A Little Princess & The Secret Garden (Unabridged): Enriched edition.

By Frances Hodgson Burnett and Keith Larson

In 'A Little Princess & The Secret Garden (Unabridged)', Francis Hodgson Burnett masterfully weaves together two beloved children's classics filled with themes of resilience, imagination, and the power of positive thinking. The descriptive and emotionally charged style allows readers to fully immerse themselves in the magical worlds of Sara Crewe and Mary Lennox as they navigate through challenging circumstances and discover the secrets of hidden gardens. These timeless tales are not only entertaining but also offer valuable life lessons and inspire readers of all ages to find beauty in unexpected places. Francis Hodgson Burnett, a prolific author known for her works for both children and adults, drew inspiration from her own experiences of loss and hardship to create stories that continue to resonate with readers around the world. Her ability to capture the innocence and wisdom of childhood in her characters is what sets her apart as a literary genius with a profound understanding of human nature. I highly recommend 'A Little Princess & The Secret Garden (Unabridged)' to readers who appreciate beautifully crafted storytelling, engaging characters, and uplifting themes. Whether you are looking to revisit these timeless classics or discover them for the first time, this collection is sure to captivate and inspire.

In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience:
- A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions.
- The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing.
- A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation.
- A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists.
- A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths.
- Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts.
- Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Musaicum Books
• Release date: Mar 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9788027240722

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) was an English author and playwright best remembered for her children’s stories, including A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, and Little Lord Fauntleroy. 

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Francis Hodgson Burnett

A Little Princess & The Secret Garden

(Unabridged)

Enriched edition.

Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Keith Larson

Edited and published by Musaicum Press, 2018

Table of Contents

Introduction

Author Biography

Historical Context

Synopsis (Selection)

A Little Princess & The Secret Garden (Unabridged)

Analysis

Reflection

Memorable Quotes

Introduction

Table of Contents

This volume gathers two complete, unabridged novels by Frances Hodgson Burnett—A Little Princess and The Secret Garden—presented in their full original texts. Together they offer a concentrated view of an author whose work helped shape modern children’s literature. The aim of this collection is simple: to provide authoritative, continuous narratives as Burnett wrote them, allowing readers to experience the stories’ pacing, language, and design without alteration. As companion pieces, these novels illuminate each other, revealing an art devoted to the moral and imaginative lives of children and to the transformative power of care, friendship, and place. They are, above all, full-length novels for young readers.

A Little Princess is a children’s novel set largely in a London boarding school, where a richly imaginative pupil, Sara Crewe, faces a sudden reversal of fortune. The book belongs to the tradition of domestic and school-story fiction, yet it moves beyond convention by making the inner life of a child its primary subject. The premise is straightforward: how does one remain generous, truthful, and brave when circumstances grow severe? Burnett’s narrative explores the sustaining force of imagination, the ethics of everyday kindness, and the dignity of work and friendship, without relying on sensational incident to carry the plot.

The Secret Garden is a children’s novel set in a secluded Yorkshire estate, where Mary Lennox, newly bereft of her parents, arrives withdrawn and discontented. She discovers a locked, neglected garden and, with new acquaintances, begins to tend it. The premise foregrounds a hidden space and a child’s hesitant curiosity about the natural world. Without revealing later developments, it is enough to say that the novel explores how patient attention—to plants, to animals, to other people—can foster health and joy. The setting’s moorland weather, the rhythms of gardening, and the textures of a large house all shape the book’s quiet movement.

Placing these two novels side by side underscores Burnett’s abiding interest in thresholds—between loneliness and fellowship, want and sufficiency, enclosure and openness. Each story begins with a child in a constricted world and follows a gradual widening of sympathy and possibility. Rooms, attics, corridors, and walled gardens are not merely backgrounds; they are moral and emotional spaces that respond to care. Burnett’s heroines learn to see, and then to act, and then to sustain action with steadiness. The novels together trace an arc from imaginative survival to generous participation in shared life.

Burnett’s stylistic hallmarks are evident throughout. Her prose is clear, rhythmic, and attentive to sensory detail; her dialogue is brisk and theatrical without being mannered. Chapters often resolve with a small turn of feeling rather than a large shock, giving the books a poised, serial cadence that invites reflection. She writes close to a child’s perspective, but never condescends to it, balancing sentiment with wit and restraint. Repetition of key words and images—firelight, hands, keys, seeds—creates a fabric of motifs that quietly organize the action and guide readers toward the novels’ central concerns.

