The Secret Garden Summary: Frances Hodgson Burnett's Yorkshire Classic Explained
What The Secret Garden is about
Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel was serialised in The American Magazine between November 1910 and August 1911, then published in book form in 1911. The American edition came from the Frederick A. Stokes Company with illustrations by M. L. Kirk, the British edition from Heinemann with illustrations by Charles Robinson. It is regarded as a classic of English children's literature and has been adapted many times for stage and screen.
The story opens at the turn of the twentieth century. Mary Lennox is a sickly, neglected and unloved ten-year-old, born in British India to wealthy, self-indulgent British parents. She is raised mainly by native servants who spoil her, and she grows up aggressive, self-centred and unpleasant. A cholera epidemic kills her parents and the few surviving servants flee, leaving her entirely alone. British soldiers find her and place her briefly with an English clergyman, whose children taunt her with the rhyme "Mistress Mary, quite contrary".
Mary is sent to England to live with her uncle, Archibald Craven, at Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire Moors. Archibald was married to Lilias, the sister of Mary's father. On arrival Mary learns that Lilias is dead and that Archibald is a hunchback. Mary hates the house, hates the people in it who refuse to pander to her, and hates the bleak moor most of all. Then she hears about a walled garden where her aunt once spent hours growing roses. Lilias died after an accident there ten years earlier, and the grieving Archibald locked the door and buried the key.
Finding that garden becomes Mary's obsession, and the search changes her. A robin redbreast leads her to a patch of disturbed soil where the key is buried. She asks her maid for garden tools. She starts spending her days outdoors. Her health improves and her temper softens. The second half of the novel turns on a discovery inside the house: following cries that echo through the corridors at night, Mary finds a hidden bedroom and a boy her own age.
The main characters
Mary Lennox begins the book as one of the least likeable child heroines in English fiction, and that is deliberate. Burnett makes her sour, demanding and friendless, then shows what fresh air, work and company can do to a child nobody has ever bothered with.
Colin Craven is Archibald's son and Mary's cousin. He suffers from fevers, is confined to bed and is believed unable to walk. Like Mary, he has been spoiled badly, with servants obeying his every whim to head off his hysterical tantrums. He expects to die young and talks about it constantly.
Dickon Sowerby is the twelve-year-old brother of Mary's maid, Martha. He spends most of his time out on the moors and knows plants and animals by instinct. He brings Mary her first garden tools and becomes her first real friend.
Martha Sowerby, the maid, is the one who tells Mary about Lilias and the locked garden. Ben Weatherstaff, the gruff old gardener, and a tame robin complete Mary's small circle. Archibald Craven himself is mostly absent, travelling abroad, a man who has let grief shut down a house.
The themes
The central idea is that neglect makes children unpleasant and attention makes them well. Mary and Colin are both products of adults who either ignored them or indulged them. Neither was given anything useful to do. The garden gives them work, and the work gives them health.
Nature functions as medicine throughout. The Yorkshire moor that Mary first loathes becomes the thing that saves her. Burnett draws a straight line between the garden coming back into bloom and the two children coming back to life, and she lets the reader see the parallel without ever quite stating it.
Friendship is the mechanism. Mary cannot heal herself alone. Dickon gives her the knowledge, Colin gives her someone to care about besides herself, and Ben gives her a hard truth at exactly the right moment. Identity matters too. Both children have been defined by what adults say about them, Mary as contrary, Colin as an invalid, and both have to refuse those labels.
How it ends (spoilers)
Mary tells Colin about the garden and he asks to see it. He is wheeled outside for the first time in years. Ben Weatherstaff appears on a ladder over the wall and admits he believed Colin to be a cripple with a crooked back and crooked legs. Furious, Colin rises shakily from his chair and finds he can stand, though his legs are weak from disuse.
The children and Ben conspire to keep his recovery secret so they can surprise his father. Abroad, Archibald's own spirits lift, and he dreams of Lilias calling to him from inside the garden. A letter from Dickon and Martha's mother brings him home. Hearing voices behind the wall, he finds the door unlocked, the garden in full bloom and his son on his feet, having just beaten Mary in a race. Father and son walk back to the manor together, to the astonishment of the servants.
Why it still matters
The book has survived because its promise is simple and physical. Go outside, dig something, stop talking about yourself, get better. That holds up for readers of any age, and it explains why the novel keeps returning as a play and a film.
It also refuses to make its children sweet. Mary is horrible, Colin is worse, and Burnett lets them be horrible for a long time before anything shifts. Children notice that honesty. Adults coming back to the book tend to notice how much of it is about grief, a locked house, a man who could not face a garden for ten years, and the way a place can be brought back along with the people in it.
