The Secret Garden and Other Works (Annotated)

Three novels about children who were forgotten, and what happened when they decided not to be.

Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote for children. She also wrote about the most serious things adults spend their lives avoiding: what neglect does to a person, whether damage can be undone, and whether there is something in the human will — or in a garden, or in a friend, or in a locked room discovered at midnight — that can reverse what seemed irreversible.

The Secret Garden (1911) begins with a cholera epidemic in colonial India and a child no one wanted — and becomes, slowly and precisely, one of the most persuasive accounts of psychological transformation in English literature. Mary Lennox arrives at Misselthwaite Manor disagreeable, sallow, and entirely alone. What she finds there — a walled garden, a crying boy hidden in the house, a Yorkshire boy who speaks to animals — does not redeem her through sentimentality. It changes her through attention, effort, and the specific pleasure of making something grow.

A Little Princess (1905) applies the same intelligence to a different premise: what happens to a child who has everything and then loses it entirely? Sara Crewe's fall from pampered student to servant girl at Miss Minchin's Seminary is one of Victorian fiction's most uncomfortable social portraits — and her survival, built on imagination and internal dignity rather than rescue, is among its most quietly radical arguments.

Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) inverts the formula: a child who has nothing — raised in a New York tenement, fatherless — discovers he is heir to an English earldom, and proceeds to civilize his grandfather through the uncomplicated force of genuine affection. The novel is less sentimental than its reputation suggests; Burnett is interested in what goodness actually does to power when they meet directly.

Mary Lennox — disagreeable, solitary, and entirely right about most things; the child no one saw who learned to see everything.

Sara Crewe — who decided, in the attic, with insufficient food and a rat for company, that she was still a princess; and meant something serious by it.

Cedric Errol — who loved his grandfather before his grandfather deserved it, and was right to.

✦ The complete, unabridged texts of all three novels — The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, and Little Lord Fauntleroy — nothing condensed or omitted, together with three original afterwords by Henry Bugalho.

This edition also includes:

✦ The Garden Behind the Wall — a critical afterword on The Secret Garden: its psychological architecture, its place in the tradition of the English country house novel, and why it has outlasted almost everything published in the same decade

✦ The World of Frances Hodgson Burnett: England, America, and the Atlantic Novel — historical and cultural context: the transatlantic career, the serialization culture, and the social world the three novels are simultaneously inhabiting and questioning

✦ Frances Hodgson Burnett: A Life Between Worlds — a full biographical account: from Manchester to Tennessee to Long Island, through the losses and the extraordinary productivity that produced some of the most durable fiction in the English language

For readers who enjoy:

✦ Classic English literature and the great tradition of the Victorian and Edwardian novel

✦ Fiction about girls and women who survive on their own terms — before survival was a genre

✦ Readers who encountered these novels as children and are ready to understand what Burnett was actually doing

✦ The complete works of a writer whose reputation has never caught up with her achievement