The social and geographical textures of these works are distinct yet complementary. A Little Princess moves between colonial India as memory and metropolitan London as present reality, with the school as a microcosm of hierarchy, labor, and aspiration. The Secret Garden unfolds on a Yorkshire estate bordered by open moor, where climate, dialect, and work shape daily life. In both novels, differences of class and circumstance are made visible through habits, settings, and speech, and acts of consideration across these differences become the measure of moral growth. The worlds are particular, yet the questions they pose remain widely legible.

Across both books, Burnett returns to themes of kindness and responsibility as practices rather than sentiments. The narratives value courtesy, fairness, and generosity, not as rewards for virtue but as disciplines that create conditions for flourishing. Storytelling and play are presented as serious work for children, tools for organizing experience and imagining better arrangements. The presence or absence of heat, food, and companionship is never trivialized; material care is part of ethical life. These commitments give the novels their enduring warmth without tipping into didacticism.

Burnett’s attention to children’s inner weather is notable. Her protagonists are neither idealized nor scolded into goodness; they falter, revise themselves, and cultivate new habits of seeing. Imagination functions as a bridge between isolation and relation, allowing a child to practice generosity before it is fully felt. The books also consider how environments—rooms cleared of dust, paths opened in a garden—can reflect and encourage psychological change. Without anticipating later turns, it can be said that growth is achieved not through sudden rescue, but through daily acts of noticing and care.

These novels have remained central to the children’s canon because they join accessible storytelling to durable questions about character and community. They continue to be widely read, reprinted, and adapted for stage and screen, a testament to their supple plots and memorable settings. Teachers, librarians, and families return to them for their readability, their humane humor, and their capacity to invite conversation across ages. That endurance is inseparable from Burnett’s craft, which allows readers to recognize themselves and those they love without requiring specialized knowledge or elaborate interpretation.

The decision to present unabridged texts preserves the cadence, vocabulary, and narrative architecture that give these works their integrity. Period idioms and references are retained, and with them the historical texture that shaped the stories’ making. Readers will encounter attitudes and assumptions reflective of the time in which the books were written; these pages invite attentive, context-aware reading rather than smoothing differences away. Unabridged form also safeguards the novels’ patient pacing—the accumulation of scenes and small gestures through which meaning is made and hearts are changed.

This collection is designed for immersive reading, whether alone, aloud, or in company. The parallels between the books reward attentive comparison: a private sanctuary, a disciplined imagination, a series of quiet labors that open onto fellowship. Readers may notice how both titles name images of aspiration—the princess as an ideal of conduct, the garden as a place of cultivation—and how each becomes a way of living rather than a fixed identity. The cadence of Burnett’s chapters invites pauses for conversation, reflection, and, often, the simple pleasure of anticipating the next day’s reading.

In bringing A Little Princess and The Secret Garden together, this volume offers a coherent portrait of an author who trusted children with serious subjects and offered them stories equal to their intelligence. These unabridged novels ask readers to look closely, act kindly, and keep faith with slow, restorative work. Their settings are particular; their invitations are universal. May the pages that follow provide both companionship and discovery, allowing new readers to meet these stories as if for the first time, and returning readers to find in them the same clear note of hope and renewal.

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) was an English-born, transatlantic author whose fiction bridged late Victorian and Edwardian readerships. Best remembered today for The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, she wrote widely for magazines and developed a durable reputation for child-centered narratives that blend realism with moral imagination. Living and publishing in both Britain and the United States, she navigated two literary markets, shaping stories that addressed themes of resilience, empathy, and transformation. Her work occupies a pivotal place in the evolution of children’s literature, moving away from strict didacticism toward psychologically attentive portraits of young protagonists whose inner lives and imaginative resources enable growth.

Born in industrial Manchester, England, Burnett experienced economic upheaval early in life and relocated with her family to the United States in her mid-teens, settling in the American South. Formal schooling was limited; she educated herself through extensive reading and by writing persistently from a young age. The periodical press of the nineteenth century offered an accessible avenue for publication, and she began selling stories to magazines to contribute to household income. This apprenticeship in short fiction honed her control of plot and dialogue, while the realities of migration and transatlantic adjustment furnished material for settings and characters that move between social worlds.

Burnett’s artistic development reflected the crosscurrents of Victorian domestic fiction, popular magazine storytelling, and the growing market for literature addressed to children. Time spent in England and America broadened her sense of class, manners, and landscape, while engagement with theater and performance sharpened scene construction and pacing. Gardening became an important creative stimulus; years later, a walled garden she tended in the English countryside informed the imagery and atmosphere of The Secret Garden. Rather than advancing heavy-handed lessons, she cultivated narratives in which kindness, imagination, and attention to surroundings transform experience—an approach that resonated with a readership spanning age groups.

