The Secret Garden

The Most Difficult Heroine

Mary Lennox is not a likeable child when we first meet her. Spoiled, imperious, self-centred, and completely alone — her parents have died in a cholera epidemic in India, and she is sent to live with her reclusive uncle in a vast, mostly empty manor on the Yorkshire moors. She doesn’t know how to do anything, doesn’t know how to play, and doesn’t particularly want to know how to be kind.

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s decision to begin with such an unattractive protagonist is one of the most psychologically astute choices in children’s literature. Mary’s transformation is not from good to better but from genuinely unpleasant to genuinely alive — and we understand exactly why she was the way she was when we first met her.

The Garden

When Mary discovers the locked door in the garden wall, and the key, and the garden itself — overgrown, neglected, but alive — the novel finds its central symbol. The secret garden is both a real place and a representation of everything that has been locked up and left untended: in Mary, in her invalid cousin Colin, and in Archibald Craven, the bereaved and absent uncle.

Burnett’s treatment of the garden’s restoration is genuinely practical — she clearly knew about horticulture — and the physical work of digging and planting is never romanticised. It is effortful, directed, and healing precisely because it requires attention to something outside the self.

The Psychology Beneath the Story

The novel’s most striking aspect, read in the twenty-first century, is how clearly Burnett is writing about what we would now call depression, psychosomatic illness, and the effects of neglect on child development. Colin believes he is ill and is becoming more so. What cures him is not medicine but engagement, fresh air, work, and being taken seriously.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — A classic that gets deeper with every re-reading: psychologically astute, beautifully observed, and genuinely transformative.

Three Children, Three Recoveries

It is easy to remember The Secret Garden as the story of one child, but Burnett’s structure is triangular. Mary Lennox, sour and friendless after the cholera epidemic that orphaned her in India, is the first to be reclaimed by the Yorkshire moor and the locked garden she discovers behind its ivy. Colin Craven, the cousin she finds shut away in the great house, convinced he is destined to die young, is the second. And Archibald Craven, the grieving widower who has fled his own home and his own son, is the third — the adult whose paralysis the children’s recovery is finally able to reach. The garden does not heal one person; it circulates health among three, and Burnett’s quiet argument is that no recovery is wholly private. Mary cannot get well in isolation. She gets well by being needed — first by the garden, then by Colin, then by the whole household that reorganises itself around the thing the children are tending in secret.

Dickon and the Moral of the Moor

Dickon, the Sowerby boy who charms animals and seems to grow out of the moor itself, is the novel’s still point. He is poor where Mary and Colin are privileged, but he possesses the one thing their wealth has not bought them: an unforced belonging to the living world. Burnett does not sentimentalise him into a symbol — he is practical, knowledgeable, generous with his expertise — but she clearly intends him as a corrective to the hothouse misery of the manor. Where Mary and Colin have been over-attended and under-loved, Dickon has been raised in plain affection and open air, and he carries the easy competence that follows. His mother, Susan Sowerby, performs a similar function at the level of the adults: it is her common sense, relayed at a distance, that gives Archibald Craven permission to come home. The moor people, in Burnett’s scheme, hold the wisdom the gentry have mislaid.

A Book About Health Before Its Time

Read in the twenty-first century, the most arresting thing about The Secret Garden is how much of it concerns what we would now call psychosomatic illness and the social determinants of wellbeing. Colin is not organically sick; he has been made ill by neglect, terror, and the suggestion — repeated until he believed it — that he was doomed. His cure is not pharmacological. It is fresh air, physical work, decent food, the company of other children, and the radical experience of being taken seriously rather than pitied. Burnett, writing in 1911, anticipates by a century the research that would link movement, nature, and social connection to mental and physical health. She dresses the insight in the quasi-mystical language of “Magic,” which can feel dated, but the underlying observation is sound and, if anything, has only been confirmed.

This is also why the book survives re-reading by adults who first met it as children. What looked, at eight, like a simple story about a hidden garden reveals itself, later, as a study of how neglected people become difficult people, and how difficulty can be undone by the right environment rather than the right reproach. Mary is never scolded into kindness; she is absorbed into a project larger than herself and changed by the absorption.

The Shift to Colin

The most common complaint about the novel — that its focus migrates from Mary to Colin in the final third — is fair as description but perhaps unfair as criticism. Burnett does let Colin’s spectacular recovery dominate the closing chapters, and Mary, the genuinely original creation, recedes. But the shift is consistent with the book’s circulatory logic: having been healed, Mary’s role becomes to heal, and the narrative follows the health as it moves. That the ending belongs to the reconciliation of father and son rather than to Mary herself is a structural choice, not an oversight, even if it leaves some readers wishing the most interesting character had been granted the last word.