The Secret Garden

The pitch

Sour, unloved Mary Lennox is shipped to a Yorkshire manor full of locked doors, finds the key to a garden no one has entered in ten years, and — alongside a boy everyone treats as an invalid — brings it and herself back to life. It is the quiet masterpiece of children’s literature, and spring reading at its absolute best.

What to know

This is a long, slow book, and nothing explodes in it. That’s the point. It suits a patient reader (grades 4–7), a chapter-a-night read-aloud, or a child going through something hard; few books take a child’s loneliness more seriously or repair it more carefully. The Yorkshire dialect looks odd on the page for a chapter or two, then becomes part of the warmth.

Life when written

When the book appeared in 1911 the British Empire was at its height, and children of English families working in India were routinely shipped “home” to relatives they had never met — Mary’s journey was an ordinary one. Great Yorkshire houses like Misselthwaite really did keep walled gardens behind locked doors, with wild moor running for miles between villages. Doctors of the day prescribed fresh air for nearly everything; the book takes that prescription and makes it magic.