A Little Princess emerged from an earlier magazine story about a student in a London boarding school and was later expanded into a full-length novel in the early twentieth century. The book centers on a child’s capacity for dignity, friendship, and imaginative endurance when confronted with sudden reversals of fortune. Burnett refines the boarding-school setting into a social microcosm, contrasting cruelty and indifference with small acts of generosity. Readers and critics praised the novel’s humane spirit and its avoidance of sensationalism, noting how its heroine’s inward life, storytelling, and rituals of make-believe bridge the gap between deprivation and moral poise.

Conceived in the years just before and after 1910, The Secret Garden draws on Burnett’s intimate knowledge of gardens and the restorative rhythms of outdoor life. Set on a Yorkshire estate, the novel explores how attention to living things—plants, animals, friendships—can catalyze emotional change in children. The walled garden motif provides a physical space for renewal and a metaphor for the inner self, emphasizing privacy, patience, and care. Contemporary readers appreciated its vivid setting and ensemble of young characters, and the book’s reputation grew steadily, becoming a touchstone of children’s literature for its portrayal of growth without sentimentality.

Throughout her career, Burnett balanced magazine serialization, book publication, and dramatic adaptation, often revising material for different audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. With The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, she advanced a modern vision of childhood that recognizes agency, interiority, and the social force of courtesy. Critics have noted her deft use of domestic spaces—rooms, schools, gardens—as laboratories of character and change. Her prose favors clarity and scene-driven momentum, which supported both periodical and book formats. The accessibility of her narratives helped sustain a broad readership that extended from private family libraries to public institutions over time.

In later years Burnett divided her time between England and the United States, maintaining a household in the New York area while continuing to publish into the 1910s. She died in the mid-1920s, leaving a body of work that remains continuously in print. The Secret Garden and A Little Princess have inspired numerous adaptations for stage and screen, as well as new editions that foreground their themes for contemporary readers. Their emphasis on empathy, the restorative power of nature, and the imaginative dignity of children continues to shape educational discourse and creative practice, securing Burnett’s place in the canon of children’s literature.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) wrote across the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, moving between Britain and the United States and building a transatlantic readership. Her career coincided with the consolidation of mass-market magazines, illustrated gift books, and a growing field of children’s literature that treated childhood as a distinct moral and imaginative sphere. A Little Princess first appeared in parts in the 1880s and became a full novel in 1905; The Secret Garden was serialized in 1910 and published in 1911. Together they register transformations in empire, education, medicine, and publishing, while preserving a nineteenth-century confidence in character, sympathy, and the restorative power of nature.

Burnett’s lifetime spanned an England remade by industry, from the cotton economy of Manchester—her birthplace—to the railways and expanding cities that reoriented work and family life. Industrialization produced stark contrasts between crowded urban districts and rural districts celebrated for health and moral calm. The Secret Garden turns toward the North Country landscape and the idea of recuperation through open air, while A Little Princess observes London’s streets and indoor institutions. Both novels reflect a society grappling with the social consequences of mechanization, philanthropy, and domestic service, and they echo a late nineteenth-century impulse to imagine humane refuges within or beyond industrial modernity.

The British Empire provides a shared backdrop. After the 1857–58 uprising, the Crown assumed direct rule in India, establishing the British Raj (1858–1947). British families stationed in South Asia maintained strong ties to home, often sending children back to Britain for schooling and safety. Both works mark their protagonists’ lives by connections to British India—governing networks, servants, and the movement of capital and people across imperial routes. Recurrent references to heat, unfamiliar languages, and colonial households capture commonplace experiences for Anglo-Indian families. Repeated cholera epidemics in India during the nineteenth century form part of the period’s public-health landscape that readers would have recognized.

Victorian and Edwardian reforms reshaped schooling. The Elementary Education Acts (beginning 1870) expanded state-supported education and, by the 1890s, made elementary schooling free and compulsory for most children in England and Wales. Yet middle- and upper-class girls often attended private seminaries that emphasized languages, accomplishments, and social polish over advanced academics. A Little Princess situates a child within such a London establishment, exposing the economics of fees, patronage, and discipline that structured many private schools. The novel’s interest in pedagogy and moral cultivation mirrors contemporary debates about what educated girls should learn, from practical arithmetic to the refinement expected in urban, respectable households.

