The Secret Garden

· Gramercy
3.8
17.7K reviews
Ebook
375
Pages

About this ebook

Since its publication in 1911, The Secret Garden, a touchstone of children’s literature, has been adapted for plays and movies over a dozen times. Charming generations of readers, the story centers around the healing power of friendship, and the magic in the everyday. Burnett begins with a spoiled and unsympathetic heroine named Mary Lennox. When Mary is orphaned, she is shipped from her home in colonial India to a drab country house in Yorkshire. As she learns to tend the garden on the estate, Mary forms her first true friendships; when they bring a secret garden back to life, Mary and her friends are also transformed.

Ratings and reviews

3.8
17.7K reviews
A Google user
Very loving and very touching book I have ever read. It gives a lesson to live life to the fullest, inspite of being through the bad times often. Mind is everything, what you think you become.The way it has been written is so real,that I can easily imagine each and every character of the story in my mind.Even I can smell the spring time so well that I enjoyed through out the book and will remember it for the rest of my life.
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A Google user
3-2-12 2nd Block The Secret Garden The author of The Secret Garden is Frances Hodgson Burnett. Hodgson was born on November 24, 1894 in Manchester, England. The name she was born with was Frances Eliza Hodgson. She was a playwright and of course author. She is best known for her children’s novels. Two include Little Ford Fauntleroy and The Secret Garden. The Secret Garden was published in 1911, and Little Ford Fauntleroy was published in 1886. If someone asked me to describe this book to them, the first word I would use to describe it would be adventurous. Overall, it was an interesting book that caught my attention. It was a tale of two unhappy, selfish, rude children who found their source of happiness in a garden along with the help of a person named Dickon. The children, Colin and Mary, then became happy, excited, normal kids. They no longer were depressed, and they no longer hated everything and everyone around them. The Secret Garden opens by introducing Mary Lennox to readers. She is a girl who is very foul-tempered. She does not like anyone and no one really likes her. In the beginning of the story, Mary lives with her parents in India. She was in constant care of servants, and rarely saw her parents. A severe case of cholera struck the household leaving no one but herself. Mary is then found by a group of soldiers. They send her to live with her uncle in Yorkshire. His name is Archibald Craven. “When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She has a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression.”(opening lines) In this part of the story, I did not like Mary because she was a rude, selfish, and hateful child. She was not respectful and hated everything. When everyone around her was struck harshly with cholera, it did kind of make me feel sorry for her. Even though she did treat everyone around her poorly, it still would be very hard on a little girl. When Mary got to Yorkshire, she saw before her eyes a huge mansion. Later on, she finds out that there were close to one hundred rooms, but the majority of them were shut off by Archibald Craven. She then finds out that Craven’s wife, Lilias Craven, had past away ten years earlier, and that that was the reason why Archibald was very unhappy and depressed. Mary also realized that he shut off a lot of the rooms and other things because they reminded him too much of his wife. This made her very curious. Mary then began to sneak around some of the locked up rooms and look in them. The one thing that Mary found out that made her the most curious and anxious was the secret garden. It also belonged to Lilias, and it too was locked up after she died. Mary learned that her uncle buried the key to the garden in the earth somewhere. She learned all of this information about the garden from the servant, Martha Sowerby. Her curiosity made her determined to find it. Mary’s determination made her have more of a positive outlook on things. She began to engage with the world more instead of being so sour about everything, and she even made a couple of friends, a redbreast robin, a gardener, Ben Weatherstaff, and Dickon Sowerby, Martha’s son. “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.”(44) One day, Mary’s curiosity was distracted from far-off cries somewhere in the house. She asked Martha about it, but she dismissed it and said it was the breeze/wind. Mary was forbidden to seek out the distant cries by Martha. Martha absolutely refused to let her seek out the source of the cries. On another day, Mary was distracted from this mystery when she found the key to the garden with the help of the robin
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A Google user
May 17, 2012
At the end of these digital books, Google makes a note about the scanning process and that "by their estimates" any spelling or other errors should not detract from the enjoyment of the book. That being said, this one has a huge number of problems and I had to skip two or three pages in the middle because they were more or less incomprehensible, fragmented sentences, words and phrases set into super or subscript as though the scanning program had interpreted them to be punctuation, random letters, etc.
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About the author

An immensely prolific author, Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in Manchester in 1849. Burnett’s family immigrated to the United States when she was a teenager, and from the age of 18, she helped support her family with her writing. She published more than two dozen books, and many were adapted into plays. Her memories of her childhood in England were her inspiration for some of the most vivid titles in children’s literature, including Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden.

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