The Secret Garden

Orphaned by a cholera epidemic in colonial India and sent to a great, half-empty house on the Yorkshire moors, ten-year-old Mary Lennox is as unloved and unlovable a child as English fiction has produced — sour, sallow, and used to being obeyed. At Misselthwaite Manor she is given nothing but room, fresh air, and the freedom to wander, and she begins, almost despite herself, to come alive.

Then she hears of a garden that has been locked and left to run wild for ten years, since her aunt died there, and she sets out to find the buried key and the hidden door. With the help of Martha the housemaid and her brother Dickon — the moor-boy who charms robins and foxes and speaks the broad Yorkshire of the open country — Mary begins to coax the dead garden back to green life.

And in the silent house she makes another discovery: her cousin Colin, a hysterical, bedridden boy who has been told all his life that he will die young. As the three children dig and plant in secret, the garden, the girl, and the boy revive together, carried by a force they come to call the Magic — Burnett's idea, drawn from her own faith in mind-cure and healing, that the will and the open air can make weak things strong.

Tender, strange, and quietly radical, The Secret Garden is a story about everything that can be shut up and given up on — a garden, a child, a grieving family — and brought back, with patience and labour and attention, to life. More than a century on, it remains one of the best-loved books ever written for children.