Mistress Mary, Quite Contrary

Review of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s "The Secret Garden" (1911)

May 09, 2025

There’s something almost unsettling about how much Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) gets away with. The beloved novel is supposed to be a sweet, inspirational tale of a bitter child learning kindness via roses and metaphor. And sure, it is that. But scratch the surface and you’ll find something tougher, more prickly, and far more psychologically astute than its reputation suggests. It’s marketed as a children’s book, but it reads like something that wants to argue with Freud and slap the smugness off Peter Pan.

The novel opens with clinical disdain. Mary Lennox, our ten-year-old protagonist, is “as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived.” Not “misunderstood.” Not “damaged.” A “pig”. Burnett has no time for moral hedging—Mary is awful. But she’s awful in the very specific way that only neglected children are: proud, brittle, and utterly helpless. It's an arresting move for a book ostensibly written for children. Burnett doesn’t want your sympathy. She wants your attention.

Mary is packed off to a giant English manor after a family tragedy, and Burnett immediately shifts registers—from colonial detachment to windswept Gothic. Misselthwaite Manor is equal parts Brontë and wallpaper sample, all corridors and echoes and secret sobbing. You don’t have to read Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights to know that’s literary shorthand for someone’s emotional collapse.

It sounded like something in a book and it did not make Mary feel cheerful. A house with a hundred rooms, nearly all shut up and with their doors locked—a house on the edge of a moor—whatsoever a moor was—sounded dreary. A man with a crooked back who shut himself up also! She stared out of the window with her lips pinched together, and it seemed quite natural that the rain should have begun to pour down in gray.

Left to her own devices there, Mary discovers a locked, overgrown garden—and, more importantly, her own capacity for curiosity and care. As she brings the garden back to life, she befriends two boys: one, a nature-whispering peasant; the other a sickly, tantrum-prone heir. Together, they heal emotionally and physically through digging, laughing, and aggressively breathing fresh air.

Where Burnett blooms

The Secret Garden respects children enough to give them characters who are rude, neurotic, and occasionally monstrous. And instead of rushing in to redeem them with plot contrivances, Burnett makes them work for it. Mary has to run, skip, dig, wait for months, and worse, suffer the indignity of friendship. And thankfully, she becomes a person, not a parable.

Four good things had happened to her, in fact, since she came to Misselthwaite Manor. She had felt as if she had understood a robin and that he had understood her; she had run in the wind until her blood had grown warm; she had been healthily hungry for the first time in her life; and she had found out what it was to be sorry for someone.

Burnett makes you strangely complicit in this transformation with the vivid emotional texture of her prose. You don’t like children at first, but you start to care about them. There’s real catharsis in watching them emerge, blinking and dirty, into something resembling joy. But the process is slow. Painfully so. You’ll want to skim. Don’t. The pacing is the point.

Burnett is also brilliant at atmosphere. You can touch the damp earth, smell the rotting leaves, hear the creak of iron gates, and even feel Bröntean wuthering:

Mary did not know what "wutherin'" meant until she listened, and then she understood. It must mean that hollow shuddering sort of roar which rushed round and round the house, as if the giant no one could see were buffeting it and beating at the walls and windows to try to break in. But one knew he could not get in, and somehow it made one feel very safe and warm inside a room with a red coal fire.

Burnett based much of this on her own walled garden at Great Maytham Hall in Kent, where she lived for a decade. She loved gardening and often wrote outside under a tree in the grounds. It shows.

In the garden there was nothing which was not quite like themselves - nothing which did not understand the wonderfulness of what was happening to them - the immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity of Eggs. If there had been one person in that garden who had not known through all his or her innermost being that if an Egg were taken away or hurt the whole world would whirl round and crash through space and come to an end... there could have been no happiness even in that golden springtime air.

What lurks in the shadows

You'll, of course, tiptoe around the indulgent overgrowth of Burnett's dialogue in the Yorkshire dialect. It’s “authentic”, sure, but also borderline unreadable at times, especially for a child.

“Once when I was givin' th' children a bit of a preach after they'd been fightin' I ses to 'em all, "When I was at school my jography told as th' world was shaped like a orange an' I found out before I was ten that th' whole orange doesn't belong to nobody. No one owns more than his bit of a quarter an' there's times it seems like there's not enow quarters to go round. But don't you—none o' you—think as you own th' whole orange or you'll find out you're mistaken, an' you won't find it out without hard knocks.”

So, while Burnett’s fidelity to the local accent is admirable, it also slows the story down to a maddening crawl. The novel’s emotional subtlety deserves better than a tangle of dropped consonants.

What's more difficult to notice, however, is how The Secret Garden omits anything genuinely dangerous from its Edenic little world. You're told the garden is “wild,” “neglected,” and full of tangled undergrowth, yet somehow there's not a single Yorkshire adder slithering through the ivy or a wasps’ nest lurking in the roses. Nature, in Burnett’s vision, is all nurture. Never red in tooth and claw. The omission defangs the realism, turns the garden into fantasy, and lets the metaphor off too easily.

In creating this fantasy, Burnett borrows liberally from Romanticism, the health-cure movement, and a thin gruel of New Thought. Her tame Nature cures almost everything, and if you tame your inner nature as well with outdoors activity and positive thinking, you can cure the rest. Yes, it’s as dubious as it sounds.

One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. 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... surprising things can happen to any one who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place.

There’s even a whisper of spiritual fascism here. Characters who are sick or broken are often portrayed as morally suspect—until they get better, at which point they become beautiful and kind. It’s an old, deeply problematic trope, and Burnett also leans on this cracked cane.

It doesn't help that towards the end of the book, a preachy streak with self-help moralising undermines the raw emotional work the first half does so well.

At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done. Then they begin to hope it can be done. Then they see it can be done. Then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.

The Verdict: Overgrown garden itself

There's a reason this novel survives classroom abuse, bad stage adaptations, and more than one treacly film version. The book itself is a garden: overgrown, uneven, and full of thorns. It's not manicured in the prize-winning way, but wherever it blooms it makes you believe in the regenerative powers of literary spring.

“I wouldn’t want to make it look like a gardener’s garden, all clipped an’ spick an’ span, would you?” he said. “It’s nicer like this with things runnin’ wild, an’ swingin’ an’ catchin’ hold of each other.”
“Don’t let us make it tidy,” said Mary anxiously. “It wouldn’t seem like a secret garden if it was tidy.”

And just like a wild garden, it hides danger in the shadows. The book’s pseudoscientific health ideology can be disastrous when readers generalise it beyond psychosomatic cases. It can be interpreted to blame the unwell for their condition, implying they're sick because they're negative or spoiled, not because of biology or circumstance. It feeds into ableism and medical neglect, encouraging people to ignore legitimate treatment in favour of misunderstood “natural” healing. It’s a slippery slope from garden therapy to rejecting science altogether.

So, read The Secret Garden with a trowel in one hand and a grain of salt in the other. Appreciate the lush prose, the psychological depth, and the transformative power of nature, but know where the fantasy ends and real-world nuance begins. It's a literary classic, not a manual for living.

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