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The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett

1911 · Early 20th Century · Novel · English

Public domainhigh medical relevanceRead full text Five-minute digest

Posthumous or imagined likeness of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Source · Public domain

Summary

The Secret Garden begins in imperial India, where Mary Lennox is a sickly, spoiled and emotionally neglected child. A cholera outbreak kills her parents and household, and Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven. At first she is contrary, lonely and ignorant of affection. The moor, the servants' plain speech and Martha Sowerby's warmth begin to alter her. Mary hears of a walled garden locked for ten years after the death of Mrs. Craven, whose accident there devastated her husband. Guided by a robin, Mary finds the key and enters the neglected garden. Working secretly in the soil with Dickon Sowerby, a boy at home with animals and plants, she learns care, patience and bodily vigor. Another mystery troubles the house: cries in the night. Mary discovers Colin Craven, her cousin, hidden away as an invalid and convinced that he will develop a hunchback and die young. Colin's illness is partly real frailty, partly fear, confinement and the beliefs imposed on him by adults. Mary challenges his tyranny, brings him into the garden and, with Dickon, turns restoration into a ritual of fresh air, exercise, secrecy, imagination and disciplined hope. As the garden revives, so do Mary and Colin. Colin learns to stand, walk and run; Mary becomes healthy and affectionate; Archibald Craven, grieving abroad, dreams of his wife and returns to find his son transformed. The children effectively rebuild a family by rebuilding an ecosystem of trust. The novel is a fantasy of environmental and emotional healing. Its medical lens is central: cholera, invalidism, hypochondria, disability anxiety, caregiving, nutrition, fresh-air cure, mind-body medicine and childhood neglect all shape the plot. Its optimism is powerful but should be read critically, since it can blur distinctions between psychosomatic illness, disability and moral will.

Plot or Argument

India and cholera
Mary's neglected imperial childhood ends when cholera kills her parents and servants, leaving her orphaned and emotionally untouched.
Misselthwaite Manor
Mary arrives in Yorkshire, encounters Martha, the moor and a household organized around grief, secrecy and prohibition.
Finding the garden
The robin leads Mary to the buried key and hidden door of the locked garden, where neglected life begins to return through her labor.
Dickon and outdoor healing
Dickon's friendship introduces Mary to gardening, animals, exercise and a noncoercive model of care rooted in the moor.
Colin discovered
Mary finds Colin confined in his room, frightened by predictions of deformity and death, and tyrannical from isolation.
Colin in the garden
Mary, Dickon and Colin use secrecy, ritual, fresh air and practice to transform Colin's expectations of his body.
Craven's return
Archibald Craven returns from grief and finds Colin walking in the revived garden, completing the restoration of child, father and house.

Characters

Mary Lennox, protagonist
A neglected, disagreeable orphan whose health and affections revive through garden work and friendship.
Colin Craven, Mary's cousin
A hidden invalid convinced he will die or become deformed, transformed through fresh air, exercise and changed belief.
Dickon Sowerby, Mary's friend
A moorland boy with deep sympathy for animals and plants, embodying natural care and vitality.
Martha Sowerby, servant and friend
A Yorkshire maid whose warmth and practical speech help Mary adjust to Misselthwaite.
Archibald Craven, Mary's uncle
A grieving widower who neglects his son and house because he cannot bear his wife's death.
Mrs. Sowerby, maternal guide
Dickon and Martha's mother, a figure of practical wisdom, nourishment and emotional health.
Ben Weatherstaff, gardener
A gruff old gardener connected to the robin, the garden and the memory of Mrs. Craven.

Lessons

Care can begin with attention
Mary becomes capable of affection by caring for soil, shoots and living creatures. The novel teaches that attention to small lives can retrain a neglected emotional life.
- Why does gardening change Mary?
- Is the garden a place, a therapy or a secret society?
- How does Dickon model care differently from adults in the manor?
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Beliefs about the body can shape illness
Colin's confinement and fear worsen his weakness. Burnett's cure belongs to the novel's garden theology of fresh air, exercise, companionship, and disciplined hope.
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- How does the house change as the children change?
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Context

The novel reflects early twentieth-century interests in fresh air, exercise, gardening, child development, domestic reform and New Thought ideas about the power of mind. Its opening also reflects British imperial life in India as Burnett presents it through Mary Lennox's childhood.

