ISBN The Secret Garden

The Secret Garden

Opening the door into the innermost places of the heart, The Secret Garden is a timeless classic that has left generations of readers with warm, lifelong memories of its magical charms.

When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen…
 
So begins the famous opening of one of the world’s best-loved children’s stories. First published in 1911, this is the poignant tale of a lonely little girl, orphaned and sent to a Yorkshire mansion at the edge of a vast lonely moor. At first, she is frightened by this gloomy place, but with the help of the local boy Dickon, who earns the trust of the moor’s wild animals with his honesty and love, the invalid Colin, a spoiled, unhappy boy terrified of life, and a mysterious, abandoned garden, Mary is eventually overcome by the mystery of life itself—its birth and renewal, its love and joy. 
 
With an Afterword by Sandra M. Gilbert


About author(s)
Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in Manchester, England, on November 24, 1849. After Burnett’s father’s death in 1853, her mother ran the family’s iron foundry until the American Civil War caused the business to fail. Destitute, the Hodgsons moved to Tennessee in 1865 to stay with relatives in a log cabin. Burnett lived there until 1873, when she married a doctor, Swan Burnett, whom she later divorced in 1898. She married Peter Townsend, an actor, in 1900.

In her teens Burnett had written stories and tales to help support the family and later claimed never to have written a manuscript that was not published. Her first widespread success came with That Lass o’ Lowrie’s in 1877, a tale of the Lancashire coal mines. But it was the publication of Little Lord Fauntleroy, in 1886, that brought the author fame and wealth and established Cedric as the model for a generation of young boys. Sara Crewe was published in 1888, and the rags-to-riches story was so successful that Burnett revised, expanded, and republished it in 1905 as A Little Princess. The beloved The Secret Garden appeared four years later to enormous critical and popular acclaim.

A prolific writer, Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote more than 40 novels and plays and dozens of short stories during her lifetime. She died in Plandome, New York, on October 29, 1924.