The Story:
One morning, young Mary Lennox wakes to find her life changed forever. It is 1911, in India, and Mary's parents, together with all their household staff have died during an outbreak of cholera. As if in a dream, she is transported to a new and unfamiliar World - the wild and forbidding Yorkshire moors - and to Misselthwaite Manor, the gloomy house of her uncle and guardian, Archibald Craven. Cast adrift and left to play alone, Mary makes friends with Martha, a chambermaid, and soon discovers that Misselthwaite is a house of many secrets. She is sure she can hear the sound of someone crying mingled with the wind that howls around the house at night and when she meets her uncle, she learns the story of her beautiful Aunt Lily who died tragically ten years ago and from whose memory, Archibald can never escape.
Likewise, outside in the gardens, things are not as they seem. Inspired by a tale of a locked walled garden hidden somewhere in the grounds that belonged to her Aunt Lily, Mary sets off to explore.
She meets Dickon, a strange boy who can talk to animals, Ben Weatherstaff the surly head gardener and an insistent robin who seems to be trying to tell her something. It's not long before Mary begins her quest to find the key to the secret garden, little knowing that this key will also unlock the secrets of the house and launch her on a magical journey.
A bio of Frances Hodgson Burnett:
When, at the age of fifteen, Frances Hodgson emigrated to America, she left behind a country that held for her many unhappy memories. Her father died when she was four and her mother struggled to bring up her family in the grime of 1850's Manchester.
America must certainly have felt like the promised land and it was here, inspired as much by the need for income as by the vast expansive landscape, that she began writing and publishing stories in womens magazines. Novels and stage plays followed, but it was not until 1886 and the publication of her children's novel Little Lord Fauntleroy that she became a household name. As her fame grew so did a certain notoriety. The failure of her marriage to Dr. Swan Burnett was followed by another separation from an actor 10 years her junior. She mixed in bohemian circles, travelled frequently and was in Europe when her son Lionel contracted tuberculosis and tragically died at only sixteen. In 1898, she moved back to England, living at Maytham Hall in Sussex. Her next successful children's novel followed in 1905 with the publication of A Little Princess. During this time she could fully indulge in her passion for gardening which later inspired the writing of her greatest novel, The Secret Garden, published in 1911.
Drawing together what we would now call New Age beliefs and her recurrent image of the isolated orphan child, the book has had enduring appeal both to children and adults and has been adapted for stage and screen. Frances retired to America, building herself a magnificent house on Long Island, where she died in 1924.
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