The Secret Garden

Ten year old Mary Lennox, neglected and sickly after a childhood in colonial India, is shipped off to her reclusive uncle's isolated Yorkshire estate after her parents die of cholera. Alone in a house full of locked rooms, she learns of a walled garden shut up a decade earlier, after her uncle's wife died in an accident there, and finds the key and a hidden door with help from a cheerful robin and Dickon, a local boy who can seemingly talk to any animal. Mary also discovers her invalid cousin Colin, confined to his bed and convinced by the adults around him that he is dying or will grow a crooked spine, and she draws him, resentful and skeptical at first, into the secret of the garden itself. The three children spend the following months secretly reviving the garden's neglected beds, and the fresh air, physical work, and simple belief that he is not actually ill restore Colin's strength until he can walk and even run again. The novel ends with Colin's father, long away and grieving, returning home to find the garden in full bloom and his son transformed, and the family reunited in a house that has finally been unlocked.

Burnett treats the garden itself as a kind of quiet, unmagical magic, healing that comes from sunlight, dirt under fingernails, and honest friendship rather than from anything supernatural. It reads gently and steadily, giving Mary's initial sourness real room before she softens, and the slow uncovering of the garden gives the book a patient, absorbing shape that rewards a reader's own attention the way the children's daily visits reward theirs.

Burnett began the novel in spring 1909 while planning her own garden on Long Island, and she later wrote a separate essay, My Robin, crediting a real robin at her English home, Maytham Hall, as the model for the bird that leads Mary to the key.