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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
Francis Hodgson Burnett's 'The Secret Garden' is a timeless classic that explores the power of nature and the wonders of childhood. The book tells the story of Mary Lennox, a lonely and neglected girl who discovers a hidden garden on her uncle's estate, which serves as a metaphor for rejuvenation and growth. Burnett's descriptive and evocative prose creates a rich and immersive reading experience, transporting the reader to the enchanting world of the garden. Set in the context of the Victorian era, the novel also delves into themes of healing, redemption, and the resilience of the human spirit, making it a compelling and thought-provoking read. Francis Hodgson Burnett's own experiences with loss and rediscovery likely influenced her writing of this captivating tale, adding depth and authenticity to the narrative. 'The Secret Garden' is a must-read for anyone seeking a heartwarming and inspiring story that celebrates the transformative power of love, friendship, and the natural world. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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The Secret Garden (Unabridged)
Table of Contents
Introduction
A locked gate waits for the right hands to turn it, and hearts to follow through. In that image lies the promise and tension of The Secret Garden: the struggle between neglect and care, loneliness and companionship, sterility and growth. Frances Hodgson Burnett situates this drama not on a battlefield but in a corner of earth where attention itself becomes transformative. The book invites readers to consider how noticing, nurturing, and patient work can remake a place—and, just as quietly, a self. Its atmosphere of hushed discovery gives shape to a story that remains intimate while opening outward to durable questions about renewal and belonging.
The Secret Garden is a classic children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, a British-born writer who made her career largely in the United States. First published in serial form in 1910 and in book form in 1911, it belongs to the early twentieth century yet persists with unusual vitality. Burnett was already known for Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess, and here she again centers a child to explore moral and emotional growth. The unabridged text preserves Burnett’s pacing, descriptive richness, and ear for dialect, allowing modern readers to encounter the work much as its first audience did, with language and structure intact.
The premise is simple and compelling. Mary Lennox, newly orphaned and transplanted from British-ruled India to a relative’s vast, secluded estate on the Yorkshire moors, finds herself adrift among strangers and silences. There she hears rumors of a walled garden locked and neglected for years. Drawn by curiosity and a hunger she can barely name, she begins to seek ways into that hidden space. As Mary explores the grounds and makes new acquaintances, the landscape and the household alike present possibilities for change. The novel’s early chapters orient us to her solitude and to the manor’s mysteries, preparing the ground for careful, character-centered growth.
Burnett’s enduring themes—healing, friendship, responsibility, and the restorative power of nature—give the novel its classic status. The garden functions as both literal place and living metaphor, mirroring the children’s gradual awakening to empathy and purpose. The rhythms of weather, soil, and seasons become a counterpoint to moods and habits formed by grief and neglect. Without resorting to didacticism, the narrative shows how small acts of attention accumulate into transformation. The book neither sentimentalizes childhood nor dismisses it; rather, it honors children’s capacity for observation, initiative, and change, setting these qualities against the stasis of locked rooms and shuttered memories.
Much of the book’s literary force lies in its craft. Burnett renders the Yorkshire moors with brisk clarity—wind, heather, skylarks—and uses the garden as an interior stage where character, symbol, and setting converge. Her third-person narration closely follows the child’s perspective, sustaining immediacy without sacrificing narrative control. The unabridged text preserves the region’s distinctive speech as part of the novel’s texture, as well as the cadences of Edwardian prose. Scenes unfold with patient specificity: the heft of a key, the feel of turned soil, the hush of early morning. Such details ground the story’s emotional arc in the concreteness of place.
Its classic stature is also a matter of cultural reach. The Secret Garden has been widely read in classrooms and at home, translated into many languages, and repeatedly adapted for stage and screen. Across these retellings, audiences return to Burnett’s central image of a hidden space made fertile by care. The novel’s balanced appeal to children and adults—its plain surface and layered implications—has secured it a place among the most beloved works of children’s literature. Its influence radiates not through controversy or novelty alone, but through the quiet persistence of a story that readers find themselves revisiting at different ages, with fresh understanding.
Writers and storytellers have long drawn on the archetype the novel revitalized: the secret place that answers to patience, curiosity, and collaboration. The trope of a walled or hidden refuge—entered not by force but by earned belonging—recurs across later children’s narratives, gardening memoirs, and family dramas. Burnett helped fix in the literary imagination the idea that domestic and natural spaces can be sites of moral growth as well as shelter. The Secret Garden’s emphasis on restoration rather than conquest has shaped how subsequent tales frame discovery, shifting the focus from possession to stewardship, from solitary triumph to shared tending.
The book also belongs to its historical moment. Written and published in the Edwardian era, it carries traces of its time’s assumptions and anxieties: the reach of empire, the class stratifications of British society, and evolving ideas about childhood and health. The contrast between crowded, illness-marked households and the bracing air of the moors reflects contemporary beliefs about environment and well-being. At the same time, Burnett’s attention to everyday kindness and practical care complicates the period backdrop. The novel’s social world is not an argument brief, yet it offers ample material for readers to consider context alongside character.
Psychologically, the narrative is notable for its portrayal of loneliness, irritability, and the slow work of attachment. Burnett does not rush her characters through change; she lets them be difficult, then shows how new routines and relationships create different possibilities. Mary’s prickliness, the manor’s long corridors, and the hush around closed-off spaces all register the costs of isolation. Against this, the steady repetition of small tasks—walks, conversations, the tending of living things—maps a path from self-absorption to connection. This attention to inner weather gives the book a depth that continues to invite thoughtful adult rereading.
