The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett



The Secret Garden
Francis Hodgson Burnett
(Wordsworth Editions Limited, Ware (Hertfordshire): 1993)

New introduction and notes added in 2000. First published in 1909.

READ: October-November 2007

Though it's a classic of children's lit, I'd never read this before, and now I know why it is so highly thought of. I don't know how I missed it. What a fantastic, amazing book. You can always tell, with a really good book like this, why exactly it is the classic it became. The Secret Garden tells the story of Mary Lennox, a spoiled, selfish little girl, who is sent to live in Yorkshire with her hunchback uncle after the death of her parents in India. After discovering a secret garden, a transformation comes over her and the inhabitants of the Yorkshire mansion that perhaps can't be explained by anything other than magic. It sounds a little hokey, perhaps, but the writing is charming and sure to win you over. It charmed me from page one, and I was sad to put it down.

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