Secret Garden (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

*The Secret Garden*, by **Frances Hodgson Burnett**, is part of the *Barnes some include illustrations of historical interest. *Barnes & Noble Classics *pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

Though **Frances Hodgson Burnett** wrote more than forty books, none remains so popular as her miraculous and magical masterpiece, *The Secret Garden*. Has any story ever dared to begin by calling its heroine, “the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen” and, just a few sentences later, “as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived?” Mary Lennox is the “little pig,” sent to Misselthwaite Manor, on the Yorkshire moors, to live with her uncle after her parents die of cholera. There she discovers her sickly cousin Colin, who is equally obnoxious and imperious. Both love no one because they have never been loved. They are the book’s spiritual secret gardens, needing only the right kind of care to bloom into lovely children.

Mary also discovers a literal secret garden, hidden behind a locked gate on her uncle’s estate, neglected for the ten years since Colin’s birth and his mother’s death. Together with a local child named Dickon, Mary and Colin transform the garden into a paradise bursting with life and color. Through their newfound mutual love of nature, they nurture each other, until they are brought back to health and happiness.

**With Charles Robinson's original illustrations.**

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**Jill Muller** was born in England and educated at Mercy College and Columbia University. She currently teaches at Mercy College and Columbia University. She is the author of *Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism*, in addition to articles on Joyce, Newman, Hopkins, and the medieval women mystics.