The Secret Garden is one of the most delightful and enduring classics of children’s literature, which has remained a firm favorite with children the world over ever since it made its first appearance in The American Magazine in 1910. It was brought out in the novel form in 1911. The plot of the book centers round Mary Lennox, a spoiled, contrary, solitary child raised in India but sent to live in her uncle’s Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire after her parents’ death in a cholera epidemic. Mary had never met her uncle Archibald Craven before. When she arrives at her uncle’s Manor, she is a rude, stubborn, and given to stormy temper tantrums. But her nature undergoes a gradual transformation when she comes to know the tragedies that have befallen her strict and disciplinarian uncle whom she earlier feared and despised. She is left to herself by her uncle because he travels often to escape the memory of his deceased wife. The only person who has time for Mary is her chambermaid, Martha who tells her about Mrs. Craven’s walled garden, which has been closed and locked since her death. She becomes fascinated by the prospect of the forgotten garden, and her quest to find out the garden’s secrets leads her to discover other secrets hidden in the Manor. These discoveries combined with the unlikely friendships she makes along the way help her come out of the shell and find new fascination with the world around her.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, née Frances Eliza Hodgson, (24th Nov., 1849, Manchester, U.K.—29th Oct., 1924, Plandome, N.Y., U.S.A.), was a British-born American novelist and playwright. She is best known for her trio of classic children’s novels—Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911). Frances grew up in increasingly strained circumstances after the death of her father, Edwin Hodgson, in 1854. On the promise of support from a maternal uncle, her family immigrated to the United States in 1865 and settled in Knoxville, Tennessee. Here Frances began to write, in order to supplement the family income, assuming full responsibility for the family upon the death of her mother in 1870. In 1868, she managed to place a story with Godey’s Lady’s Book. Within a few years she was being published regularly in Godey’s, Peterson’s Ladies’ Magazine, Scribner’s Monthly, and Harper’s.
