The Secret Garden (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Frances Hodgson Burnett

• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781411433120
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works. Though Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote more than forty books, none remains so popular as her miraculous and magical masterpiece, The Secret Garden. Has any story ever dared to begin by calling its heroine, "the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen" and, just a few sentences later, "as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived?" Mary Lennox is the "little pig, " sent to Misselthwaite Manor, on the Yorkshire moors, to live with her uncle after her parents die of cholera. There she discovers her sickly cousin Colin, who is equally obnoxious and imperious. Both love no one because they have never been loved. They are the book's spiritual secret gardens, needing only the right kind of care to bloom into lovely children.Mary also discovers a literal secret garden, hidden behind a locked gate on her uncle's estate, neglected for the ten years since Colin's birth and his mother's death. Together with a local child named Dickon, Mary and Colin transform the garden into a paradise bursting with life and color. Through their newfound mutual love of nature, they nurture each other, until they are brought back to health and happiness. With Charles Robinsons original illustrations. 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, in addition to articles on Joyce, Newman, Hopkins, and the medieval women mystics.

Table of contents

• FROM THE PAGES OF THE SECRET GARDEN
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
• THE WORLD OF FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT AND THE SECRET GARDEN
• Introduction
• 1 - There’s No One Left
• 2 - Mistress Mary Quite Contrary
• 3 - Across the Moor
• 4 - Martha
• 5 - The Cry in the Corridor
• 6 - “There Was Some One Crying—There Was”
• 7 - The Key of the Garden
• 8 - The Robin Who Showed the Way
• 9 - The Strangest House
• 10 - Dickon
• 11 - The Nest of the Missel Thrush
• 12 - “Might I Have a Bit of Earth?”
• 13 - “I Am Colin”
• 14 - A Young Rajah
• 15 - Nest Building
• 16 - “I Won’t!” Said Mary
• 17 - A Tantrum
• 18 - “Tha’ Munnot Waste No Time”
• 19 - “It Has Come!”
• 20 - “I Shall Live Forever”
• 21 - Ben Weatherstaff
• 22 - When the Sun Went Down
• 23 - Magic
• 24 - “Let Them Laugh”
• 25 - The Curtain
• 26 - “It’s Mother!”
• 27 - In the Garden
• ENDNOTES
• INSPIRED BY THE SECRET GARDEN
• COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
• FOR FURTHER READING