The Secret Garden Centennial Edition

This timeless classic is a poignant tale of Mary, a lonely orphaned girl sent to a Yorkshire mansion at the edge of a vast lonely moor. At first, she is frightened by this gloomy place until she meets a local boy, Dickon, who's earned the trust of the moor's wild animals, the invalid Colin, an unhappy boy terrified of life, and a mysterious, abandoned garden...

At the age of eighteen, Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) began publishing her stories in magazines such as Godey's Lady Book and Scribner's. Her novel That Lass O' Lowries (1877) became her first success. But the children's story Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) made her famous. Little Lord Fauntleroy was successfully dramatized, just as a later novel, Sara Crewe, became the popular play The Little Princess (1905). While laying out a garden, Burnett conceived and wrote The Secret Garden (1911), her best and most enduring work. Sandra M. Gilbert, an acclaimed literary critic and poet, is the coauthor of some of the most influential literary studies of our time, including The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination and No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. She has also published a memoir, Wrongful Death, as well as six collections of verse, including Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999, which won the American Book Award in 2001. A professor of English at the University of California, Davis, Gilbert is a past president of the Modern Language Association.