The Secret Garden Analysis

One of the most striking things about The Secret Garden is that there are so many large, empty houses. Think of Mary sitting alone in the first chapter in her parents' empty bungalow, not realizing...

The narrator of The Secret Garden isn't a person, in the sense that it doesn't have a name or a definite point of view. But it does have really strong feelings on what's going on in the novel. Not...

Coming-of-Age, Children's Literature, Family DramaOkay, so if we're being honest (which we always are), The Secret Garden is sort of a coming-of-age story in the genre of children's literature. Aft...

How can The Secret Garden's language not be dark? It's about two love-starved kids who become emotionally and even physically abusive to the people around them because they feel so sorry for themse...

We're sorry about the obvious pun in calling The Secret Garden's language flowery, but, well, it really is. Not only are there tons of literal flowers in the novel—forget-me-nots, roses, delphini...

The Secret Garden sounds so mysterious—why wouldn't you want to pick this book right off the shelves and buy it? After all, why should a garden by kept secret from anyone? Don't you want to find...

Chapter 27 of The Secret Garden includes pretty much everything you wouldn't expect based on the previous twenty-six chapters. For one thing, the chapter appears mostly from Archibald Craven's poin...

The Secret Garden is a fast-paced novel with just a few characters to follow, so it's not too difficult to read. The biggest challenge is getting through Dickon and the Sowerbys' thick Yorkshire ac...

You Can't Spell Tantrum Without Mary (Well, Except for the Y)At the start of The Secret Garden, we get the feeling that ten year-old Mary Lennox would cut us if we looked at her wrong. She kicks a...

The classic Rebirth storyline would be something like Disney's original Sleeping Beauty, where the evil fairy Maleficent sends our heroine Aurora into a sleep like death until Prince Charming can...

In Chapters 1 through 12, Mary Lennox learns to be a decent person with the help of a lovable country boy named Dickon Sowerby and about a kajillion climbing roses. When you start reading The Secr...

Frances Hodgson Burnett's younger son Lionel died when he was sixteen, and following his long illness and death, Burnett became deeply interested in the idea that you could communicate with the dea...

There is absolutely no steaminess here: zip, zero, nada. It's a kids' book, after all.

"Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary," a nursery rhyme referring to Queen Mary and her penchant for having people killed (2.6)"Riquet à la Houppe" (also known in English as "Ricky of the Tuft"), a fairy st...