The Secret Garden

There is a garden here that has been shut for ten years, its door hidden, its key buried since the mistress of the house died. Mary hears of it, wonders at it, and cannot let it be. A robin bursting into winter song, a gust of wind lifting the ivy, her own trembling hands at the keyhole—the book takes its time bringing her to the moment when, at last, she is "standing inside the secret garden."

What grows there is more than roses. Mary meets Martha, a blunt and kind-hearted housemaid, and Dickon, a moor boy who charms squirrels and rabbits to his side with a wooden pipe. There is gruff old Ben Weatherstaff too, who tells her plainly the two of them are cut from the same sour cloth. A cry in the night leads her deeper into the house and to a secret it has been keeping. "Don't let us talk about dying," someone says. "Let us talk about living."

Burnett writes with warmth and a lyric patience, letting sorrow surface obliquely and joy arrive by inches: a crocus kissed, a sour face turning almost pretty. This is a book about neglected things coming back to life: a garden, a house, a handful of children who were never given much of a chance. The door is ajar and the ivy is stirring. It only asks to be followed inside.