Class hierarchy and domestic service were central to Victorian everyday life. By the late nineteenth century, millions worked in service, from cooks and maids to governesses and porters, forming a vast labor force within private homes and institutions. A Little Princess observes the routines and hierarchies of an urban school with domestic staff, while The Secret Garden presents a northern estate where gardeners and house servants maintain the rhythms of rural gentry life. These settings reflect the period’s moral economy—charity as a social obligation, work as character-forming, and rank delineated by dress, speech, and tasks—while also revealing tensions between benevolence, dependence, and the desire for dignity.

Rapid advances in medicine changed how illness and environment were understood. Germ theory gained acceptance in the late nineteenth century; municipal sanitation improved; and open-air treatments were promoted for tuberculosis and childhood convalescence. In Britain and the United States, fresh air movements and children’s sanatoria sought to counter cramped city living. The Secret Garden aligns with these medical cultures by linking outdoor life, diet, and routine to well-being, reflecting contemporary faith in air, sunlight, and exercise. A Little Princess, set amid London winters and indoor discipline, gestures to the bodily and emotional strains of urban childhood, echoing public-health reformers’ attention to ventilation, nutrition, and rest.

Late Victorian religious ferment also matters. New Thought and the mind cure tradition, alongside Christian Science (founded 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy), popularized ideas that mental states could influence bodily health. Burnett took an interest in such movements in the 1890s, exploring the language of belief, suggestion, and inner transformation. While neither novel is doctrinal, their motifs of hope, attention, and the power of words reflect a culture intrigued by psychosomatic healing and the ethics of optimism. The rhetoric of magic in The Secret Garden and the insistence on imaginative resilience in A Little Princess sit within these broader currents of spiritualized self-help and reform-era moral psychology.

Turn-of-the-century Britain also experienced a horticultural renaissance. Writers like William Robinson promoted naturalistic planting, while designers such as Gertrude Jekyll championed color harmonies and garden rooms. Walled gardens, a feature of many estates, provided sheltered microclimates for fruit and flowers. Burnett rented Great Maytham Hall in Kent from 1898 to 1907; its walled garden has long been cited as inspiration for The Secret Garden. The novel’s careful attention to tools, seasons, and plant habits reflects a public steeped in gardening manuals and the Arts and Crafts sensibility, which prized handwork, intimate landscapes, and the restorative, orderly pleasures of cultivated nature.

Publishing history situates each work in a booming transatlantic market. Burnett’s Sara Crewe first appeared in St. Nicholas Magazine in 1888, a leading American children’s periodical, before being expanded into A Little Princess in 1905, with illustrations by Ethel Franklin Betts. The Secret Garden ran in The American Magazine in 1910 prior to its 1911 book editions, which featured artists such as Maria Louise Kirk (U.S.) and Charles Robinson (U.K.). Serialization encouraged episodic structure and wide circulation, while illustrated gift volumes targeted holiday buyers. Libraries, school prizes, and family read-alouds cemented these titles within middle-class domestic culture on both sides of the Atlantic.

Imperial economics and financial speculation pulse beneath A Little Princess. The late nineteenth century saw fortunes made and lost through colonial resource extraction, global shipping, and securities markets. The South African diamond boom began in the late 1860s; De Beers consolidated the industry by 1888, symbolizing empire-linked wealth. London served as a clearinghouse for mining shares and overseas ventures. The novel’s references to distant investments and glittering commodities resonate with that world of risk and promise, in which personal security could hinge on volatile markets, imperial concessions, and the credibility of business partners half a world away.

The period also witnessed growing attention to child welfare. Philanthropists such as Thomas Barnardo established homes for destitute children in the late nineteenth century, while the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) was founded in 1884–85. Britain’s Children Act of 1908—often called the Children’s Charter—created juvenile courts and strengthened protections against neglect. Both novels portray children’s vulnerability to adult decisions and institutional rules, reflecting wider anxieties about guardianship, moral upbringing, and the limits of charity. The emphasis on kindness, structured routine, and responsible authority aligns with reformers’ efforts to protect children within schools, households, and workplaces.

Burnett was a rare example of a woman earning a substantial livelihood through fiction. After emigrating to the United States in 1865, she supported family members by writing for periodicals and later by publishing bestselling novels and plays. Her public career unfolded amid debates over the New Woman, paid work for middle-class women, and appropriate female authority. Her heroines’ poise and initiative register these conversations about girls’ education and moral agency. While firmly within conventional proprieties, the novels suggest the capacities of young women to influence social environments, reflecting the era’s incremental opening of cultural and economic space for female ambition.

