The Secret Garden

An orphaned girl, a grim moorland manor with hundreds of empty rooms, strange cries in the night, and a walled garden, with its door locked and the key buried. These are the ingredients of one of the most famous and well-loved of children's classics, an inspiring story of regeneration and salvation that gently subverted the conventions of a century of romantic and gothic fiction for girls. Marking the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Secret Garden , this new edition of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic tale of redemption and renewal features a fascinating introduction by Peter Hunt that explores the relationship between the book and the 19th-century genres of girls' stories, romances, the gothic, and the sensational, and examines the book's symbolic undercurrents. The book includes new explanatory notes that point out literary parallels and manuscript changes as well as glossing historical allusions and meanings, an up-to-date bibliography, a new chronology, and Burnett's essay "My Robin," a companion piece to the book.

Peter Hunt is Professor Emeritus of Children's Literature at Cardiff University.