Mary Lennox Was a Brat and I Loved Her For It

A sour little girl, a big empty house, and a garden nobody will talk about

Here’s the setup, and it’s a good one. Mary Lennox is ten years old, raised in colonial India by parents who basically forgot they had a kid, and when a cholera outbreak kills everyone in the house and leaves her the sole survivor, she gets shipped off to Yorkshire to live with an uncle she’s never met. Uncle Archibald Craven is a hunchbacked widower who spends most of his time traveling anywhere that isn’t his own house, because his wife died in a garden accident and he can’t stand to look at the place. Mary arrives at Misselthwaite Manor, a hundred-room pile of a house with locked doors and moors stretching out in every direction, and she is, by design, a genuinely unpleasant child. Spoiled, sallow, demanding, incapable of playing because nobody ever taught her how.

Then she finds out there’s a garden on the property that’s been locked for ten years, key buried, door hidden under ivy, and nobody will tell her why. Burnett is doing something smart here that I don’t think gets enough credit: she lets you sit with an unlikable protagonist long enough that her slow thaw actually means something. Mary doesn’t become nice because the plot needs her to. She becomes nice because a robin shows her where a key is buried, and because a Yorkshire boy named Dickon can charm animals out of hedgerows, and because digging in dirt gives a friendless kid something to do with her hands and her attention.

Where it earns it, and where it drags

Look, the middle section where Mary and Dickon are just quietly reviving a garden together is some of the best slow-build atmosphere in children’s literature. Burnett takes her time with it. You get crocuses pushing up through frozen ground, described with the kind of specificity that tells you she’d actually gardened herself and wasn’t faking it. There’s a real tactile joy in it, dirt and green shoots and secrets kept between two kids, and it never once feels like filler.

And then there’s Colin.

Here’s the thing, Colin Craven, the invalid cousin nobody mentioned, hidden away in his room because he’s convinced he’s dying and everyone around him is convinced too, is one of the most insufferable child characters I’ve read in a long time, and I mean that as a genuine criticism, not affectionate ribbing. His screaming fits go on for pages. His self-pity is relentless. I remember reading his introduction on a train and audibly groaning, because just when the book had built up real momentum with Mary and Dickon, it stops to introduce a second, even more tantrum-prone kid and slows everything down again. Burnett clearly means for this to mirror Mary’s own arc (spoiled kid gets fixed by fresh air and purpose), but she does it so on the nose that it tips into lecture. The whole “thoughts create reality” thread with Colin, all that turn of the century faith-healing, mind-over-matter stuff Burnett was genuinely into at the time, has aged into something closer to twee self-help than the book seems to realize.

I’ll also say the dialect. Ben Weatherstaff and Dickon and Martha all speak in heavy phonetic Yorkshire, and depending on your patience that’s either charming texture or a genuine slog to parse. I found it charming about seventy percent of the time and exhausting the other thirty.

And I have to be honest about the colonial framing too, because it’s baked into the very first chapter. India exists in this book mainly as a place that makes Mary sickly and yellow and bad-tempered, and England (specifically the Yorkshire moor) is what heals her. That’s not incidental, it’s structural, and a modern reader should go in knowing it’s there rather than getting blindsided by it.

But then there’s the scene where Colin actually stands up for the first time, and Mary and Dickon and Colin are running through the garden not caring who sees them, and even knowing exactly how manipulative the setup is, it got me. I sat there on my couch, cold and cranky, feeling weirdly emotional about a fictional garden. Maybe that’s a sign the book still works. Maybe it’s a sign I’m a sucker for redemption arcs involving plants. Possibly both.

The whole idea of the story is that if you look for the good in things, keep busy, and let something outside yourself matter more than your own misery, you get better. It’s simple to the point of being almost embarrassing, and it still works on people a hundred years later.

About Frances Hodgson Burnett

Burnett was English by birth, moved to America as a teenager when her family’s money ran out, and basically wrote her way back into financial stability, churning out adult romances and society novels for years before Little Lord Fauntleroy made her famous (and mildly infamous, since it launched a thousand mothers dressing their sons in velvet suits). She was theatrical, dramatic, married twice, divorced once in an era when that got you talked about, and genuinely believed in the New Thought movement, the idea that positive thinking could heal the body, which is exactly why Colin’s arc reads the way it does. She wasn’t writing a metaphor. She meant it literally. She also gardened obsessively at her own homes in both the US and England, which explains why the descriptions of soil and bulbs and robins in this book feel lived-in rather than researched.

If this got its hooks in you, read these next

• A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Same author, same interest in a girl’s fortunes collapsing and her inner life carrying her through it, arguably a tighter book than this one.
• Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery. Another orphan, another rural landscape doing emotional heavy lifting, with a warmer and funnier voice than Burnett’s.
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. If it was the pastoral, seasons-turning atmosphere that got you, this scratches the same itch without any child protagonists at all.
• Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. A different kind of secret garden book, quieter and stranger, for when you want the same wonder with a time-slip twist.

You can find copies of the book itself here on Amazon if you want to see which edition and cover speaks to you, there are some genuinely gorgeous illustrated ones out there.

For your book club

1. Mary is deliberately unlikable for the first third of the book. Did that make you more or less invested in her, and where did that shift for you?
2. Colin’s illness is framed as largely psychological, cured by fresh air, belief, and purpose. How do you read that today, knowing what we know about actual childhood illness and disability?
3. What is the garden actually a metaphor for, and does that metaphor hold up by the book’s end or does it get stretched too thin?
4. How does the book’s treatment of India in the opening chapters color the rest of the story once you notice it?
5. Dickon is presented as almost supernaturally in tune with nature. Is he a real character to you, or more of a symbol Burnett needed for the plot to work?