COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

 

 

Comments

 

 

NEW YORK TIMES

 

“If Henry James is the most English of all Americans, Frances Hodgson Burnett is the most American of all the English,” says a friend of the latter’s, whose latest book, “The Secret Garden,” like many of her others, deals with English life. Mrs. Burnett was born in England, but she is naturalized as American.

—September 24, 1911

 

R. A. WHAY

The Secret Garden is more than a mere story of children; underlying it there is a deep symbolism. But regarded purely as romance, it is an exceedingly pretty tale, full of the pathos of sheer happiness, a tale which no one could possibly associate with any other name than that of Mrs. Burnett.

—from The Bookman (October 1911)

 

CURRENT LITERATURE

At last Little Lord Fauntleroy has found a successor—not one, but three, for three children are the heroes of Mrs. Burnett’s latest and delectable tale. “The Secret Garden,” as the Boston Transcript remarks, reveals Mrs. Burnett as a master of imaginative prose at its very best. The Book News Monthly concedes “Little Lord Fauntleroy” was “not sweeter, tenderer, more human.” Now and then, as the New York Sun points out, the author lays on the old Fauntleroy color pretty thick, but the novel’s fundamental idea saves the book from being merely a charming variation of a former theme. We find in this story for the first time, the New Thought doled out darlingly and delightfully to children. This, as Ellen Key has told us in one of her unforgettable books, is the century of the child. Why, then, should we withhold from the little ones the new knowledge which, in fact, is world-old? ...

The story, as one critic avers, is a morality piece. Yet Mrs. Burnett never preaches or gives one the impression of preaching. Her book may be a tract, but it is cleverly disguised, a tract about the “magic of love, the magic of growth, the magic of the joy of living.” It is all “good white magic,” as the Sun reviewer declares, and no one but a highly sophisticated child, probably, would resent magic not of the classical Arabian brand. May we not say that Mrs. Burnett has given us the fairy tale of the future? Mary and Colin and Dickon, to quote The North American, dwell in a mystical Arcadia, “where grown-ups and dogs and horses and birds talk to them in a common speech unknown to the outside world, with no thought of storms and stresses that assail and vex humdrum humanity.”

—November 1911

 

 

JEANNETTE L. GILDER

 

I find that as many children are reading Mrs. Burnett’s “Secret Garden” as grown-ups; to be sure, grown-ups read it to some of them, but the little ones love it just as much, if not better than if it were written down for their supposed understanding.

—from the Chicago Daily Tribune (November 18, 1911)

 

 

Questions

1. Can gardening have therapeutic value? For everybody? Only for people with special problems? If so, which problems?

2. Would clearing land, chopping down trees, and building your own log cabin in the woods have the same effect as cultivating a secret garden ?

3. Professor Muller, in the moving conclusion to her Introduction, describes the garden as a symbol and as an imaginative refuge. But a symbol of what, would you say? A refuge from what?

4. A garden is not just nature untouched. What’s allowed to grow in a garden is selected and planted by humans; it is watered, weeded, and arranged by humans for human needs and tastes, and for a human aesthetic sense. Indeed, it’s hardly “natural” at all. How does the “cultivated” or human or artificial or even unnatural component of a garden affect your understanding of The Secret Garden?