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The Secret Garden

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Sour, lonely Mary Lennox is sent to live in her uncle's gloomy house on the Yorkshire moors. There she finds a key to a garden that has been locked for ten years, and a secret hidden in the house. By Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911). A public-domain classic.

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How it begins When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people. She had not wanted a little girl at all, and when Mary was born she handed her over to the care of an Ayah, who was made to understand that if she wished to please the Mem Sahib she must keep the child out of sight as much as possible. So when she was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby she was kept out of the way, and when she became a sickly, fretful, toddling thing she was kept out of the way also. She never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the other native servants, and as they always obeyed her and gave her her own way in everything, because the Mem Sahib would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying, by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived. The young English governess who came to teach her to read and write disliked her so much that she gave up her place in three months, and when other governesses came to try to fill it they always went away in a shorter time than the first one. So if Mary had not chosen to really want to know how to read books she would never have learned her letters at all.One frightfully hot morning, when she was about nine years old, she awakened feeling very cross, and she became crosser still when she saw that the servant who stood by her bedside was not her Ayah. Keep reading →

About this story

Mary Lennox, a lonely and rather disagreeable child, is sent from India to live in a vast house on the Yorkshire moors. Nobody there has time for her, so she starts to explore, and she hears about a garden that has been locked for ten years. Her search for it, and for the people around it, is the heart of the book.

Frances Hodgson Burnett published it in 1911, after it first ran in a magazine. She was already famous for Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess. It is often called a children’s book, but it is as much about what grief does to a house, and what fresh air, work and company can do for the people in it.

Themes: Healing, friendship, nature, growing up
Good for: Readers of any age who like slow, gentle stories with a strong sense of place
Worth noticing: How Mary changes over the book, and what each change is linked to.

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