The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret Garden
27 chapters
4.17from 1,335,151 ratingson Goodreads
Orphaned in India and sent to a Yorkshire house with a hundred rooms and an uncle who is never in it, Mary Lennox is a sour, unwanted child with nothing to do. Then a robin shows her a key. The garden that has been locked for ten years, and the invalid cousin she finds crying somewhere in the house at night, turn out to need the same thing.
About the book
Published in 1911, The Secret Garden opens with a cholera epidemic in India that leaves Mary Lennox, nine years old and thoroughly disagreeable, with no family and nobody who wants her. She is sent to Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire moors, a house of a hundred locked rooms belonging to an uncle who is almost never in it. A robin shows her a buried key, and behind a wall of ivy is a garden shut up for ten years since her aunt died in it. What she finds in the house is her cousin Colin, a boy kept in bed all his life and convinced he is dying, who has been screaming at night with nobody willing to contradict him. The book’s argument is physical and unsentimental — fresh air, work, other children, the spring — and it makes the recovery of the garden and of the two children the same event.
Characters
Mary Lennox — Protagonist
A sour, sallow, unwanted nine-year-old, sent from India to a house where nobody has plans for her.
Colin Craven — Mary’s cousin
Hidden away in the house since birth, certain he is an invalid and used to being obeyed.
Dickon Sowerby — Friend
A moor boy of twelve who charms animals, knows every plant, and treats the garden as a patient.
Martha Sowerby — Housemaid
Dickon’s sister, a plain-spoken Yorkshire maid who declines to dress Mary or flatter her.
Archibald Craven — Mary’s uncle
A widower with a crooked back who travels Europe to avoid the house his wife died at.
Ben Weatherstaff — Gardener
A gruff old gardener who has secretly kept the locked garden alive for ten years.
Mrs Medlock — Housekeeper
The housekeeper who fetches Mary from London and tells her which corridors she may not walk down.
About the author
Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) was an English-American novelist and playwright. Her family emigrated from Manchester to Tennessee after her father's death and into real poverty, and she began selling stories at eighteen to keep them — she paid for the postage by picking wild grapes. She wrote more than fifty books and a dozen plays, moved between England and America all her life, and fought an early transatlantic copyright case over the stage rights to Little Lord Fauntleroy that changed British law. She was a devoted gardener, which is the book of hers people still read: The Secret Garden.