Reading the unabridged text highlights Burnett’s structural patience and sonic pleasures. The pacing allows discovery to feel earned, and descriptive passages establish the sensory life of moor and garden without haste. The regional speech, presented with care, situates the story in a particular community and landscape. Modern readers may notice the novel’s confidence in cumulative detail: objects, habits, and gestures that gather significance across chapters. Unshortened, the book makes room for atmosphere and for the incremental nature of trust and growth—qualities that abridgments can compress but not reproduce without loss.
The Secret Garden’s contemporary relevance is unmistakable. Its portrait of grief and recovery speaks to readers attentive to mental and emotional health. Its vision of nature as partner rather than backdrop resonates in an era newly aware of ecological interdependence and the therapeutic value of green spaces. The story’s emphasis on attentive care, shared work, and the ethical use of one’s energies aligns with current conversations about community and stewardship. It also offers a humane lens on children’s agency: change begins not with grand declarations, but with the choice to notice and to nurture what has been overlooked.
To call this book a classic is to acknowledge more than its age or fame. It endures because it stages a modest miracle that readers continue to recognize: neglected places—and persons—can be restored through attention, patience, and friendship. Burnett’s novel invites us into a bounded world that enlarges the reader’s own, offering companionship across time. In opening the gate to this unabridged edition, you enter a work shaped by its era yet alive to ours, a story whose quiet confidence feels both bracing and kind. May its keys—curiosity, care, and community—turn easily in your hands.
Synopsis
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden opens with Mary Lennox, a neglected, ill-tempered child raised in colonial India by distant parents and servants. A sudden outbreak of illness leaves her orphaned, and she is sent to England to live with her uncle, Archibald Craven, at the remote Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire moor. The change in climate and circumstance throws Mary into a world that is colder, stricter, and far less indulgent. Unused to fending for herself, she is confronted with solitude, strange customs, and a household that keeps its emotional distance, setting the stage for a story of gradual awakening and renewal.
Misselthwaite is vast, drafty, and filled with locked rooms and whispered histories. The housekeeper, Mrs. Medlock, enforces rules, while a plainspoken young maid, Martha Sowerby, encourages Mary to explore the outdoors on the moor. Mary hears tantalizing references to a walled garden that has been shut for years following a family tragedy. The manor’s isolation, the sweeping moorland, and servants’ guarded manner stoke her curiosity. Boredom gives way to a restless desire to discover what lies beyond closed doors and hedges. The notion of a forbidden garden becomes a focal point for Mary’s first stirrings of interest in the world beyond herself.
At first sour and imperious, Mary begins to change as she wanders the grounds. Encounters with a friendly robin and the gruff gardener, Ben Weatherstaff, draw her into the rhythms of the estate. The clean air and daily walks give her an appetite and color in her cheeks. The Yorkshire dialect, unfamiliar and blunt, challenges her assumptions and softens her manner. She becomes attentive to small signs of life in the hedges and earth, sensing possibility where there had seemed only neglect. Her curiosity deepens into engagement, and the idea that a place might grow back into beauty takes root in her imagination.
As winter eases, Mary discovers a way into the long-locked walled garden. The enclosure, once cherished and then abandoned, shows both decay and resilient life. She begins to clear, dig, and tend in secret, guarding her discovery from prying eyes. Simple tools and the practice of patient effort become part of her days. Each new shoot and patch of turned soil mirrors changes in her own health and spirit. The garden’s silence and shelter offer privacy and purpose, and Mary learns the satisfaction of steady work. The promise of a revived space becomes a private covenant between the child and the earth.
Martha’s brother, Dickon Sowerby, soon enters Mary’s world. Comfortable among animals and plants, he embodies a practical knowledge of the moor and a warm, unselfconscious goodness. His presence shifts the tone from solitary exploration to shared endeavor. Without intruding on Mary’s secret, he supports her efforts, showing her how to nurture seedlings and protect new growth. Talk of the life force in nature—sometimes called a kind of magic—offers the children a language for hope without straying from the everyday tasks that make change possible. Friendship, humility, and wonder become as important as spades, twine, and careful watering.
Inside the manor, Mary hears inexplicable crying at night, a sound everyone denies. Investigating, she discovers Colin Craven, her cousin, a boy secluded in a hidden bedroom. Frail, often angry, and convinced of his own invalidism, Colin lives under constant attention and a regimen that reinforces his fears. Mary’s forthright manner unsettles him, yet their conversation punctures his isolation. She speaks of fresh air, growing things, and the possibility of happiness, pushing back against the belief that he must remain helpless. The revelation of Colin’s existence reframes the house’s secrecy, adding an intimate human dimension to the novel’s locked doors.
Mary’s circle gradually includes Dickon and Colin in a fragile, hopeful collaboration. They cultivate small routines that value fresh air, movement, and quiet attention to living things. The garden, kept private from most of the household, becomes a symbol of agency as much as a physical refuge. Colin’s mindset begins to shift from dread to curiosity, and Mary’s confidence matures into leadership tempered by care for others. Ben Weatherstaff’s watchful presence connects the past to the present, reminding them that grown-ups hold their own griefs and loyalties. The children’s project evolves into a shared discipline that promises growth without guaranteeing outcomes.
Around them, adult concerns persist. Archibald Craven, haunted by loss, stays away from the manor, leaving an emotional vacuum that shapes the household. Dr. Craven and the servants manage Colin’s care within strict expectations, wary of disturbances. The Yorkshire seasons move from stark cold to enlivening spring, and natural cycles mirror inner changes among the characters. References to the Sowerby family’s steadiness and common sense introduce a counterpoint to the manor’s gloom, suggesting that warmth and practicality can coexist with refinement. The narrative balances secrecy and responsibility, laying groundwork for reconciliation without hurrying resolution.
