Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel – published 100 years ago this summer – centers on a selfish, mean-spirited heroine, whose journey towards self-knowledge begins with an unlocked door.
From a piece in the Guardian...
The secret garden is a catalyst for healing in the characters who see it, and with Colin the effect is literal. Unable to walk when we meet him, he discovers in the garden that he can stand. He secretly practises until he is able to shock his father by getting out his wheelchair and walking. With Colin, it's apparent from the start that his disability is psychological, rooted in a loveless childhood. But it's not surprising that Burnett's notion of cures is informed by Christian Science. The philosophy is plain in the text: "When new beautiful thoughts began to push out the old hideous ones, life began to come back to [Colin], his blood ran healthily through his veins and strength poured into him like a flood." On the page, Colin's story is haunting. In context of a larger literature that has relatively few complex characters with disabilities, the diagnosis of "it's all in his head" feels disappointing.
The history of the novel's reception is as strange as the text. While The Secret Garden is now catalogued as children's literature, it was originally serialised in a magazine for adults before being published in its entirety in 1911. Marketed to both young and adult readers, it had lukewarm success and became little more than a footnote in Burnett's prolific career; her other novels, such as A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy, were far more popular at the time of her death in 1924. What probably saved the book from the out-of-print netherworld was the 20th-century rise in children's literature scholarship, and general attentiveness to literature for children as a distinct genre. That, and the fact that the book's copyright expired in the US in 1987, and most other places in 1995, opening the way for untold numbers of abridged, unabridged and adapted editions.
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