The Secret Garden

Great Maytham Hall Garden, Kent, England

At the turn of the 20th century, Mary Lennox is a sickly, neglected, unloved 10-year-old girl, born in India to wealthy British parents who never wanted her and made an effort to ignore the girl. She is cared for primarily by native servants, who allow her to become spoiled, aggressive and self-centred. After a cholera epidemic kills Mary's parents and the few surviving servants flee the house, Mary awakes to find herself alone. She is discovered by British soldiers who place her in the care of an English clergyman, whose children taunt her by calling her "Mistress Mary, quite contrary". However, this is only temporary: she is soon sent to England, to live with her wealthy hunchbacked uncle Archibald Craven (whom she has never met) at his isolated mansion Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire Moors.

At first, Mary is as obnoxious and sour as ever. She dislikes her new home, the people living in it, and most of all, the bleak moor on which it sits. She only begins to like a good-natured maid named Martha Sowerby, who tells Mary about Mary's aunt, the late Lilias Craven, who would spend hours in a private walled garden growing roses. Mrs Craven died after an accident in the garden, and the devastated Mr Craven locked the garden and buried the key. Mary becomes interested in finding the secret garden herself, and her ill manners begin to soften as a result. Soon she comes to enjoy the company of Martha, the gardener Ben Weatherstaff, and a friendly robin redbreast. Her health and attitude improve with the bracing Yorkshire air, and she grows stronger as she explores the moor and plays with a skipping rope that Mrs Sowerby buys for her. Mary wonders about the secret garden and about some mysterious cries that echo through the house at night.

As Mary explores the gardens, her robin draws her attention to an area of disturbed soil. Here Mary finds the key to the locked garden, and eventually she discovers the door to the garden. She asks Martha for garden tools, which Martha sends with Dickon, her 12-year-old brother, who spends most of his time out on the moors. Mary and Dickon take a liking to each other, as Dickon has a kind way with animals and a good nature. Eager to absorb his gardening knowledge, Mary tells him about the secret garden.

One night, Mary hears the cries once more and decides to follow them through the house. She is startled to find a boy of her age named Colin, who lives in a hidden bedroom. She soon discovers that they are cousins, Colin being the son of Mr and Mrs Craven, and that he suffers from an unspecified spinal problem which precludes him from walking and causes him to spend most of his time in bed. He, like Mary, has grown spoiled and self-centred, with the servants obeying his every whim in order to prevent the frightening hysterical tantrums Colin occasionally flies into. Mary visits him every day that week, distracting him from his troubles with stories of the moor, Dickon and his animals, and the secret garden. Mary finally confides that she has access to the secret garden, and Colin asks to see it. Colin is put into his wheelchair and brought outside into the secret garden. It is the first time he has been outdoors for several years.

While in the garden, the children look up to see Ben Weatherstaff looking over the wall on a ladder. Startled and angry to find the children in the secret garden, he admits that he believed Colin to be a cripple. Furious at being called crippled, Colin stands up from his chair and finds that his legs are fine, though weak from long disuse. Colin and Mary soon spend almost every day in the garden, sometimes with Dickon as company. The children and Ben conspire to keep Colin's recovering health a secret from the other staff, so as to surprise his father, who is travelling abroad. As Colin's health improves, his father experiences a coinciding increase in spirits, culminating in a dream where his late wife calls to him from inside the garden. When he receives a letter from Mrs Sowerby, he takes the opportunity finally to return home. He walks the outer garden wall in his wife's memory, but hears voices inside, finds the door unlocked, and is shocked to see the garden in full bloom, and his son healthy, having just won a race against Mary. The children tell him the story, and the servants watch, stunned, as Mr Craven and Colin walk back to the manor together.

The secret garden at Misselthwaite Manor is the site of both the near-destruction and the subsequent regeneration of a family.[5] Another theme is the way a thing that is neglected withers and dies, but when it is worked on and cared for, it thrives, as Mary and Colin do.

Frontispiece, 1911

The book's working title was Mistress Mary, a reference to the English nursery rhyme Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary. Parts of it were written during Burnett's visits to Buile Hill Park,[6] Maytham Hall in Kent, England, where Burnett lived for a number of years during her marriage, is often cited as the inspiration for the book's setting.[7] Burnett kept an extensive garden, including an impressive rose garden. However, it has been noted that apart from the garden, Maytham Hall and Misselthwaite Manor are physically very different.[7]

The Secret Garden was first serialised in ten issues (November 1910 – August 1911) of The American Magazine, with illustrations by J. Scott Williams.[8] It was first published in book form in August 1911 by the Frederick A. Stokes Company in New York;[9] it was also published that year by William Heinemann in London. Its copyright expired in the United States in 1987, and in most other parts of the world in 1995, placing the book in the public domain. As a result, several abridged and unabridged editions were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as a full-colour illustrated edition from David R. Godine, Publisher in 1989.

Inga Moore's abridged edition of 2008, illustrated by her, is arranged so that a line of the text also serves as a caption to a picture.

Marketing to both adult and juvenile audiences may have had an effect on its early reception; the book was far from so celebrated as Burnett's previous works during her lifetime.[10] Tracing the book's revival from almost complete eclipse at the time of Burnett's death in 1924, Anne H. Lundin noted that the author's obituary notices all remarked on Little Lord Fauntleroy and passed over The Secret Garden in silence.[11]

With the rise of scholarly work in children's literature over the past quarter-century, The Secret Garden has risen steadily in prominence. It is often noted as one of the best children's books of the 20th century.[10] In 2003 it ranked No. 51 in The Big Read, a survey of the British public by the BBC to identify the "Nation's Best-loved Novel" (not just children's novel).[12] Based on a 2007 online poll, the U.S. National Education Association named it one of "Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children".[13] In 2012 it was ranked No. 15 among all-time children's novels in a survey published by School Library Journal, a monthly with a primarily US audience.[14] (A Little Princess was ranked number 56 and Little Lord Fauntleroy did not make the Top 100.)[14] Jeffrey Masson considers The Secret Garden "one of the greatest books ever written for children".[15] In an oblique compliment, Barbara Sleigh has her title character reading The Secret Garden on the train at the beginning of her children's novel Jessamy.[16]

Wikisource has original text related to this article: The Secret Garden

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Secret Garden (novel).

• The Secret Garden at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML illustrated)
• The Secret Garden, available at Internet Archive. New York: F. A. Stokes, 1911 (colour scanned book)
• The Secret Garden public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• The Secret Garden From the Collections at the Library of Congress