The novel’s gothic aspects allude to the Brontë sisters’ Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847).

The Secret Garden offers a twist on the traditional 19th-century orphan narrative: Mary Lennox is not a saintly child, but a decidedly unpleasant, unattractive little girl.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the New Thought movement posited positive thinking as a divinely-derived force for good, and as a means of achieving mental and physical healing.

The garden’s decay and rebirth symbolizes Mary and Colin’s physical and spiritual trajectories.

While the novel treats the underlying horror of the abandonment and isolation Mary and Colin suffer with marked seriousness, an unabashed joy pervades scenes set in the natural world.

Burnett’s son Lionel’s death from tuberculosis in 1890 affected the author deeply.

With the help of Martha’s animal-charming brother, Dickon, Mary brings the garden back to life and helps her cousin regain his health and reconnect with his father.

Mary first locates the garden, then discovers another secret: that her uncle has an invalid son named Colin. Mary’s maid, Martha, tells her about a garden that has been locked since Mrs. Craven’s manor in Yorkshire after her parents die. Mary Lennox, a spoiled, lonely child travels from India to her uncle, Mr.The Secret Garden offers an ahead-of-its-time understanding of the link between mental and physical well-being.Both a celebration of the natural world and an expression of faith in the possibility that even the most wounded soul can heal and transform, The Secret Garden offers an ahead-of-its-time understanding of the link between mental and physical well-being. In nurturing the garden, the once physically and spiritually weak Mary – and her mirror, Colin – enact their own redemption: achieving health and happiness. Burnett’s Eden-esque garden acts as both the site and symbol of her characters’ physical and spiritual growth.

And yet, it is precisely Burnett’s willingness to take her readers into the darkness – in order that they might better understand the path toward the light – which makes The Secret Garden such a compelling, modern-feeling tale today, more than 100 years after its publication.

Nor is the novel’s exploration of isolation, death, and the ways the traumas of the past haunt the present, typical children’s fare. But Frances Hodgson Burnett’s orphan – the decidedly unlikable and unattractive but refreshingly honest Mary Lennox is hardly the idealized heroine found in most turn-of-the-century orphan stories. On its surface, The Secret Garden is a straightforward story of how an isolated orphan, by a lucky twist of fate, finds friendship and happiness in an unlikely way.

The secret garden 1911