BEFORE FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT WROTE THE SECRET Garden, most of the literature for children starred grotesquely good little boys and girls. Bad children were never the heroes of a story. Rather they were punished appropriately like the bad sister in the fairy tale, with a mouthful of toads, or reformed. Even Mrs. Burnett’s earlier heroes—the relentlessly courageous little Cedric Fauntleroy and the relentlessly hopeful little Sara Crewe—were such child paragons.
But in The Secret Garden a new child hero emerges. Cranky, demanding, angry, and thoroughly unattractive, both Mary and Colin are anything but likable. And yet, we understand what makes them that way.
Mary is a survivor. She survives her parents’ dismissive behavior toward her. She survives the Indian servants’ submissiveness. She survives the cholera epidemic. And we know she will survive the cold welcome she receives at Misselthwaite. She survives the only way she knows how—by being disagreeable, aggressive, and sly.
Colin, too, is a survivor. He survives his mother’s
death and his father’s strange behavior toward him. He survives despite the doctor’s pessimistic diagnoses and detrimental treatment. He survives the servants’ pity and their indifference. He survives in the only way he knows how—by being hysterical, prone to tantrums, and ill.
That Frances Hodgson Burnett can make us like these two thoroughly unlikable children is a large part of the genius that makes this book a classic. We admire and enjoy Dickon, who is as much a nature god as he is a little boy. But we do not love him. Our hearts go out to the impossible pair—Mary and Colin. We root for them to get well, to fix the garden, to “live for ever and ever and ever.”
Some of what makes The Secret Garden work so well must have come from Mrs. Burnett’s life. Like Colin’s father, the gentleman with the unhappy past, Mrs. Burnett spent a great deal of time away from home. Her guilty secret was that she had been holidaying when her son Vivian had become so ill. And though she could not save him, she could save another little boy named Colin Craven. It is that secret guilt and her great need to have the child well, that drives the emotional part of this story.
Also, like Mary, Frances Hodgson Burnett lost a father early and was sent from a beloved home to a new, cold environment. Her solace had been in make-believe and in gardens. So Mary becomes a kind of symbol for Mrs. Burnett’s childhood tragedy. As one critic wrote of her, “It was Burnett’s lifelong habit … to transform her experience into the conventional forms of a story.”
There is another curious element in The Secret Garden. Unlike most of the ordinary books of the day, which had little moral lessons of a decidedly Christian nature, there is something curiously unchristian about the book. Burnett all but deifies nature, and clearly speaks about a kind of life force working in nature. Though she has Dickon
sing the “Doxology,” that most Christian of hymns, both and he and his mother speak of the Magic in the earth and the growing things.
Mrs. Burnett was, herself, a most unorthodox Christian, dabbling in such interests as faith healing, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Christian Science. Clearly she is not trying to force young readers onto any such paths. But there is a great magic healing power in the garden itself—and in the seasonal and cyclical plotting of the book. It ends in autumn, with everything—children and garden—awakened. That natural magic also transforms the book and every reader.
—JANE YOLEN