Most agree that character growth and development is the key component of a successful narrative. After all, what’s the point in completing a journey if one emerges from it utterly unchanged? Even a small change is significant in the greater scheme of things, with even incremental shifts in outlook changing the way we approach things. These small shifts are the standard shape of things in adult literature, where few individuals undergo a truly epiphanous experience. In children’s literature, however, such changes are reasonably common: think of the myriad “chosen one” narratives out there, or those that could be tucked under the wing of the “overcoming adversity through [random activity]” sub-genre.

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s much-loved The Secret Garden is all about these sorts of dramatic changes, and is perhaps so universally so well-received because she allows her characters such flaws in the first place. Where many authors err on the side of the likeable protagonist in order to ensure that the reader is able to feel some sort of empathy with the character in question, Hodgson Burnett eschews all of this and gives us a trio of rather foul, down-trodden individuals who are more sour than a tub of off cream. Fortunately, Hodgson Burnett is skilled enough that she not only works her magic on her characters, but on us, too, and what should be a book that’s rather pat and twee is something utterly superlative instead.

Indian-born Mary Lennox is a self-centred, snippy young girl who has spent the formative years of her life being waited upon by an array of servants and governesses. Mary is used to being treated with deference, to having her every whim attended to. But her being able to treat her servants as playthings doesn’t hide the fact that Mary is utterly without companionship, and that her callousness and insularity is a shield that serves to protect her from the loneliness she feels. A loneliness that is only compounded when, after a bout of cholera churns through the population in her area, she is the only survivor. With no one to care for her, Mary is sent to Misselthwaite, a rambling manor deep in the heart of the moors of Yorkshire.

The contrast of vibrant, bustling India, with its dazzling heat and socially and linguistically complex way of life and quiet, bucolic Yorkshire, whose own soft beauty Mary has be coaxed to learn to appreciate, is a fascinating one. But while Mary was an outsider in India, so to is she an outside at Misselthwaite. Unversed in the Yorkshire dialect and unaccustomed with the pragmatic way of life of the locals–which includes things such as dressing oneself, a notion that’s utterly foreign to Mary–Mary is equally out of her depth in this new environment as she was in India. But she’s not the only one. Her new guardian, the aptly named Dr Craven, is a forlorn, lost man who has never recovered from the death of his wife some ten years ago. And, of course, there’s Colin, the would-be cripple who lives out his days secreted away in his bedroom, counting down the days until his inevitable death.

It certainly sounds like an abject setting, and yes, at first one is rather tempted to slap a bit of sense into this moody lot. But Hodgson Burnett’s way of doing so proves to be rather more beautiful than my own suggested open-handed approach. She uses a garden, a locked away, lost garden that has gone untended for years, to illustrate the way in which beauty, passion, and hope, lay dormant in all of us, and need only be tended to if it is to be brought to the fore. Hodgson Burnett highlights the way in which so much of our way of being is psychosomatic, with our self-concept being based upon fears and habituated behaviours that have simply gone unchecked and unchallenged. She highlights that the very act of tending to something, or indeed someone, necessarily involves tending to oneself.

Thus, as Mary throws herself into the new-found delights of the natural world, led carefully by the winsome country lad Dickon, who is the very embodiment of love and acceptance, she gradually comes into her own. With her every effort Mary becomes physically, emotionally, and spiritually enhanced, and she reinvests her new outlook into improving the lives of those around her. She helps to imbue Colin with the self-confidence he needs to cast of his own emotional shackles, and her increasingly robust presence brings life to Misselthwaite, raising the awareness of Dr Craven, who becomes more reflective and open and less lost in his own misery. The children’s breaking into the “secret garden”, of course, emphasises the importance of dealing with one’s emotions and struggles rather than leaving them to fester: for both Colin and Dr Craven the garden represents a wound that no one has thus far been allowed to tend to.

Hodgson Burnett manages all of this with astonishing warmth, and though there is certainly a quixotic feel to the narrative at times, with every Yorkshire native a red-cheeked, plump, and universally loving individual, and motifs such as the garden and the robin redbreast (who is, oh, just a wee bit over-anthropomorphised) being trotted out time and time again, it’s impossible not to adore this book. Like The Little Prince (see my review), it’s gentle, suggestive, and so very evocative, and it’s hard not to do a little reflecting yourself once you’ve turned that final page.

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See also our review of A Little Princess (Rating: )

Other books by Frances Hodgson Burnett