Martha also tells Mary that, somewhere on the estate grounds, there is a garden that has been locked up for 10 years. Listening to Martha talk about Dickon, Mary feels an interest in something outside herself for the first time in her life. Martha manages to soothe Mary by telling her about her brother, Dickon, who has an affinity with animals. The maid, Martha, chats with Mary as if she were her equal, which irritates the spiteful little girl. The next morning, at the manor, Mary wakes to find a young maid tending her fireplace. Craven’s beautiful wife died young, and the man became a near-hermit in his grief. The ancient house stands on the edge of a moor, and almost all of its hundred rooms are kept locked. Medlock tells Mary more about her uncle, who is a hunchback, and about his home, Misselthwaite Manor. Mary is sent to England to live with her uncle, Archibald Craven. From them, she learns both her parents have died. After several hours, a group of soldiers discovers Mary. When she awakens the next day, the house is silent. Mary, forgotten by both her family and the servants, hides in her nursery. As people fall ill, the household devolves into a state of panic. The servants indulge Mary’s every whim, and Mary quickly becomes selfish and tyrannical. Lennox happy, the family’s Indian servants must keep Mary from disturbing her mother, and out of view of her friends. Her father is a government official in India, and her mother, though beautiful, cares more about parties than her young daughter. Nine-year-old Mary Lennox is an unattractive girl, in both body and mind. “Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.”.Great Maytham Hall – where Burnett cultivated a beautiful rose garden and enjoyed the company of a semi-tame robin – served as the author’s initial inspiration for The Secret Garden.The novel’s gothic aspects allude to the Brontë sisters’ Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847).The Secret Garden offers a twist on the traditional 19th-century orphan narrative: Mary Lennox is not a saintly child, but a decidedly unpleasant, unattractive little girl.In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the New Thought movement posited positive thinking as a divinely-derived force for good, and as a means of achieving mental and physical healing. The garden’s decay and rebirth symbolizes Mary and Colin’s physical and spiritual trajectories.While the novel treats the underlying horror of the abandonment and isolation Mary and Colin suffer with marked seriousness, an unabashed joy pervades scenes set in the natural world.Burnett’s son Lionel’s death from tuberculosis in 1890 affected the author deeply.With the help of Martha’s animal-charming brother, Dickon, Mary brings the garden back to life and helps her cousin regain his health and reconnect with his father. Mary first locates the garden, then discovers another secret: that her uncle has an invalid son named Colin. Mary’s maid, Martha, tells her about a garden that has been locked since Mrs. Craven’s manor in Yorkshire after her parents die. Mary Lennox, a spoiled, lonely child travels from India to her uncle, Mr.The Secret Garden offers an ahead-of-its-time understanding of the link between mental and physical well-being.Both a celebration of the natural world and an expression of faith in the possibility that even the most wounded soul can heal and transform, The Secret Garden offers an ahead-of-its-time understanding of the link between mental and physical well-being. In nurturing the garden, the once physically and spiritually weak Mary – and her mirror, Colin – enact their own redemption: achieving health and happiness. Burnett’s Eden-esque garden acts as both the site and symbol of her characters’ physical and spiritual growth. And yet, it is precisely Burnett’s willingness to take her readers into the darkness – in order that they might better understand the path toward the light – which makes The Secret Garden such a compelling, modern-feeling tale today, more than 100 years after its publication. Nor is the novel’s exploration of isolation, death, and the ways the traumas of the past haunt the present, typical children’s fare. But Frances Hodgson Burnett’s orphan – the decidedly unlikable and unattractive but refreshingly honest Mary Lennox is hardly the idealized heroine found in most turn-of-the-century orphan stories. On its surface, The Secret Garden is a straightforward story of how an isolated orphan, by a lucky twist of fate, finds friendship and happiness in an unlikely way.
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