Frances Hodgson Burnett published The Secret Garden in 1911. Mary Lennox, a sour, neglected child whose parents have died in a cholera epidemic in India, is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire, the estate of her uncle Archibald Craven. Misselthwaite is enormous, cold, and full of locked rooms, including the garden that Craven locked after his wife's death a decade earlier. Mary discovers the garden, begins to restore it with the help of a local boy, Dickon, and eventually extends its healing qualities to Colin Craven, her cousin, who has been kept bedridden under the belief that he is a permanent invalid.
Burnett constructed the novel around a therapeutic logic informed by contemporary theories of the relationship between mental attitude and physical health. The garden functions as an objective correlative for the process of restoration: neglected and apparently dead, it turns out to be dormant rather than dead, and the work of clearing, planting, and tending it is also the work of Mary's and Colin's psychological development. The novel's central argument, that attention to growing things, outdoor activity, and contact with natural rhythms produces psychological health that indoor withdrawal cannot, is stated more directly in the second half than the first, as Colin's recovery becomes its explicit subject.
The Secret Garden has never been out of print since its publication and remains one of the most-read children's novels in English. Its appeal to adult readers rests partly on the garden's symbolic architecture, the locked, hidden space discovered and restored, and partly on the unusual severity with which Burnett treats Mary's initial character before the transformation begins. Mary is not sympathetic in the novel's early chapters, and the specificity of her unpleasantness is part of what makes her eventual development convincing rather than sentimental.
The novel's enduring readability owes much to the precision of its construction, the economy of means by which it achieves its effects, and the care with which the author builds a world that is internally coherent enough to generate genuine surprise at the moments of revelation. These are qualities that no amount of time diminishes, and they are why the book continues to find new readers across generations.
Leo Tolstoy's wife Sofia copied War and Peace by hand seven times, the manuscript ran to over 1,200 pages.
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