The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson BurnettPuffin Books, 2015 (Originally 1911)

The Secret Garden is one of those books I definitely read as a child, but that I guess I didn’t love: re-reading it as an adult, I found that I remembered the beginning very vividly, those first two chapters where the reader is introduced to Mary Lennox, an English girl who was born in India and moves to Yorkshire to live with her uncle after her parents both die, but I didn’t remember a lot of detail about the rest of the book, though I remembered the general outline, which is basically this: Mary is a spoiled brat but also quite lonely; her uncle isn’t really around and she wanders around the massive house and its massive grounds in a state of grumpiness, until some things happen to change that. She hears about a garden on the grounds that’s been locked for ten years (her whole lifetime!) and then, excitingly, finds its key, and then its door. She also makes friends with two boys around her own age—Dickon, who’s a little older than her and is the brother of one of the servants at the house and is a kind child who loves animals and nature and knows all about plants, and Colin, who’s the same age as her and is her cousin, whose existence was being kept from her but whose room she discovers one night when she hears him crying. (Colin’s mother died and his father can’t bear seeing him; Colin has basically spent his life confined to his bedroom, and thinks of himself as an invalid, though actually it seems like his illnesses were passing things rather than anything chronic/permanent.) They all spend time in the garden together, and both Mary and Colin find themselves becoming happier and healthier and less horrible (Colin, when we meet him, is as self-centered and spoiled as Mary at the start of the book).

Re-reading this as an adult, I was (negatively) struck by a few things: 1) Mary’s casual racism (the things she says about the household servants in India, ack: I mean, it’s not presented positively and I imagine an English child living in the system of colonialism may have had those thoughts/said those things, but oof) and 2) the emphasis on positivity. I mean, I really like the idea of making space for joy, but negative emotions are a part of life too, and not all problems can be solved by changing how you think about them. So, yeah, I was bothered by bits like this: “To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live” (321). And as this piece by Anna Clark in the Guardian puts it, on one level, it makes sense within the story that Colin can walk by just believing he can/trying to/working at it: his problems are not actually physical. But, to quote Clark, “in the context of a larger literature that has relatively few complex characters with disabilities, the diagnosis of “it’s all in his head” feels disappointing.”

Still, there were things about this book that I liked a whole lot. I like the details of Mary’s arrival in England, the train ride to Yorkshire with the rain streaming down the windows and the lunch basket of cold beef and chicken and hot tea that the housekeeper gets for herself and Mary at a train station. I like the way that we get to see Mary having increasingly positive interactions with an increasing variety of people, and how her feelings about herself and the world change as that happens. I like the way that Mary’s growth and Colin’s growth are set against the springtime garden, everything and everyone opening up together, and that gorgeous spring sense of energy and possibility, and I like seeing Mary and Colin’s friendship growing, too, the way we get to see them laugh together and talk together and explore the house together on a rainy day.

Next time I’m in the mood for some early-20th-century kid-lit, I’d probably reach for some E. Nesbit sooner than I’d reach for Frances Hodgson Burnett, but I’m still glad to have re-read this.