all the requisites of Gothic gloom: tapestry-covered walls, suits of armor, family portraits, hidden corridors, and deserted chambers.

In atmosphere and setting, The Secret Garden owes much to the Victorian romantic novels that Burnett devoured as a child. In particular, the novel has an obvious debt to the writings of the Brontë sisters: Burnett’s friend Ella Hepworth Dixon described it “a sort of children’s Jane Eyre”(Gerzina, p. 262). The secrecy surrounding Colin Craven and his mysterious screams in the night is reminiscent of Bertha Rochester; Archibald Craven is a sexless version of the morose and brooding Edward Rochester; and the plain-featured and fearless orphan Mary Lennox has much in common with Jane Eyre herself Elements from Withering Heights are also present, though heavily sweetened and domesticated. Burnett frequently refers to the Yorkshire wind as “wuthering,” and in Dickon she creates a benign equivalent of the wild, moorland child Heathcliff. By naming a minor character, the local athlete Bob Haworth, after the Yorkshire village in which the sisters were born, Burnett acknowledges and even signals The Secret Garden’s many echoes of the Brontës.

The novel’s Gothic background only serves to emphasize the contrasting realism of the central characters. Colin and Mary stand out from their nineteenth-century setting as two very modern children whose experiences can resonate with and offer reassurance to contemporary readers. Their unattractive but convincing tantrums and selfishness set them apart from the child heroes of Victorian novels, including Burnett’s own Cedric Fauntleroy. While Victorian victims and orphans are typically restored to fortune through the intervention of adult benefactors, the recovery of Colin and Mary, though aided by Susan Sowerby, is brought about by their encounter with another child, Dickon, and their discovery of the magic of the secret garden. Victorian novels for the young promote passivity and obedience, but The Secret Garden assures its readers that even the most unhappy and damaged of children can learn to form healthy friendships and create beauty and order in their lives.

The early chapters of the novel, which was originally titled Mistress Mary, trace the emotional growth of Mary Lennox with the precision of a psychological case study. While her self-absorption and lack of sensitivity to others is plausibly explained by parental neglect coupled with spoiling by her Indian servants, we also learn, in the very first chapter, that Mary is attracted to gardens and gardening—a sign that she is capable of appreciating nature and therefore, in Burnett’s terms, of redemption: “She pretended that she was making a flower-bed, and she stuck big scarlet hibiscus blossoms into little heaps of earth” (p. 8). After her arrival at Misselthwaite, Mary’s first positive attachment is to a robin. Like many disturbed children, she finds it easier to relate to animals than to other humans. When she meets Ben Weatherstaff, the lonely and ill-tempered gardener, Mary forms her first friendship and begins to learn about herself by seeing her own characteristics mirrored in others. As Weatherstaff points out, “Tha’ an’ me are a good bit alike.... We was wove out of th’ same cloth. We’re neither of us good lookin’ an’ we’re both of us as sour as we look” (p. 35). It is Weatherstaff who provokes Mary’s curiosity about the hidden garden. Just as the old gardener’s grumpiness offers her a mirror of her outward behavior, so the neglected and uncultivated garden reflects the child’s inner life:

It was because it had been shut up so long that she wanted to see it. It seemed as if it must be different from other places and that something strange must have happened to it during ten years (p. 57).

With her discovery of the secret garden, Mary is no longer a powerless outsider. From being a secret herself, the child nobody knew, she has become the possessor of a secret: Knowledge of the garden is hers to bestow or to withhold. Unlike any of the previous relationships in her life, her new friendship with Dickon is based not on the dependency of a child on an adult, nor on the tyranny of a spoiled child to a servant, but on a shared secret and a common passion. Cultivating the secret garden with Dickon, Mary loses her contrariness and grows in the self-knowledge and self-confidence that make it possible for her to form other positive relationships. As she later confesses to Colin, “I should have detested you if I had seen you before I saw the robin and Dickon” (p. 146).

Mary’s meeting with her cousin Colin marks the culmination of