By tracing Mary’s growth from self-absorption to engagement, and by depicting the quiet transformation of a neglected place, The Secret Garden presents renewal as a patient, communal act. It frames nature as a teacher and solace, while acknowledging grief, class differences, and fear as obstacles that people must meet with courage and care. Without relying on grand declarations, the book intimates that attention, friendship, and steady work can change a life. Its enduring significance lies in showing children’s literature as a space for psychological realism and hope, affirming that closed doors—literal and figurative—can open toward healthier ways of being.
Historical Context
The Secret Garden unfolds against the late Victorian to Edwardian world of the early twentieth century, a period roughly spanning the 1890s to the years just before the First World War. The narrative moves from the British Raj in India to a vast Yorkshire estate in northern England, linking two core institutions of the time: the empire and the landed country house. Britain’s imperial administration, domestic service hierarchies, and the rhythms of rural estate life frame the story’s social landscape. Medicine, public health, and changing ideas about childhood likewise shape characters’ experiences, while railways and periodical publishing knit together distant places, enabling movement of people, ideas, and the book itself.
The book opens in colonial India under the British Raj (1858–1947), where British families often lived in segregated compounds served by Indian staff. Anglo-Indian households relied on ayahs (nannies) and a network of servants, reflecting racialized power relations and the prevailing culture of the memsahib. India experienced repeated cholera outbreaks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and British communities there were vulnerable despite attempts at sanitary control. The novel’s early scenes echo this historical setting: a child of empire, raised by servants, confronts sudden upheaval. The depiction mirrors the intimate yet unequal domestic arrangements characteristic of British life in the subcontinent at the time.
Cholera’s presence in the narrative belongs to a broader public health history. Global cholera pandemics began in 1817, with major waves persisting into the early twentieth century; the sixth pandemic (1899–1923) heavily affected parts of India, the Middle East, and Russia. By the 1880s and 1890s, germ theory and bacteriology had transformed medical science in Britain, influencing sanitary reforms in cities and colonial settings alike. Nonetheless, infrastructure, water quality, and social inequality constrained outcomes. The story’s use of epidemic shock aligns with the era’s awareness that disease could rapidly dismantle domestic life, while also gesturing to contemporary debates over sanitation, contagion, and the reach of modern medicine.
The narrative then relocates to Yorkshire, a region shaped by both industrial growth and starkly beautiful moorland. While the West Riding industrialized with textile mills and mining from the eighteenth century onward, large estates and rural villages persisted, sustaining older patterns of landholding and employment. Country houses functioned as economic hubs, employing gardeners, grooms, and indoor staff. Railways, which had transformed British mobility by the late nineteenth century, connected London to northern counties, making movement to a remote manor plausible. The book’s emphasis on the moor—windy, open, and vigorous—draws on a cultural geography that associated northern landscapes with health, resilience, and moral fortitude.
Within country houses, domestic service was a dominant institution. According to the 1911 census, domestic service was the largest occupation for women in Britain. Household hierarchies were clearly defined: a housekeeper oversaw maids and kitchen staff; gardeners maintained walled and ornamental grounds; children were often attended by nurses or governesses rather than parents. Bells, schedules, and strict rules organized labor and privacy. The Secret Garden reflects this world through housekeepers, maids, and gardeners whose work sustains the manor’s routines. Their dialects and customs register regional identities, while their interactions with the gentry illustrate both the distance and the interdependence that characterized service in large houses.
The period also saw evolving ideas about childhood. In upper- and middle-class households, nurseries and schoolrooms kept children largely separate from adult social life. Nannies, nurses, and governesses structured daily routines, while formal displays of parental affection could be limited by prevailing norms. At the same time, a broad humanitarian concern for children was gaining strength. In Britain, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children formed in the 1880s; the Children Act of 1908 advanced protections; and from 1907 school medical inspections sought to improve health. The novel’s attention to neglected or emotionally isolated children registers these shifting attitudes and the growing visibility of child welfare.
Compulsory education expanded during the period. The Elementary Education Act of 1870 established publicly funded schooling; attendance became mandatory in 1880, with the minimum leaving age raised in stages, reaching 12 by 1899 and 14 only in 1918. Rural attendance was sometimes irregular due to seasonal labor and family needs. Working-class children frequently contributed to household economies, while gentry children had tutors or boarding schools. The Secret Garden’s representation of children with differing access to schooling and free time reflects these uneven structures. Outdoor play, natural history, and practical skills were increasingly valued complements to formal lessons, anticipating strands of progressive education that would gain ground before the war.
Medicine and disability were understood through a mixture of older and newer models. The late nineteenth century popularized the figure of the “invalid,” often treated with rest cures, seclusion, or strict regimens. Simultaneously, the open-air movement and sanatorium treatment for tuberculosis advanced the belief that fresh air, sunlight, and graded exercise could restore health; Britain established sanatoria from the 1890s onward. Public discourse also included anxieties about heredity and “degeneration,” promoted by emerging eugenic thought. The novel’s emphasis on fresh air, gradual physical activity, and psychological uplift engages contemporary therapeutic fashions, quietly questioning deterministic views of frailty while aligning with open-air convalescence.
Gardening in this era was both an elite art and a popular pastime. The Arts and Crafts movement, associated with figures like William Morris, promoted craftsmanship and harmonious design, while horticultural innovators such as William Robinson (The Wild Garden, 1870) and Gertrude Jekyll (late 1890s onward) favored naturalistic plantings and color harmonies. Walled kitchen and flower gardens were standard features of large estates, offering shelter, microclimates, and privacy. Amateur gardening spread through periodicals and societies, and seeds and tools became widely accessible by catalog. The Secret Garden draws on this culture, presenting cultivation as an accessible, restorative practice that bridges aesthetic pleasure and practical labor.
