In the Library
The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 6 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 27
- Length
- Length 80k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Mistress Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With silver bells, and cockle shells, And marigolds all in a row.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre does the same thing with a cold northern house that keeps someone hidden away upstairs, but the child in it has to grow up before the house gives up its secret.
£1.99
Anne of Green Gables
L.M. Montgomery
Montgomery does the same thing with an orphan dropped on people who did not ask for her, but her thawing is all talk where Mary's is all digging.
£1.99
About the book
Ten years ago a door in a garden wall was locked and the key buried; no one at Misselthwaite Manor has gone in since. Mary Lennox arrives from India orphaned, sour-tempered, and friendless, into a house of shut doors and a father who cannot bear to look at his own son. Somewhere behind the ivy is the garden nobody will name; somewhere down a corridor is a boy nobody mentioned, hidden in his bed and utterly convinced his crooked spine will kill him before he grows up. Burnett does something quietly radical with these two children: she does not fix them with a lesson, she fixes them with dirt under the fingernails, a robin who trusts a stranger, a Yorkshire lad who talks to foxes and calls the wind his friend. Watching a locked, grieving place come back to green is one of the purest pleasures the English novel has offered a child, or the child still living inside an adult. The Secret Garden never tells you it is about hope. It just hands you a trowel.