her emotional development in the novel. Colin is the last in the series of mirrors by which she learns about herself Like Mary, Colin is rejected and hidden, starved of the company of other children and accustomed to ordering servants around. Although Mary refuses to tolerate his tantrums, she understands his isolation and powerlessness and for the first time in her life feels empathy for and desire to help another person. When Mary introduces Colin to Dickon and the secret garden, her own cure is complete, and Colin’s healing begins.

In the final chapters of The Secret Garden, Burnett’s attention shifts from Mary to Colin. Mary assumes a supportive and nurturing role as her cousin develops from a self-pitying invalid into the robust and self-possessed young heir of Misselthwaite. Some feminist critics have seen Colin’s displacement of Mary from the center of the narrative as an indicator of Burnett’s espousal of traditional gender roles. Danielle E. Price, for example, complains that “Mary is forgotten in what becomes a story of father and son, and we remember, if we had ever forgotten, who owns and who will own all the gardens on the estate” (p. 11). An alternative explanation for the story’s change of focus is that Burnett, who often embarked on a novel without knowing exactly where the plot would lead her, became increasingly emotionally involved with Colin as she used the character to invent a happier outcome for the sufferings of her son Lionel.

It is Burnett’s intense involvement and identification with the experiences of her two protagonists that lifts her writing above the formulaic quality of much of her other work and accounts for The Secret Garden’s extraordinary emotional power. Child readers respond instinctively to the author’s evident personal investment in the novel, and they relate to the psychological authenticity of the two main characters. Readers of all ages appreciate Burnett’s success in writing “some happiness into the world” without compromising emotional truth. Like all human joy, the triumphant conclusion of The Secret Garden is shadowed by loss. As Colin and Mary come running out of the garden, we know they are leaving childhood behind. They cannot linger in Eden. The garden has completed its work of healing and renewal, and the children are now ready to grow up. Yet, as we have known all along, the secret garden is as much a symbolic as a physical space. Though Colin and Mary no longer play there, it remains for them, as for Burnett herself, and for generations of readers, a lasting imaginative refuge, a garden of the heart.

Jill Muller was born in England and educated at Mercy College and Columbia University. She currently teaches at Mercy College and Columbia University. She is the author of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism (Routledge, 2003), in addition to articles on Joyce, Newman, Hopkins, and the medieval women mystics. She also wrote the Introductions to the Barnes & Noble Classics editions of Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.

1

There’s No One Left

When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor1 to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held a position under the English Government2 and had always been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people. She had not wanted a little girl at all, and when Mary was born she handed her over to the care of an Ayah,a who was made to understand that if she wished to please the Mem Sahibb she must keep the child out of sight as much as possible. So when she was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby she was kept out of the way, and when she became a sickly, fretful, toddling thing she was kept out of the way also. She never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the other native servants, and as they always obeyed her and gave her her own way in everything, because the Mem Sahib would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying, by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and