The Yorkshire moor in British literature carried a powerful legacy. The Brontë novels of the 1840s, particularly Wuthering Heights, had already cast the moor as austere, untamed, and morally suggestive. Late Victorian and Edwardian readers associated wild landscapes with authenticity and renewal—a counterpoise to urban industrial life. Children’s literature likewise embraced nature as a site of freedom and self-discovery during its so-called golden age (roughly the 1860s–1910s), spanning authors from Lewis Carroll to E. Nesbit and Kenneth Grahame. Burnett’s novel inherits this tradition, relocating the Romantic and post-Romantic ideal of nature’s tutelage into a child-centered narrative of attention, patience, and seasonal change.
Frances Hodgson Burnett herself straddled two literary markets. Born in Manchester in 1849, she emigrated to the United States in 1865, built a career in magazines and books, and maintained close ties to Britain. By the time The Secret Garden appeared, she was an established author of transatlantic bestsellers, including Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) and A Little Princess (1905). From the late 1890s she spent periods in England; her tenancy at Maytham Hall in Kent (circa 1898–1907), with its walled rose garden, is widely cited as an inspiration for the novel’s central image. Her mobility and career illustrate the era’s increasingly global literary circuits.
The Secret Garden itself moved through those circuits. It was serialized in a U.S. general-interest periodical, The American Magazine, beginning in late 1910 and continuing into 1911, and appeared in book form in 1911 in both the United States and Britain. Serialization brought the work to a broad, middle-class audience that read fiction alongside essays on health, household management, and social reform—topics resonant with the novel’s themes. The transatlantic publication helped consolidate Burnett’s Anglo-American readership, ensuring the book’s early reception on both sides of the ocean and embedding it in shared conversations about children, health, and home.
Metaphysical and mind-cure currents also shaped the intellectual climate. The late nineteenth century saw the spread of New Thought and the rise of Christian Science (founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879), movements that emphasized the influence of thought on bodily health and experience. Burnett is documented as having explored such ideas in the 1880s and 1890s. While The Secret Garden is not doctrinal, its language of inner change, directed attention, and the enlivening force of gratitude and imagination reflects this milieu. The narrative’s nonsectarian portrayal of mental and physical revitalization echoes contemporary debates about suggestion, habit, and the psychosomatic dimensions of illness.
Class relations structure the book’s social world. Early twentieth-century Britain retained stark economic contrasts between gentry and laboring families, especially in rural districts. Liberal welfare reforms of 1906–1914—free school meals (1906), school medical inspections (1907), and the Children Act (1908)—acknowledged the effects of poverty on health and development. Rural households often stretched resources through home production and seasonal work. The novel’s interactions across class lines—between estate servants, working families, and the owners—reflect both the persistence of hierarchy and currents of philanthropic paternalism, in which the well-off were expected to care for dependents, even as the state slowly expanded its role.
Gardens in Britain were never only local. From the eighteenth century onward, imperial botany, centered at institutions such as Kew Gardens, collected, classified, and distributed plants across the empire. Wardian cases and global shipping networks moved seeds and saplings from Asia, Africa, and the Americas to British estates. Walled gardens, with their controlled environments, enabled experiments with tender species. By 1900, many “English” gardens incorporated botanical migrants naturalized into domestic landscapes. The Secret Garden’s horticultural space thus carries imperial traces: it is a site where global botanical exchange is domesticated, and where care and curiosity about plants shadow the broader traffic of empire.
Technological and infrastructural change underwrite the novel’s movement and its sense of seclusion. By the early twentieth century, Britain possessed an extensive rail network, making long-distance travel to rural counties routine, while postal and telegraph systems connected estates to urban centers. Many large houses were adopting modern conveniences—gas or electric lighting, improved plumbing—though change was uneven. Despite these links, architectural design and social custom preserved privacy: walled gardens, locked rooms, and service corridors shaped who could enter where. The story’s alternation between swift mobility and carefully guarded spaces reflects an era that was both networked and protective of domestic boundaries.
The care of children increasingly intersected with new psychology and pedagogy. Thinkers like G. Stanley Hall popularized developmental stages (Adolescence, 1904), and pedagogical experiments—from Froebelian kindergarten to the Montessori method (founded 1907)—privileged child-centered, sensory learning. British reformers advocated outdoor play, school gardens, and nature study as antidotes to urban crowding and rote instruction. The Secret Garden aligns with these trends by presenting growth through discovery, responsibility, and embodied experience. It suggests that attention, routine, and meaningful tasks can reshape temperament—an approach consistent with emergent behavioral and educational insights, even as it remains framed by the domestic sphere rather than the classroom or clinic. The novel’s historical context converges in its quiet argument for environmental and relational care as foundations for health.
Author Biography
Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) was a British-American novelist and playwright whose work bridged the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. She is renowned for children’s books that remain central to English-language literature, including Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden, while also producing a substantial body of fiction for adults. Publishing across both sides of the Atlantic and adapting her own work for the stage, Burnett cultivated an international readership. Her narratives often explore resilience, benevolence, class mobility, and the restorative power of imagination and nature, shaping popular understandings of childhood and influencing later writers, illustrators, and adapters for theater and film.
