Customer Reviews

The Secret Garden (Norton Critical Edition)

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A most helpful edition for students or anyone who wants more information regarding the author and/or story.

I have to admit, I did not like Francis Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. The book was readable, do not get the sense that it did not carry me along. The thing is that I seem to suffer from some sort of gender bias that I cannot break. Or it could be something else entirely. However, I am not setting out to talk solely of my bias towards male authors. I came to the book expectant. Books that seem to have come from outside the popular culture of my own childhood have been approached warily at best. I think I remember seeing some sort of film adaptation of The Secret Garden at a time long past, but it was not ingrained so the chance of enjoyment based on prior contexts was low. After reading and thinking about the novel, I still did not like it, and I was trying to consider why it seemed distasteful to me, so I could have something more than an unqualified value judgment.

This process of judgment led me to compare the novel to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Yes, Stowe's work is a classic in the way that parents of high school children seem to want to venerate, but there is a common thread between these two works, besides the female authors sporting three names: sentimentality. The writers on the book push the reader into so much pathos that there is perhaps a slip into bathos. There is in both texts what seems to be an inclination towards realism, but for this reader, there is too much sentimentality creeping into the text. Mary and Colin seem to be a combination of poor little Eva St. Claire, and perhaps we can force Ben Weatherstaff into the role of Uncle Tom, without the tragic Christian martyr's death.