This reckless interlude came to an end when Lionel was diagnosed with tuberculosis, then the leading cause of death in America. Burnett returned Vivian to Washington and took fifteen-year-old Lionel on an increasingly frenzied and fruitless tour of European specialists. Despite his mother’s showers of gifts, tears, and endearments, and Townsend’s attentive care, Lionel died on December 7, 1890, in Paris. In her passion of grief Frances covered the walls of her hotel rooms with pictures of Lionel and wrote letters and journals to her dead son. She did not return to the equally heart-broken Vivian and Swan in Washington for more than a year.

In her mature years, Frances Hodgson Burnett was sometimes a subject of ridicule and caricature, mocked for her efforts to squeeze her increasingly stout figure into girlish ruffles, ribbons, and decolletage, her nickname, “Fluffy,” and her penchant for younger men. Her long-troubled marriage finally ended in 1898, and in the same year she moved to England to take up residence at Maytham Hall, a mansion in rural Kent. There she played the lady of the manor, engaging in charity work, attending services at the local church, visiting Henry James in nearby Rye (James called her the “Princess of Maytham”), and cultivating her garden. She wrote each day in a walled rose garden, accompanied by a friendly robin and, one year, a pair of orphan lambs who followed her about and slept on her knee as she sang to them. Burnett appeared to have found contentment and happiness. Then, seemingly on an impulse, she married Stephen Townsend in Genoa, Italy. Afterward she would claim that he had blackmailed her into marriage, threatening to publicize her earlier adulteries, and that his motives were wholly mercenary. By 1902 the marriage was over: It had lasted less than two years. The breakup left her in a state of mental and physical collapse. Writing and the garden at Maytham were her solace. When Maytham’s owner put the house up for sale, Burnett must have felt like an exile from Eden.

By the time she started work on The Secret Garden, Burnett was back in the United States, living with her sister Edith at Plandome, the house on Long Island that would remain her American home until her death in 1924. The passion for gardening that she had discovered at Maytham persisted for the rest of her life. In her last, posthumously published book, In the Garden, she wrote,

I love it all. I love to dig. I love to kneel down in the grass at the edge of a flowerbed and pull out the weeds fiercely and throw them into a heap by my side. I love to fight with those who can spring up again almost in a night and taunt me. I tear them up by the roots again and again (p. 20).

For Frances Hodgson Burnett, as for her creation Mary Lennox, gardening was a consolation for disappointment and loss, a means of imposing order, an enactment of hope: “As long as one has a garden one has a future, and if one has a future one is alive” (In the Garden, p. 30).

Writing, like weeding, was a defense against painful memories. In The Secret Garden, Burnett recreates and immortalizes her beloved garden at Maytham, complete with its friendly robin, and uses it as a setting in which to revisit and repair some of her own life’s sorrows and dislocations. A pet lamb reappears in the company of Dickon the “animal charmer” (p. 122) and is bottle-fed by the spoiled invalid, Colin, who thereby initiates the process of his emotional and physical recovery through contact with the natural world. Colin shares his pallid face and luminous “agate-grey” (p. 100) eyes with Burnett’s son, Lionel. Unlike the unfortunate Lionel, however, he leaves behind his couch and wheelchair to greet his father, in the final chapter, as a perfectly healthy child. Colin’s cousin Mary, orphaned in India, must learn, like the young Frances Hodgson, to adapt to a new country and unfamiliar customs. Unlike Frances, who shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic through most of her life and dreamed of a permanent home at Maytham, Mary puts down roots in her rose garden at Misselthwaite Manor. The characters in The Secret Garden enact a fantasy of healing and integration in which a dying boy recovers and a lonely girl discovers her true home. In Burnett’s fairy tale the children owe their triumph not to a golden goose or a fairy godmother but