Raised in industrial Manchester, Burnett experienced financial hardship and emigrated with her family to the United States in the mid-1860s. Her formal schooling was limited, but she read widely and taught herself to write for the robust periodical market. As a teenager and young adult she sold short fiction to prominent magazines, among them Godey’s Lady’s Book, Scribner’s Monthly, and St. Nicholas. The magazine system, with its serials and illustration, shaped her sense of pacing, audience, and character. She absorbed conventions of Victorian domestic and sentimental fiction while responding to transatlantic tastes, laying the groundwork for a career that moved fluidly between adult and juvenile readerships.
Burnett’s first major success came with That Lass o’ Lowrie’s (1877), a novel set among Lancashire miners that drew praise for its portrayal of working-class life. Throughout the 1880s she published popular social comedies and romances, including A Fair Barbarian (1881) and Through One Administration (1883). Her adult fiction frequently examined class, ambition, and marriage within Anglo-American settings. An adept craftsperson of plot and dialogue, she learned to balance melodramatic turns with sympathetic characterization, techniques that later served her children’s narratives. By the end of the decade she was an established figure in the literary marketplace, with publishers in both Britain and the United States.
Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) transformed Burnett’s public profile. The tale’s appeal to readers of varying ages made it an international bestseller and a durable stage property. Burnett wrote the theatrical adaptation herself, and the phenomenon extended into fashion and illustration, famously popularizing the “Fauntleroy suit.” Her efforts to control unauthorized dramatizations led to a significant legal victory affirming an author’s right to dramatize a work in the United States, a precedent discussed in publishing histories. The book’s blend of sentiment, moral education, and social fantasy became a template—admired by many readers and critiqued by some reviewers—that she refined in later juvenile fiction.
She continued to build her reputation with works for young readers that began in magazines and were later expanded. The novella Sara Crewe appeared in 1888 in St. Nicholas and was reworked as A Little Princess in 1905, elaborating themes of dignity, imagination, and resourcefulness under strain. The Secret Garden, first published as a novel in 1911 following earlier serialization, drew on her experience of English country life to explore convalescence and renewal through friendship and the natural world. She also wrote adventure and court-intrigue tales for children, alongside adult novels such as The Making of a Marchioness and the transatlantic saga The Shuttle.
Critics have linked Burnett’s emphasis on healing, optimism, and inner transformation to contemporary movements that interested her, including spiritualist and mind-cure discourses circulating in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without departing from accessible storytelling, she incorporated ideas about the influence of environment, habit, and sympathetic community on well-being. Her child-centered perspective, brisk plotting, and vivid spaces—urban streets, drawing rooms, and enclosed gardens—won a broad readership. While some contemporaries regarded her sentimentality skeptically, others praised her humane tone and theatrical instinct. The results endure: characters who change through acts of care and attention, rather than through spectacle or punishment.
In her later years Burnett divided her time between the United States and England, continued to publish fiction into the 1910s and early 1920s, and maintained involvement with stage adaptations of her work. She died in New York State in 1924. Her books remained in print, and successive generations rediscovered them through films, television, and new theatrical versions. The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, and Little Lord Fauntleroy still anchor conversations about children’s literature, empathy, and the ethics of caretaking. Beyond their period charm, these narratives offer a contemporary resonance in their faith in restorative spaces, cross-cultural connection, and the agency of young people.
The Secret Garden (Unabridged)
Chapter 1 There is No One Left
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people. She had not wanted a little girl at all, and when Mary was born she handed her over to the care of an Ayah[1], who was made to understand that if she wished to please the Mem Sahib she must keep the child out of sight as much as possible. So when she was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby she was kept out of the way, and when she became a sickly, fretful, toddling thing she was kept out of the way also. She never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the other native servants, and as they always obeyed her and gave her her own way in everything, because the Mem Sahib would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying, by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived. The young English governess who came to teach her to read and write disliked her so much that she gave up her place in three months, and when other governesses came to try to fill it they always went away in a shorter time than the first one. So if Mary had not chosen to really want to know how to read books she would never have learned her letters at all.
One frightfully hot morning, when she was about nine years old, she awakened feeling very cross, and she became crosser still when she saw that the servant who stood by her bedside was not her Ayah.
“Why did you come?” she said to the strange woman. “I will not let you stay. Send my Ayah to me.”
The woman looked frightened, but she only stammered that the Ayah could not come and when Mary threw herself into a passion and beat and kicked her, she looked only more frightened and repeated that it was not possible for the Ayah to come to Missie Sahib.
There was something mysterious in the air that morning. Nothing was done in its regular order and several of the native servants seemed missing, while those whom Mary saw slunk or hurried about with ashy and scared faces. But no one would tell her anything and her Ayah did not come. She was actually left alone as the morning went on, and at last she wandered out into the garden and began to play by herself under a tree near the veranda. She pretended that she was making a flower-bed, and she stuck big scarlet hibiscus blossoms into little heaps of earth, all the time growing more and more angry and muttering to herself the things she would say and the names she would call Saidie when she returned.
“Pig! Pig! Daughter of Pigs!” she said, because to call a native a pig is the worst insult of all.
She was grinding her teeth and saying this over and over again when she heard her mother come out on the veranda with some one. She was with a fair young man and they stood talking together in low strange voices. Mary knew the fair young man who looked like a boy. She had heard that he was a very young officer who had just come from England. The child stared at him, but she stared most at her mother. She always did this when she had a chance to see her, because the Mem Sahib — Mary used to call her that oftener than anything else — was such a tall, slim, pretty person and wore such lovely clothes. Her hair was like curly silk and she had a delicate little nose which seemed to be disdaining things, and she had large laughing eyes. All her clothes were thin and floating, and Mary said they were “full of lace.” They looked fuller of lace than ever this morning, but her eyes were not laughing at all. They were large and scared and lifted imploringly to the fair boy officer’s face.
