Best Read of the Year: The Secret Garden
I picked up The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett for my daughter when I saw it in remainder pile at a local bookstore. I had seen the movie from 1993 and also a television version on PBS and liked it. I started reading it when I got home. I was so drawn into the book I couldn’t put it down. I’ve read quite a few books this year but this has them all beat.
Mary is orphaned in India. A cholera outbreak nearly kills everyone in her household, including both her parents. She is discovered alone in her room by British military officers who come to search the house to see what has happened to everyone in the home.
Mary is an unpleasant girl-exceedingly unpleasant. She has lived a pampered life, lording over the servant who watched over her, and she was ingored by her parents, who hadn’t any time for her. When she was found the army officers comment to each other that they had heard that her beautiful mother had a child, but they say it in such a manner as if it they had believed it to be only a baseless rumor.
She stays for a while with a missionary family, whose children come to call Mary by the nursery rhyme “Mary quite contrary”, for she truly was a contrary child. Afterward she sails alone back to England to live with her Uncle Craven, a reclusive and self-absorbed man who does not even bother to meet her on his vast Yorkshire estate.
The estate is full of gardens which Mary is free to wander through, but she hears of a secret garden and she becomes obsessed with thinking of it. Ten years before her Uncle Craven had ordered it locked and buried the key. Now the walls were become all overgown and the door was hidden and cannot be found. Why had her uncle locked it? What has happened to the locked garden over these ten long years? Why will no one talk of it?
Another question haunts Mary. What is the muffled wailing sound she sometimes hears somewhere in the large house? Is it really the scullery maid crying, as the servant Martha, Mary’s only friend, had told her? Why is she not allowed to freely roam the house?
Skillfully exploring the mind of the child, her reasonings and perspectives, Frances Hodgson Burnett weaves these mysteries together into a fascinating story that any child, girl or boy, will love. She leaves hints and she foreshadows in such excellent ways that young readers will not want to stop reading.
We all know the nursery rhyme, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary”. It continues, “How does your garden grow?”
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