The Secret Garden (Oxford World´s Classics New Edition)

• A new edition of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic tale of redemption and renewal that continues to speak to modern readers 100 years after it first appeared.
• Includes a fascinating introduction on 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 notes point out literary parallels and manuscript changes as well as glossing historical allusions and meanings.
• Includes Burnett's essay, the companion-piece 'My Robin'.

New to this edition

• Introduction by Peter Hunt.
• Up-to-date bibliography.
• New explanatory notes.
• New chronology.
• Appendix: 'My Robin'.
• Reset text.

'It was the garden that did it - and Mary and Dickon and the creatures - and the Magic.'

An orphaned girl, a grim moorland manor with hundreds of empty rooms, strange cries in the night, a walled garden, with its door locked and the key buried - and a boy who talks to animals. These are the ingredients of one of the most famous and well-loved of children's classics. Through her discovery of the secret garden, Mary Lennox is gradually transformed from a spoilt and unhappy child into a healthy, unselfish girl who in turn redeems her neglected cousin and his gloomy, Byronic father. Frances Hodgson Burnett's inspiring story of regeneration and salvation gently subverted the conventions of a century of romantic and gothic fiction for girls.

After a hundred years, The Secret Garden's critique of empire and of attitudes to childhood and gender, and its advocacy of a holistic approach to health remains remarkably contemporary and relevant.

Readership: Readers of classic children's literature, Edwardian literature, students of children's literature, cultural studies, popular culture, childhood studies, 19th and 20th century literature, American literature/American children's literature.