“Is it so very bad? Oh, is it?” Mary heard her say.
“Awfully,” the young man answered in a trembling voice. “Awfully, Mrs. Lennox. You ought to have gone to the hills two weeks ago.”
The Mem Sahib wrung her hands.
“Oh, I know I ought!” she cried. “I only stayed to go to that silly dinner party. What a fool I was!”
At that very moment such a loud sound of wailing broke out from the servants’ quarters that she clutched the young man’s arm, and Mary stood shivering from head to foot. The wailing grew wilder and wilder.
“What is it? What is it?” Mrs. Lennox gasped.
“Some one has died,” answered the boy officer. “You did not say it had broken out among your servants.”
“I did not know!” the Mem Sahib cried. “Come with me! Come with me!” and she turned and ran into the house.
After that appalling things happened, and the mysteriousness of the morning was explained to Mary. The cholera had broken out in its most fatal form and people were dying like flies. The Ayah had been taken ill in the night, and it was because she had just died that the servants had wailed in the huts. Before the next day three other servants were dead and others had run away in terror. There was panic on every side, and dying people in all the bungalows.
During the confusion and bewilderment of the second day Mary hid herself in the nursery and was forgotten by every one. Nobody thought of her, nobody wanted her, and strange things happened of which she knew nothing. Mary alternately cried and slept through the hours. She only knew that people were ill and that she heard mysterious and frightening sounds. Once she crept into the dining-room and found it empty, though a partly finished meal was on the table and chairs and plates looked as if they had been hastily pushed back when the diners rose suddenly for some reason. The child ate some fruit and biscuits, and being thirsty she drank a glass of wine which stood nearly filled. It was sweet, and she did not know how strong it was. Very soon it made her intensely drowsy, and she went back to her nursery and shut herself in again, frightened by cries she heard in the huts and by the hurrying sound of feet. The wine made her so sleepy that she could scarcely keep her eyes open and she lay down on her bed and knew nothing more for a long time.
Many things happened during the hours in which she slept so heavily, but she was not disturbed by the wails and the sound of things being carried in and out of the bungalow.
When she awakened she lay and stared at the wall. The house was perfectly still. She had never known it to be so silent before. She heard neither voices nor footsteps, and wondered if everybody had got well of the cholera and all the trouble was over. She wondered also who would take care of her now her Ayah was dead. There would be a new Ayah, and perhaps she would know some new stories. Mary had been rather tired of the old ones. She did not cry because her nurse had died. She was not an affectionate child and had never cared much for any one. The noise and hurrying about and wailing over the cholera had frightened her, and she had been angry because no one seemed to remember that she was alive. Every one was too panic-stricken to think of a little girl no one was fond of. When people had the cholera it seemed that they remembered nothing but themselves. But if every one had got well again, surely some one would remember and come to look for her.
But no one came, and as she lay waiting the house seemed to grow more and more silent. She heard something rustling on the matting and when she looked down she saw a little snake gliding along and watching her with eyes like jewels. She was not frightened, because he was a harmless little thing who would not hurt her and he seemed in a hurry to get out of the room. He slipped under the door as she watched him.
“How queer and quiet it is,” she said. “It sounds as if there was no one in the bungalow but me and the snake.”
Almost the next minute she heard footsteps in the compound, and then on the veranda. They were men’s footsteps, and the men entered the bungalow and talked in low voices. No one went to meet or speak to them and they seemed to open doors and look into rooms.
“What desolation!” she heard one voice say. “That pretty, pretty woman! I suppose the child, too. I heard there was a child, though no one ever saw her.”
Mary was standing in the middle of the nursery when they opened the door a few minutes later. She looked an ugly, cross little thing and was frowning because she was beginning to be hungry and feel disgracefully neglected. The first man who came in was a large officer she had once seen talking to her father. He looked tired and troubled, but when he saw her he was so startled that he almost jumped back.
“Barney!” he cried out. “There is a child here! A child alone! In a place like this! Mercy on us, who is she!”
“I am Mary Lennox,” the little girl said, drawing herself up stiffly. She thought the man was very rude to call her father’s bungalow “A place like this!” “I fell asleep when every one had the cholera and I have only just wakened up. Why does nobody come?”
“It is the child no one ever saw!” exclaimed the man, turning to his companions. “She has actually been forgotten!”
“Why was I forgotten?” Mary said, stamping her foot. “Why does nobody come?”
The young man whose name was Barney looked at her very sadly. Mary even thought she saw him wink his eyes as if to wink tears away.
“Poor little kid!” he said. “There is nobody left to come.”
It was in that strange and sudden way that Mary found out that she had neither father nor mother left; that they had died and been carried away in the night, and that the few native servants who had not died also had left the house as quickly as they could get out of it, none of them even remembering that there was a Missie Sahib. That was why the place was so quiet. It was true that there was no one in the bungalow but herself and the little rustling snake.
Chapter 2 Mistress Mary Quite Contrary
Mary had liked to look at her mother from a distance and she had thought her very pretty, but as she knew very little of her she could scarcely have been expected to love her or to miss her very much when she was gone. She did not miss her at all, in fact, and as she was a self-absorbed child she gave her entire thought to herself, as she had always done[1q]. If she had been older she would no doubt have been very anxious at being left alone in the world, but she was very young, and as she had always been taken care of, she supposed she always would be. What she thought was that she would like to know if she was going to nice people, who would be polite to her and give her her own way as her Ayah and the other native servants had done.
