The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett published The Secret Garden in 1911, serialized first in The American Magazine. She was sixty-two years old and had already written Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) and A Little Princess (1905). She had been thinking about gardens for years — she was a passionate gardener — and she had recently spent time in England, where the walled kitchen gardens of Victorian and Edwardian country houses became her setting.

The premise: Mary Lennox is a disagreeable, pale, sickly child orphaned in India and sent to live with her uncle at Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire. She is unloved and knows it. At the Manor, she discovers a locked garden — sealed for ten years since her uncle's wife died there — and gradually, with the help of a Yorkshire boy named Dickon and eventually her invalid cousin Colin, tends it back to life. The garden's resurrection is inseparable from Mary's.

The novel's argument is about where healing comes from — not from adults, not from authority, but from children who are given access to growing things and the freedom to tend them. It is also, quietly, about class: the working-class Dickon, who understands the natural world completely, is the key to the garden that the gentry cannot unlock. Burnett doesn't press this point, but it's there.

The novel has gone through periods of critical disfavor — Mary's racism in the early chapters (she treats Indian servants with the contempt her class and era trained her to) makes for uncomfortable reading, and it hasn't been edited away. The racism is context, not endorsement, and the novel's argument about transformation is specifically about unlearning contempt.

Mary Lennox — disagreeable, pale, neglected. Burnett's formal achievement is making a protagonist who is not immediately sympathetic and then showing her transformation without sentimentality or false warmth. Mary becomes likable through work — through caring for the garden — not through announced goodness.

Dickon Sourby — the Yorkshire boy who communes with animals and plants, who is warm and skilled without condescension. He is the novel's image of natural wisdom: knowledge that comes from proximity to growing things rather than from books or station.

Colin Craven — Mary's cousin, an invalid who has been told he will die young and has organized his life around his illness. He is convinced he is a hunchback (he is not). His transformation — from invalid to outdoor boy — is the novel's second arc, and Burnett links it directly to the garden.

Archibald Craven — Colin's father, who has been in grief since his wife's death in the garden and has not seen Colin in years. His reconciliation with his son is the novel's final act.

No. 1 · Finding the door. Mary discovers the locked door to the garden by following a robin — a real robin, not a metaphor, though Burnett uses him symbolically — and finding the key buried in the earth. The moment of finding the door and entering for the first time is the novel's imaginative center: a child finding something no adult has been able to open. The image has remained culturally potent for 110 years.

No. 2 · Colin's first garden visit. When Mary brings Colin to the garden for the first time — carried in a wheelchair he soon won't need — and he sees things beginning to grow, his response is one of children's literature's great scenes: a boy who has been defined by dying having his first encounter with something definitionally alive.

No. 3 · "Magic." Colin develops a philosophy he calls "Magic" — the natural life-force in all growing things that can be called upon by concentration and attention. Burnett means it seriously; it is her secular version of prayer, her argument that attention to the living world is itself a form of spiritual practice. It is also charmingly wrong in the way that children's philosophies are charmingly wrong.

Read this if you are…

• A parent looking for a children's novel about transformation that doesn't announce its lesson. Burnett's pedagogy is embedded in experience, not moral statement.
• Any adult reader: the novel works at both ages, and the adult reading sees things the child reading misses (the class argument, the grief argument).
• Gardeners: the garden descriptions are botanically specific and seasonally precise; Burnett knew what she was writing about.

Skip it if you are…

• Troubled by the early Mary, whose contempt for Indian servants is a period artifact the novel doesn't apologize for. Know going in that Burnett is aware Mary needs to change, and that the racism is part of what needs changing.

• The transformation takes time. Burnett doesn't announce when Mary has changed; the reader notices by comparison. Track Mary's language about other people from chapter to chapter.
• Dickon is the key. His knowledge is working-class, practical, and complete; Mary and Colin's healing runs through him. Pay attention to what he does and doesn't say.
• "Magic" is serious. When Colin develops his philosophy of Magic, Burnett is not mocking him; she is arguing, through a child's language, that attention to living things is transformative.

• E. Nesbit — The Railway Children (1906). The Edwardian children's novel companion: another group of children who solve adult problems through children's resources.
• L. M. Montgomery — Anne of Green Gables (1908). Another disagreeable orphan who transforms through environment and attention. The comparison between Mary and Anne is illuminating about what each author was exploring.
• C. S. Lewis — The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950). Another frozen garden thawed by a child's arrival; Lewis read Burnett.

1. Mary is disagreeable and contemptuous at the beginning. What changes her? Is it the garden, Dickon, Colin, or something internal?
2. Dickon comes from a working-class family and has knowledge that the gentry children don't have. What is Burnett arguing about the relationship between class and natural wisdom?
3. Colin has organized his life around his illness, which may be largely psychosomatic. Is the novel's argument that illness can be willed away? Or is it more subtle?
4. The early Mary's contempt for Indian servants is a period artifact that the novel doesn't editorialize. How do you read the early Mary? Does the transformation the novel describes include this?
5. "Magic" is Colin's word for the life-force in growing things. What is Burnett arguing through this philosophy? Is it religious, secular, or both?
6. The garden was sealed for ten years after Colin's mother died. What does the locked garden represent? Why does unlocking it restore the people around it?