The Secret Garden
- Written By Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret Garden
- Frances Hodgson Burnett
$19.99
Behind every locked door, secrets await.
When Mary Lennox arrives at Misselthwaite Manor, she is ten years old, recently orphaned, and โ by her own admission โ thoroughly disagreeable. The vast Yorkshire estate offers little comfort: a reclusive guardian who wants nothing to do with her, a labyrinth of locked rooms, and moors stretching endlessly in every direction. Then Mary finds a key โ and unlocks a mysterious overgrown garden, hidden behind a wall of ivy and left for dead.
As Mary secretly coaxes life from the frozen soil, she stumbles into the lives of two other lonely children: Dickon, a Yorkshire boy with an almost magical ease with wild things, and Colin, her guardian’s hidden, ailing son who has convinced himself he is dying. Together, the three of them begin to tend something larger than a garden.
Published in 1911, Frances Hodgson Burnettโs most enduring novel arrived just as children’s literature began to take seriously the inner lives of its characters. Burnett’s insistence that nature and friendship can heal what grief and neglect had broken was ahead of its time, and has never stopped resonating.
โWhere you tend to a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.โ
About the Author
- Frances Hodgson Burnett
William Shakespeare (1564โ1616) was born in StratfordโuponโAvon and built his career in London’s vibrant theatrical world, where he became a playwright, actor, and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Over the course of two decades, he produced a body of work that revolutionized English drama and reshaped the Western literary canon โ plays that fused poetry with biting humor, psychological insight, and a startlingly modern sense of character. His tragedies, comedies, and histories have been performed continuously for more than four hundred years, translated into every major language, and adapted into countless forms.
Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849โ1924) was born in Manchester, England, and immigrated to Tennessee with her family at sixteen following her father’s death and the collapse of the family’s finances. She began writing to help support her mother and siblings, selling her first story to a magazine at eighteen.
Burnett wrote prolifically across her long career โ novels, plays, and serialized fiction for both adults and children โ but her children’s work is the most enduring. Little Lord Fauntleroy made her famous on both sides of the Atlantic in 1886, followed by A Little Princess in 1905.ย
The Secret Garden, published in 1911 near the end of her life, is now widely considered her masterpiece: a quiet and radical book about the healing power of cultivating both natural beauty and shared purpose.