She knew that she was not going to stay at the English clergyman’s house where she was taken at first. She did not want to stay. The English clergyman was poor and he had five children nearly all the same age and they wore shabby clothes and were always quarreling and snatching toys from each other. Mary hated their untidy bungalow and was so disagreeable to them that after the first day or two nobody would play with her. By the second day they had given her a nickname which made her furious.
It was Basil who thought of it first. Basil was a little boy with impudent blue eyes and a turned-up nose and Mary hated him. She was playing by herself under a tree, just as she had been playing the day the cholera[2] broke out. She was making heaps of earth and paths for a garden and Basil came and stood near to watch her. Presently he got rather interested and suddenly made a suggestion.
“Why don’t you put a heap of stones there and pretend it is a rockery?” he said. “There in the middle,” and he leaned over her to point.
“Go away!” cried Mary. “I don’t want boys. Go away!”
For a moment Basil looked angry, and then he began to tease. He was always teasing his sisters. He danced round and round her and made faces and sang and laughed.
“Mistress Mary, quite contrary[3],
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And marigolds all in a row.”
He sang it until the other children heard and laughed, too; and the crosser Mary got, the more they sang “Mistress Mary, quite contrary”; and after that as long as she stayed with them they called her “Mistress Mary Quite Contrary” when they spoke of her to each other, and often when they spoke to her.
“You are going to be sent home,” Basil said to her, “at the end of the week. And we’re glad of it.”
“I am glad of it, too,” answered Mary. “Where is home?”
“She doesn’t know where home is!” said Basil, with seven-year-old scorn. “It’s England, of course. Our grandmama lives there and our sister Mabel was sent to her last year. You are not going to your grandmama. You have none. You are going to your uncle. His name is Mr. Archibald Craven.”
“I don’t know anything about him,” snapped Mary.
“I know you don’t,” Basil answered. “You don’t know anything. Girls never do. I heard father and mother talking about him. He lives in a great, big, desolate old house in the country and no one goes near him. He’s so cross he won’t let them, and they wouldn’t come if he would let them. He’s a hunchback, and he’s horrid.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Mary; and she turned her back and stuck her fingers in her ears, because she would not listen any more.
But she thought over it a great deal afterward; and when Mrs. Crawford told her that night that she was going to sail away to England in a few days and go to her uncle, Mr. Archibald Craven, who lived at Misselthwaite Manor, she looked so stony and stubbornly uninterested that they did not know what to think about her. They tried to be kind to her, but she only turned her face away when Mrs. Crawford attempted to kiss her, and held herself stiffly when Mr. Crawford patted her shoulder.
“She is such a plain child,” Mrs. Crawford said pityingly, afterward. “And her mother was such a pretty creature. She had a very pretty manner, too, and Mary has the most unattractive ways I ever saw in a child. The children call her ‘Mistress Mary Quite Contrary,’ and though it’s naughty of them, one can’t help understanding it.”
“Perhaps if her mother had carried her pretty face and her pretty manners oftener into the nursery Mary might have learned some pretty ways too. It is very sad, now the poor beautiful thing is gone, to remember that many people never even knew that she had a child at all.”
“I believe she scarcely ever looked at her,” sighed Mrs. Crawford. “When her Ayah was dead there was no one to give a thought to the little thing. Think of the servants running away and leaving her all alone in that deserted bungalow. Colonel McGrew said he nearly jumped out of his skin when he opened the door and found her standing by herself in the middle of the room.”
Mary made the long voyage to England under the care of an officer’s wife, who was taking her children to leave them in a boarding-school. She was very much absorbed in her own little boy and girl, and was rather glad to hand the child over to the woman Mr. Archibald Craven sent to meet her, in London. The woman was his housekeeper at Misselthwaite Manor, and her name was Mrs. Medlock. She was a stout woman, with very red cheeks and sharp black eyes. She wore a very purple dress, a black silk mantle with jet fringe on it and a black bonnet with purple velvet flowers which stuck up and trembled when she moved her head. Mary did not like her at all, but as she very seldom liked people there was nothing remarkable in that; besides which it was very evident Mrs. Medlock did not think much of her.
“My word! she’s a plain little piece of goods!” she said. “And we’d heard that her mother was a beauty. She hasn’t handed much of it down, has she, ma’am?”
“Perhaps she will improve as she grows older,” the officer’s wife said good-naturedly. “If she were not so sallow and had a nicer expression, her features are rather good. Children alter so much.”
“She’ll have to alter a good deal,” answered Mrs. Medlock. “And there’s nothing likely to improve children at Misselthwaite — if you ask me!”
They thought Mary was not listening because she was standing a little apart from them at the window of the private hotel they had gone to. She was watching the passing buses and cabs, and people, but she heard quite well and was made very curious about her uncle and the place he lived in. What sort of a place was it, and what would he be like? What was a hunchback? She had never seen one. Perhaps there were none in India.
Since she had been living in other people’s houses and had had no Ayah, she had begun to feel lonely and to think queer thoughts which were new to her. She had begun to wonder why she had never seemed to belong to any one even when her father and mother had been alive. Other children seemed to belong to their fathers and mothers, but she had never seemed to really be any one’s little girl. She had had servants, and food and clothes, but no one had taken any notice of her. She did not know that this was because she was a disagreeable child; but then, of course, she did not know she was disagreeable. She often thought that other people were, but she did not know that she was so herself.
She thought Mrs. Medlock the most disagreeable person she had ever seen, with her common, highly colored face and her common fine bonnet. When the next day they set out on their journey to Yorkshire, she walked through the station to the railway carriage with her head up and trying to keep as far away from her as she could, because she did not want to seem to belong to her. It would have made her very angry to think people imagined she was her little girl.
