The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)
“A sour, neglected child finds a locked garden — and in tending it back to life, discovers she can do the same for herself.”
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The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911) · 331pages · Edwardian / Late Victorian · 2 AP appearances
Summary
Ten-year-old Mary Lennox is sent from colonial India to her uncle's bleak Yorkshire estate after her parents die in a cholera outbreak. Lonely and contrary, she discovers a walled garden that has been locked for ten years. As she nurtures the garden back to life, she also uncovers her sickly cousin Colin, who has been convinced he is dying. Together with a Yorkshire farm boy named Dickon, the three children work the garden in secret — and the garden works on them in return, healing Colin's hypochondria, softening Mary's selfishness, and drawing the estate's absent master, Archibald Craven, back from his grief.
Why It Matters
Published in 1911, The Secret Garden was initially reviewed as charming but minor. By mid-century it had become a foundational text of children's literature, cited by C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, and countless others as formative. It is now recognized as one of the earliest psychological novels for ...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Accessible and warm in narration, with periodic elevation to spiritual-mystical register for garden and Magic sequences
Narrator: Burnett's narrator is warm, omniscient, and occasionally addresses the reader directly in the manner of Victorian chi...
Figurative Language: Moderate
Historical Context
Edwardian England and the last years of the British Empire, 1900-1914: The novel is set on the Yorkshire moors at the height of Edwardian class consciousness, and yet it imagines a space where class does not apply — the garden. This is utopian and intentional. The san...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Burnett opens the novel by telling us Mary is 'the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.' Why begin with a character we are supposed to dislike? What does this strategy risk, and what does it gain?
- The walled garden has been locked for ten years. What does the locked garden represent beyond its literal meaning? Identify at least three things in the novel that the locked garden could stand for.
- Dickon speaks in thick Yorkshire dialect — 'tha',' 'niver,' 'wuthered.' What does Burnett communicate by giving her most morally centered character the most regional, working-class speech?
- Colin believes he is dying. He is wrong. But his belief has made him genuinely ill. What is Burnett arguing about the relationship between mental attitude and physical health? Is this a reasonable claim, or magical thinking?
- Mary finds the key before she finds the door, and the door before she uses the key. Why does Burnett structure the discovery this way, over several chapters rather than in one scene?
Notable Quotes
“When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.”
“She had not been told how many of the people in the bungalow were dead. Perhaps no one thought a little girl would care.”
“It's a big, lonely place... and most of the rooms is shut up and locked.”
Why Read This
Because it is one of the few novels that dramatizes transformation without making it feel easy — Mary and Colin change slowly, through daily work, not through a single crisis or revelation. That rhythm of incremental change is more honest than mos...