The Secret Garden Themes

At the start of The Secret Garden, Mary Lennox is nine years old. Nine! We're adding an exclamation point because, when you remember how young she is in that first chapter, it seems particularly ri...

The Secret Garden takes very seriously the idea that home is where the heart is: Mary lives in India for the majority of her life, but she doesn't seem to care at all when she leaves it behind. It'...

Okay, Frances Hodgson Burnett might be rolling over in her grave at this comparison, but we think it works: Both Mary and Colin appear to suffer from the Batman problem in The Secret Garden. That i...

The Secret Garden really couldn't be clearer about its moral message if the book were called Happiness = Unselfishness. Basically, the secret to happiness in this book is to think less about yourse...

Who are the most powerful characters in The Secret Garden? We're definitely not talking about Archibald Craven, who spends most of his life running away from his responsibilities as a father, and i...

If you take a minute to think about what a garden really is, you start to see some of the implied tension in this book between humans and the natural world. That is, a garden includes plants, so it...

The whole idea that childhood is a special time to be savored as separate from adulthood is basically a Victorian invention. Oh sure, humans have always had children (obviously), but we haven't alw...

Mary Lennox is an Anglo-Indian child, which means that her parents are both English but she was born in colonial India. This implies a whole set of hierarchical relations that are as rigid as any o...