The Secret Garden

About This Book

The Secret Garden begins with a girl nobody wants. Mary Lennox is nine years old and has spent her whole life in India, in a house where servants hurried to obey her and her parents barely looked at her. She has never been taught to dress herself, to play, or to be pleasant, and she has grown into a thin, cross, disagreeable child who expects the world to move out of her way. Then, all at once, everything she knew disappears, and Mary is put on a ship and sent across the world to England. Her new home is Misselthwaite Manor, an enormous, gloomy stone house on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. It has almost a hundred rooms, and nearly all of them are locked. Its owner, Mary's uncle, is away for months at a time and has left orders that she is to keep out of the way and not go poking into rooms she has no business in. Outside there is nothing but wind, empty purple-brown moorland, and gardens shut in behind high walls. To Mary, who does not much like anything, it seems like the dullest place on earth. But a talkative housemaid mentions something she probably should not have: somewhere behind those walls there is a garden that has been locked up for ten years, with no door that anyone can find and no key that anyone will admit to having. From the moment Mary hears about it, the locked garden is all she can think about. This is a story about a bad-tempered, lonely child, a walled-up piece of ground, and what happens when the two of them find each other.

The Secret Garden is one of the rare classics that begins with a main character readers are not supposed to like — and that is exactly what makes it worth reading. Fourth graders are old enough to notice that Mary is rude, selfish, and unhappy, and old enough to be curious about why, and about whether a person like that can change. Along the way the book gives them a vivid picture of a world very unlike their own (a great English house in 1911, a wild Yorkshire moor, servants and doctors and locked wings) while asking questions they meet in their own lives every day: what do you do when you are lonely, how do you make a friend, and what happens to a person, or a plant, that has been left alone in the dark for too long. It also rewards slow, careful reading — the garden and the children grow at the same time, and noticing that connection is one of the most satisfying discoveries a young reader can make on their own.

Pre-Reading Discussion Questions

1. The main character of this book is described as spoiled, sour, and unpleasant. Why might an author choose to start a story with a character readers do not like?
2. Have you ever moved somewhere completely new, or spent time in a place where you knew no one? What was the hardest part?
3. What do you think it would actually feel like to live in a house with a hundred rooms and almost no people in it?
4. The title promises a secret. What kinds of secrets do you expect to find in a garden, and why would someone lock one up?
5. Do you think a place can change the way a person behaves? Can you think of a place that makes you feel different than you usually do?
6. What does it take to make a friend when you have never had one before?

Themes & Big Ideas to Track

• Neglect and attention: watch how the children in this book are treated by adults, and notice that being given everything is not the same as being cared for.
• Growing things: the garden and the children change at the same time and in the same way, so track what is happening in the garden whenever a character changes.
• Fresh air and the outdoors: keep an eye on what wind, walking, and digging do to a character's appetite, temper, and health.
• Secrets: notice which secrets in this book are kept out of shame and which are kept out of joy, and how differently they affect the people keeping them.
• Class and dialect: pay attention to how the wealthy characters speak compared with the Yorkshire servants, and to what the book seems to think about which group knows more about living well.
• Kindness as something learned: notice who teaches Mary how to be pleasant, and how slowly and stubbornly she learns it.

Chapter-by-Chapter Study Guide

About the Author

Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in Manchester, England, in 1849. Her family lost most of its money when she was a child, and when she was sixteen they moved to the United States and settled near Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family was so poor that Frances began selling stories to magazines to help pay the bills. She went on to become one of the most popular and best-paid writers of her time, publishing more than fifty books and many plays, and dividing her life between England and America. She is remembered today chiefly for three children's novels — Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden — all of them about children whose fortunes change suddenly and completely. Burnett loved gardening all her life and kept a walled rose garden of her own in Kent, England, which she wrote in every morning; she died in 1924.

The Secret Garden was published in 1911, at the end of the Edwardian era, when Britain still ruled India and it was ordinary for British families to live there in comfortable houses run by Indian servants — which is why Mary begins the story in a country that is not her own and arrives in England as a stranger. It was also common for wealthy English families to keep enormous country houses like Misselthwaite, staffed by dozens of servants such as Martha and Ben Weatherstaff, while working families lived in tiny cottages nearby. Medicine of the time believed that sickly children should be kept indoors, quiet, and still, an idea the book argues against energetically. Burnett wrote the novel first as a magazine serial for adults, and it was not until many years later that it became known as one of the great children's books. Modern readers should also know that some of the attitudes the characters express about India and about the Indian servants reflect the prejudices of 1911 rather than the truth, and are worth talking about as you read.