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.”
The Secret Garden— Historical Context & Author Background
Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett · Published 1911· Era: Edwardian / Late Victorian·331 pages
Themes explored: healing, nature, transformation, isolation, friendship, growth, magic, family
About Frances Hodgson Burnett
Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) was born in Manchester, England, emigrated to Tennessee at sixteen after her father's death left the family in poverty, and spent her adult life moving between England and America. She published her first story at eighteen to help support her family and never stopped working. She was twice married, twice divorced — unusual for a Victorian woman — and lost her beloved elder son Lionel to tuberculosis in 1890. The Secret Garden, published in 1911, is generally read as the culmination of her engagement with grief, with nature as healer, and with the power of directed mental attention. She spent her final years gardening in Long Island, New York.
Life → Text Connections
How Frances Hodgson Burnett's real experiences shaped specific elements of The Secret Garden.
Burnett lost her son Lionel to tuberculosis at sixteen — a grief that reshaped her spiritual beliefs
Archibald Craven's decade of wandering grief, and Colin's hypochondriac fixation on death
The novel is, among other things, Burnett working through what it means to be a parent paralyzed by loss — and imagining recovery.
Burnett was deeply influenced by Christian Science and New Thought — the belief that mental attitude directly affects physical health
Colin's 'Magic' ritual — the daily affirmations, the belief that thinking about life rather than death can produce life
The Magic is not metaphor for Burnett. She believed it was a real principle. This sincerity gives Colin's recovery its strange conviction.
Burnett was an avid gardener who described her garden as her 'outdoor self'
The botanical precision of the garden descriptions — specific plants, seasonal timing, the difference between a dead rose and a dormant one
The garden sequences are not research but memory. Burnett is writing her own garden into the novel.
Burnett spent her career moving between America and England — she was never fully at home in either
Mary's displacement — colonial India, then Yorkshire — and her gradual finding of a place that is hers
The garden as private territory, belonging to the child who found it, is autobiographically freighted: Burnett always needed a space that was entirely her own.
Historical Era
Edwardian England and the last years of the British Empire, 1900-1914
How the Era Shapes the Book
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 sanatorium movement gave Burnett medical cover for her claim that outdoor activity heals; New Thought gave her theological cover for the Magic. The colonial opening (India, the ayah, the cholera) establishes a world of imperial carelessness that Yorkshire's honest poverty quietly indicts.
Why The Secret Garden Matters Historically
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 children — its concern with the way environment and mental attitude shape health and character anticipates the child psychology of the twentieth century.
- One of the first children's novels to dramatize the concept of self-directed mental healing
- Among the first major works of children's fiction to center a genuinely unsympathetic female protagonist
- One of the first novels to treat the Yorkshire moor as a space of healing rather than gothic threat
Rarely banned, but periodically criticized: for the passive acceptance of colonialism in its opening chapters; for what some read as cultural appropriation of Yorkshire working-class life; and, from a different direction, for the New Thought spiritualism of the Magic sequences, which some Christian readers found heterodox.