outbreak leaves her orphaned, she is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire, the home of an uncle she has never met. The house has a hundred rooms, most of them shut, and a master who is almost always away. Mary is left to herself, and it is a maid named Martha and Martha’s brother Dickon, a boy who seems to be on speaking terms with every animal on the moor, who first draw her out.

Mary learns that there is a walled garden on the estate that has been locked for ten years, and she sets out to find the way in. She also discovers that she is not the only child in the house. The second half of the book follows what the children do with the garden and with each other.

Themes and historical context

Burnett was English by birth but lived much of her adult life in the United States, and The Secret Garden was written at a time when she had returned to live in England. Its setting on the Yorkshire moors, with the local dialect rendered carefully, owes something to the Brontë tradition. The contrast between colonial India, where Mary was waited on and neglected, and the working household of Misselthwaite is drawn sharply, though the book’s view of India is that of its period.

The novel reflects ideas about health that were current around 1900: the belief in open air, exercise and cheerful thinking as cures, and a suspicion of invalidism encouraged by anxious adults. Burnett had an interest in Christian Science and New Thought, and the book’s talk of “Magic” as a healing force comes from that background. Readers do not need to share these beliefs to follow the story, since the plot gives the children’s recovery perfectly ordinary causes as well.

The book’s view of class is of its time. Servants are warm and wise, and the gentry are in need of rescue by them, but nobody questions the arrangement itself.

Who should read it

The Secret Garden runs to about 80,000 words and is written in clear, direct prose. The Yorkshire dialect spoken by Martha, Dickon and the gardener Ben Weatherstaff takes a few pages to get used to but is never hard to follow. Children from about nine can read it alone; younger children enjoy it read aloud. Adult readers tend to notice how much of the book is about grief, and about the harm adults do to children by withdrawing from them. It is a quiet novel with no villain, so readers who want action should expect a slow pace.