Composition

The Secret Garden was serialized in 1910 and published in book form in 1911. Burnett drew on her love of gardens and on popular ideas about health, vitality, positive thinking and the restorative countryside.

Reception

The novel was less immediately celebrated than some of Burnett's earlier work but became one of the most beloved children's classics of the twentieth century. Adaptations have emphasized both Gothic mystery and therapeutic nature.

Childhood Nature / Landscape Illness / Body Family Death / Mortality Friendship Education Home Exile

Comparisons

little-women
Both are children's classics about moral growth within domestic life, but Burnett focuses more directly on illness, environment and bodily restoration.
black-beauty
Both books teach care through attention to dependent living beings, though Sewell centers animal suffering and Burnett centers children and plants.
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
Bronte's novel, outside this manifest, shares the Gothic house, orphan heroine and hidden suffering, but Burnett converts Gothic secrecy into healing.
david-copperfield
Dickens and Burnett both make childhood neglect morally legible, though Burnett's cure is pastoral and therapeutic.
the-portrait-of-a-lady
Both contrast confinement and freedom through houses and gardens, but Burnett gives restoration where James gives moral ambiguity.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

Chapter I, There Is No One Left, where Mary wakes in a bungalow emptied by cholera and is found by officers who did not know she existed. Notice that no one, not even Mary, mourns.
The robin who shows the way in Chapters VII and VIII, first to the buried key and then to the door hidden under the ivy, and Dickon's word wick in Chapter XI for the rose-stems that are still alive inside.
Mary's request to Mr. Craven in Chapter XII for a bit of earth, and the cries in the corridor that lead her to Colin in Chapter XIII.
The tantrum of Chapter XVII, when Mary shouts back at the hysterical Colin and feels his back for the lump he dreads, and Chapter XXI, when Colin stands up in the garden to answer Ben Weatherstaff.
The last chapters, where the children sing the Doxology in the garden and Mrs. Sowerby arrives in Chapter XXVI, and Mr. Craven, far away by a stream in the Tyrol, feels himself coming alive before a dream calls him home.

Key terms and names

Misselthwaite Manor: Mr. Craven's great house on the edge of the Yorkshire moor, with nearly a hundred rooms, most of them locked. Its closed doors mirror a household shut down by grief.
The moor: The open, wind-swept country around the manor that Mary first fears as an endless dark sea and later loves. It feeds the health of the Sowerby children and eventually of Mary and Colin.
Wick: A Yorkshire word meaning alive or lively. Dickon uses it in Chapter XI to show Mary that the grey, dry-looking rose stems still have green life inside.
The robin: Ben Weatherstaff's bird, the first creature Mary befriends, who leads her to the key and the door. His nest-building in the spring parallels the children's work.
Dickon Sowerby: Martha's twelve-year-old brother, a moor boy who charms animals and knows how things grow. He teaches Mary to garden and helps bring Colin outdoors.
Colin Craven: Mr. Craven's son, kept in a dark room and told by servants that he will be a hunchback and die young. His recovery in the garden is the turning point of the second half.
The Magic: Colin's name in Chapter XXIII for the power that makes things grow and that he believes is healing him. Mrs. Sowerby later tells him it does not matter what he calls the Big Good Thing so long as he gives thanks.
Susan Sowerby: The mother of Martha and Dickon, wise and warm, whose advice runs through the book and who comes to the garden in Chapter XXVI as a kind of mother to all three children.

Seminar Questions

Comprehension What kind of child is Mary when she arrives at Misselthwaite in Chapters II and III, and what has made her that way?
Comprehension How does Mary find the key and the door to the garden in Chapters VII and VIII, and why had the garden been locked for ten years?
Comprehension What happens during Colin's tantrum in Chapter XVII, and why does Mary's anger succeed where the nurse and doctor had failed?
Interpretation Mary and Colin are both called contrary and tyrannical. Why does Burnett make them alike, and how does each one help cure the other?
Interpretation Colin calls the power at work in the garden the Magic, while the children sing the Doxology and Mrs. Sowerby speaks of the Big Good Thing. How does the novel want readers to understand what is healing the children?
Interpretation Mr. Craven begins to recover far away in the Tyrol at the same time that his son recovers in the garden. What does Burnett suggest by linking the two?
Big Question Can a person be made whole by the work of tending something else, and what does that suggest about why human beings were given work to do?

