The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Published 1911 · 80,572 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Children's Literature, Literary Fiction, Pastoral Fiction

How hard is The Secret Garden to read?

The Secret Garden scores 34 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
The vocabulary in "The Secret Garden" is generally accessible, though it includes some regional Yorkshire dialect (e.g., "tha'", "munnot," "wick") and colonial terms like "Ayah" and "Mem Sahib." These less common words are often clarified by context or direct explanation, making the text navigable for most readers. It is more varied than a child's diary but lacks the extensive allusions or specialized jargon found in works like "Ulysses" or "Moby-Dick."
Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
Sentences in the novel are typically of moderate length, employing clear grammatical structures without excessive nesting or convoluted clauses. While paragraphs can be substantial, the prose maintains a straightforward flow, focusing on direct narration and dialogue. This makes the text more demanding than a simple declarative style like "1984" but far from the extreme hypotaxis of Henry James or the unpunctuated passages of "Ulysses."
Abstraction: 35 out of 100
"The Secret Garden" maintains a highly concrete narrative, focusing on Mary's physical experiences, emotional development, and interactions with nature and other characters. Philosophical or theoretical content is absent, with themes like healing and connection explored through tangible events and character growth. The story is firmly grounded in the physical world, placing it significantly lower on the abstraction scale than works like "The Waste Land" or "Waiting for Godot."
Information density: 45 out of 100
The narrative unfolds linearly with a clear plot and character motivations, presenting information at a manageable pace. While rich in descriptive detail, the text avoids overwhelming the reader with multiple complex plotlines, historical backdrops, or dense symbolic layers. This makes the book more engaging than a sparse personal reflection but less demanding than the encyclopedic references and intricate parallels found in "Ulysses" or "War and Peace."
Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
The Secret Garden employs a highly direct, omniscient narrator who explicitly states characters' thoughts, feelings, and motivations. Readers are told Mary is 'tyrannical and selfish' and later that her interest in Dickon marks 'the dawning of a healthy sentiment,' leaving little room for inference regarding character development or plot events. The narrative prioritizes clear exposition over subtle implication, contrasting sharply with works like *Lolita* or *The Great Gatsby*.
Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
While the secret garden itself functions as a potent symbol of healing, rebirth, and the transformative power of nature, its meaning is largely overt and consistently reinforced throughout the narrative. The robin and the moor also carry symbolic weight, but these motifs are presented clearly, guiding the reader toward their intended significance rather than inviting complex, multi-layered interpretations akin to *Moby-Dick*'s whale or *The Waste Land*'s mythic allusions.
Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
The Secret Garden exhibits very little ironic distance; the narrator's voice is earnest and directly conveys the story's themes and emotional impact. There is no discernible gap between the literal events and an implied, contrasting authorial meaning, nor is there an unreliable narrator requiring readers to question the presented reality, unlike works such as *Lolita* or *Ulysses*.
Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
The narrative of The Secret Garden consistently moves towards explicit resolution, with mysteries like Colin's crying and the locked garden being directly uncovered and actively worked upon by the characters. The excerpt concludes with clear progress in Colin's health and the garden's revival, establishing a trajectory for a satisfying and unambiguous ending, unlike the open-endedness found in *The Crying of Lot 49* or *Waiting for Godot*.
Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
The Secret Garden employs a straightforward, linear narrative structure, presenting events in strict chronological order without any complex timeline jumps or formal experiments. The third-person omniscient point of view remains consistent, providing clear access to characters' thoughts and actions without disorienting shifts or unreliable narration, placing it firmly at the lower end of structural complexity.

How The Secret Garden is regarded

The Secret Garden holds a literary regard score of 69 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where The Secret Garden sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (155 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Secret Garden scores 54 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
“There’s twelve of us an’ my father only gets sixteen shilling a week.”
Symbol: Mythical (archetypal)
It’s a secret garden, and I’m the only one in the world who wants it to be alive.
Mythos: Comedy iv (Green-world phase) (comedy iv)
Across the lawn came the Master of Misselthwaite and he looked as many of them had never seen him. And by his side with his head up in the air and his eyes full of laughter walked as strongly and steadily as any boy in Yorkshire—Master Colin!
Genre: Novel + Romance
In each century since the beginning of the world wonderful things have been discovered.

Where the story of The Secret Garden takes place

  • Misselthwaite Manor and the Yorkshire moors, a year of seasons c. 1900s (1900 to 1911), the main setting
  • British India: a cholera-stricken bungalow, then London (1895 to 1910)
  • Craven's wanderings: Norwegian fiords, the Tyrol, Lake Como (1900 to 1911)

5 things that are true of The Secret Garden, with the passage for each

  1. The house Mary is sent to has about a hundred rooms, most of them locked.

    The house is six hundred years old and it’s on the edge of the moor, and there’s near a hundred rooms in it, though most of them’s shut up and locked.

  2. Dickon is twelve years old and has a pony.

    Our Dickon, he’s twelve years old and he’s got a young pony he calls his own.

  3. The garden has been shut for ten years.

    One of th’ gardens is locked up. No one has been in it for ten years.

  4. Mary finds the key in freshly turned earth where the robin is hopping.

    It was more than a ring, however; it was an old key which looked as if it had been buried a long time.

  5. On his first entry to the garden Colin cries out that he will recover and live forever.

    “I shall get well! I shall get well!” he cried out. “Mary! Dickon! I shall get well! And I shall live forever and ever and ever!”

Scenes in The Secret Garden that Frye would name

29 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Cognitio, untitled
“Father,” he said, “I’m Colin. You can’t believe it. I scarcely can myself. I’m Colin.” Father and son are recognised and reunited, the comic recognition that restores the household.
Lyric, untitled
“Praise God from whom all blessings flow, Dickon sings the Doxology in the garden, an embedded song of thanksgiving.
Demonic imagery, untitled
The cholera had broken out in its most fatal form and people were dying like flies. The opening world is plague, wailing and abandonment: the demonic register against which the garden is later set.
Anagnorisis, untitled
She had not known before that this was one of the things which made her feel sour and cross. She seemed to find it out when the robin looked at her and she looked at the robin. Mary recognises her own loneliness, the first turn in her cure.
Pathos, untitled
th’ branch broke an’ she fell on th’ ground an’ was hurt so bad that next day she died. The sacrificial death of Mrs Craven, the original wound of the garden and the house.
Point of epiphany, untitled
She was standing inside the secret garden. The door under the ivy is the threshold between the dead house and the green world.

Books that share these scenes with The Secret Garden

About the author

Frances Hodgson Burnett