But Mrs. Medlock was not in the least disturbed by her and her thoughts. She was the kind of woman who would “stand no nonsense from young ones.” At least, that is what she would have said if she had been asked. She had not wanted to go to London just when her sister Maria’s daughter was going to be married, but she had a comfortable, well paid place as housekeeper at Misselthwaite Manor and the only way in which she could keep it was to do at once what Mr. Archibald Craven told her to do. She never dared even to ask a question.
“Captain Lennox and his wife died of the cholera,” Mr. Craven had said in his short, cold way. “Captain Lennox was my wife’s brother and I am their daughter’s guardian. The child is to be brought here. You must go to London and bring her yourself.”
So she packed her small trunk and made the journey.
Mary sat in her corner of the railway carriage and looked plain and fretful. She had nothing to read or to look at, and she had folded her thin little black-gloved hands in her lap. Her black dress made her look yellower than ever, and her limp light hair straggled from under her black crêpe hat.
“A more marred-looking young one I never saw in my life,” Mrs. Medlock thought. (Marred is a Yorkshire word and means spoiled and pettish.) She had never seen a child who sat so still without doing anything; and at last she got tired of watching her and began to talk in a brisk, hard voice.
“I suppose I may as well tell you something about where you are going to,” she said. “Do you know anything about your uncle?”
“No,” said Mary.
“Never heard your father and mother talk about him?”
“No,” said Mary frowning. She frowned because she remembered that her father and mother had never talked to her about anything in particular. Certainly they had never told her things.
“Humph,” muttered Mrs. Medlock, staring at her queer, unresponsive little face. She did not say any more for a few moments and then she began again.
“I suppose you might as well be told something — to prepare you. You are going to a queer place.”
Mary said nothing at all, and Mrs. Medlock looked rather discomfited by her apparent indifference, but, after taking a breath, she went on.
“Not but that it’s a grand big place in a gloomy way, and Mr. Craven’s proud of it in his way — and that’s gloomy enough, too. The house is six hundred years old and it’s on the edge of the moor, and there’s near a hundred rooms in it, though most of them’s shut up and locked. And there’s pictures and fine old furniture and things that’s been there for ages, and there’s a big park round it and gardens and trees with branches trailing to the ground — some of them.” She paused and took another breath. “But there’s nothing else,” she ended suddenly.
Mary had begun to listen in spite of herself. It all sounded so unlike India, and anything new rather attracted her. But she did not intend to look as if she were interested. That was one of her unhappy, disagreeable ways. So she sat still.
“Well,” said Mrs. Medlock. “What do you think of it?”
“Nothing,” she answered. “I know nothing about such places.”
That made Mrs. Medlock laugh a short sort of laugh.
“Eh!” she said, “but you are like an old woman. Don’t you care?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Mary, “whether I care or not.”
“You are right enough there,” said Mrs. Medlock. “It doesn’t. What you’re to be kept at Misselthwaite Manor for I don’t know, unless because it’s the easiest way. He’s not going to trouble himself about you, that’s sure and certain. He never troubles himself about no one.”
She stopped herself as if she had just remembered something in time.
“He’s got a crooked back,” she said. “That set him wrong. He was a sour young man and got no good of all his money and big place till he was married.”
Mary’s eyes turned toward her in spite of her intention not to seem to care. She had never thought of the hunchback’s being married and she was a trifle surprised. Mrs. Medlock saw this, and as she was a talkative woman she continued with more interest. This was one way of passing some of the time, at any rate.
“She was a sweet, pretty thing and he’d have walked the world over to get her a blade o’ grass she wanted. Nobody thought she’d marry him, but she did, and people said she married him for his money. But she didn’t — she didn’t,” positively. “When she died —”
Mary gave a little involuntary jump.
“Oh! did she die!” she exclaimed, quite without meaning to. She had just remembered a French fairy story she had once read called “Riquet à la Houppe.” It had been about a poor hunchback and a beautiful princess and it had made her suddenly sorry for Mr. Archibald Craven.
“Yes, she died,” Mrs. Medlock answered. “And it made him queerer than ever. He cares about nobody. He won’t see people. Most of the time he goes away, and when he is at Misselthwaite he shuts himself up in the West Wing and won’t let any one but Pitcher see him. Pitcher’s an old fellow, but he took care of him when he was a child and he knows his ways.”
It sounded like something in a book and it did not make Mary feel cheerful. A house with a hundred rooms, nearly all shut up and with their doors locked — a house on the edge of a moor — whatsoever a moor was — sounded dreary. A man with a crooked back who shut himself up also! She stared out of the window with her lips pinched together, and it seemed quite natural that the rain should have begun to pour down in gray slanting lines and splash and stream down the window-panes. If the pretty wife had been alive she might have made things cheerful by being something like her own mother and by running in and out and going to parties as she had done in frocks “full of lace.” But she was not there any more.
“You needn’t expect to see him, because ten to one you won’t,” said Mrs. Medlock. “And you mustn’t expect that there will be people to talk to you. You’ll have to play about and look after yourself. You’ll be told what rooms you can go into and what rooms you’re to keep out of. There’s gardens enough. But when you’re in the house don’t go wandering and poking about. Mr. Craven won’t have it.”
“I shall not want to go poking about,” said sour little Mary; and just as suddenly as she had begun to be rather sorry for Mr. Archibald Craven she began to cease to be sorry and to think he was unpleasant enough to deserve all that had happened to him.
And she turned her face toward the streaming panes of the window of the railway carriage and gazed out at the gray rain-storm which looked as if it would go on forever and ever. She watched it so long and steadily that the grayness grew heavier and heavier before her eyes and she fell asleep.