Faith Connections

Genesis 2:8-15 (Scripture)
God plants a garden in Eden and places the man there to tend and keep it. Mary's first labor in Chapter X, clearing grass from around the green points, recovers something of this original calling, and her soul grows as the garden does.
Song of Solomon 4:12 (Scripture)
The beloved is called a garden enclosed, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Mrs. Craven's walled garden, locked by grief, is such a sealed place, and its reopening brings back love into the house.
John 12:24 (Scripture)
Christ says that unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies it abides alone, but if it dies it brings forth much fruit. The dead-looking stems that turn out to be wick and the household that revives after ten years of mourning both follow this pattern of life out of apparent death.
Augustine, Confessions VIII.8-12 (Church Fathers)
Augustine's conversion takes place in a garden in Milan, where his long sickness of will is ended by a child's voice. In Burnett's garden too, the healing of adults begins with children, and the change happens out of doors among growing things.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Mary and Colin are sick in body and temper because they have been neglected, shut indoors, and left to think only of themselves. Living things, whether a robin, a garden, or a friend, draw a child out of himself and into work, attention, and care. Work in fresh air, good food, and companionship strengthen the body, while hope and gratitude replace fear. Therefore the children are healed by tending the garden, and their healing in turn restores the grieving father and the shut-up house.

Rhetorical device: epimone (incantatory repetition). In Chapter XXIII, Magic, Colin stands beneath the tree and repeats the same short sentence about the Magic being in him again and again, and asks the others to chant it with him. The repetition turns a scientific experiment, as Colin calls it, into something like a prayer.

Debate: Resolved: Mary, not Colin, is the true patient whom the garden heals.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Burnett ends the novel not with Mary but with Mr. Craven's return and Colin running out of the garden door into his arms. Using Chapters I, XVII, and XXVII, argue whether the book is finally about the healing of a child or the healing of a family, and what Mary's role becomes by the end.

Comparison with A Christmas Carol: Scrooge and Archibald Craven are both men whose hearts have closed after loss, and both are restored through visions and through a sickly child, Tiny Tim and Colin. Compare how Dickens and Burnett show a hardened adult coming back to life, and argue which book gives the more convincing account of what changes him.

Medical Lens

This is one of the library's strongest children's texts for medicine: cholera opens the plot, Colin's invalidism combines real frailty with fear and social reinforcement, and the cure uses fresh air, exercise, nutrition, routine, imagination and attachment. It belongs to a period fascinated by open-air cures and mind-cure language. The disability politics require care: Colin's recovery should not be treated as evidence that disability is simply attitude, but as a literary fantasy about neglected children and changed expectations.

Plague Epidemic Hypochondria Disability Deformity Childbirth Maternal Nursing Caregiving Mind Body Melancholia Depression Grief Starvation Nutrition Public Health Sanitation

Ch. 1
The cholera outbreak kills Mary's parents and household, revealing imperial neglect and epidemic vulnerability.
Plague Epidemic Public Health Sanitation Death Dying
Early Misselthwaite chapters
Mary's sourness, poor appetite and lack of affection are linked to neglect, environment and bodily habits.
Starvation Nutrition Mind Body Nursing Caregiving
Colin's room
Colin's confinement, fear of deformity and expectation of death show hypochondriacal and disability-anxiety themes.
Hypochondria Disability Deformity Neurosis Anxiety
Garden recovery chapters
Fresh air, exercise, food, friendship and belief become a child-centered therapeutic regimen.
Mind Body Nursing Caregiving Philosophy AS Therapy
Archibald Craven's return
The father's grief and withdrawal are treated through dream, memory and reunion with the recovered child.
Grief Melancholia Depression

Creative Prompts

Essay
Discuss The Secret Garden as fresh-air therapy, noting both its healing imagination and its limits around disability.
Fiction
Retell Colin's first day outdoors from the perspective of the nurse who has been paid to keep him indoors.
Classroom
Ask students to track every kind of care in the novel: medical, maternal, botanical, animal and self-care.