The Secret Garden

The Secret Garden was published as a book in 1911 after being serialised in The American Magazine from 1910 to 1911, and it was written by Frances Hodgson Burnett, who had already published Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess. The American edition appeared from Frederick A. Stokes with illustrations by M. L. Kirk, and the British edition followed with different illustrations by Charles Robinson.

The novel is about the effect of the outdoors on two children who have been ill-treated by their circumstances. Mary is sour and unfriendly at the start, and the book tracks her improvement through work in a garden rather than through instruction, which was a deliberate piece of thinking on the author's part about the difference fresh air and physical activity make. Colin, the cousin she finds in the house, has been told he is an invalid and behaves accordingly until he is given a reason not to.

Burnett was born in Manchester and moved to the United States as a teenager, and the Yorkshire dialect and household in the book are drawn from observation rather than nostalgia. The novel has been adapted for film and television many times, and it is one of the small group of Edwardian children's books that have never gone out of print. It is a standalone, and its argument about fresh air and unhurried time has kept it in print longer than most of the books published beside it, along with the garden itself, which readers have been trying to find for a century.