Regionalism and literary memory inflect The Secret Garden’s Yorkshire setting. Nineteenth-century readers associated the moors with the Brontës and with a romanticized ruggedness distinct from metropolitan life. By 1900, railway networks made northern landscapes accessible to tourists, yet they still carried connotations of remoteness and authenticity. The use of dialect and attention to local customs align with Victorian interest in folklore and philology, and with the realist impulse to situate characters within specific social geographies. The novel’s emphasis on wind, heather, and stone also echoes a long English tradition that linked moral clarity to elemental, northern environments.

Burnett’s career was shaped by transatlantic mobility. She settled with her family near Knoxville, Tennessee, in the 1860s, returned frequently to Britain, and lived for periods in Washington, D.C., and New York. She became a U.S. citizen in 1905. Steamship travel, cheap print, and the international copyright regime enabled authors to cultivate audiences in both nations. Burnett adapted works for the stage in London and New York, harnessing theatre’s publicity to boost book sales. This circulation fostered a shared Anglo-American children’s culture in which periodicals, school rooms, and drawing rooms exchanged stories, illustrations, and ideals of refinement and sympathy.

Reception histories diverged. Burnett dramatized Sara Crewe for the stage in 1902, and the expanded novel A Little Princess (1905) enjoyed steady popularity, especially in English-speaking schools. The Secret Garden, issued in 1911, was respectfully reviewed but comparatively muted in early sales; its reputation rose markedly in the mid-twentieth century as children’s librarians, educators, and later film and stage adaptations introduced it to new generations. Cinematic versions of both narratives—appearing from the silent era onward—reframed settings and emphasized spectacle, attesting to the enduring appeal of tales that juxtapose urban constraint with imaginative freedom and carefully tended spaces.

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers have approached these books with evolving critical lenses. Progressive educators found in them endorsements of play, fresh air, and the moral uses of imagination. Later psychological readings explored grief, attachment, and self-regulation. Ecocritical studies examined gardens as social ecosystems, connecting soil, climate, and care to community health. Disability scholars have discussed the period’s medical narratives and the rhetoric of cure. Postcolonial critics have analyzed the representation of India and servants, noting how imperial hierarchies shape language and opportunity. Such reinterpretations situate Burnett’s fiction within ongoing debates about authority, embodiment, and ethical attention.

Technological and artistic shifts inform the books’ visual worlds. The illustrated children’s volume matured in the late nineteenth century through advances in halftone reproduction and color printing, allowing magazines like St. Nicholas and gift editions of Burnett’s works to feature detailed plates. Artists such as Ethel Franklin Betts, Maria Louise Kirk, and Charles Robinson provided images that mediated class, costume, and setting for readers. This integration of text and image reflected a broader Edwardian aesthetic that favored ornament, domestic beauty, and scenes of everyday gentility—an aesthetic that harmonizes with Burnett’s emphasis on tidiness, dress, and the careful staging of rooms and gardens as moral environments.

Synopsis (Selection)

Table of Contents

The Secret Garden

After being sent to live at a sprawling, somber manor, a lonely child discovers a locked, neglected garden and the shadows of a household’s unspoken grief. As she tends the hidden space and forms unexpected friendships, the narrative follows a steady renewal of health, trust, and curiosity grounded in daily care and the rhythms of nature. The tone is quietly hopeful and restorative, highlighting a signature concern with how place, attention, and companionship can transform inner life.

A Little Princess

When a once-pampered student at a girls’ school loses her fortune, she is thrust from privilege into hardship under the same roof that once adored her. Sustained by imagination, courtesy, and moral resolve, she preserves her dignity and generosity, subtly reshaping the world around her even when she has little power. The story balances tenderness with sharp social observation, affirming the recurring theme that true worth is measured by character, empathy, and resilience rather than wealth.

A Little Princess & The Secret Garden (Unabridged)

Main Table of Contents

The Secret Garden

A Little Princess

The Secret Garden

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 There is No One Left

Chapter 2 Mistress Mary Quite Contrary

Chapter 3 Across the Moor

Chapter 4 Martha

Chapter 5 The Cry in the Corridor

Chapter 6 There was Some One Crying — There was!

Chapter 7 The Key of the Garden

Chapter 8 The Robin who Showed the Way

Chapter 9 The Strangest House Any One Ever Lived in

Chapter 10 Dickon

Chapter 11 The Nest of the Missel Thrush

Chapter 12 Might I have a Bit of Earth?

Chapter 13 I Am Colin

Chapter 14 A Young Rajah

Chapter 15 Nest Building

Chapter 16 I Won’t! Said Mary

Chapter 17 A Tantrum

Chapter 18 Tha’ Munnot Waste No Time

Chapter 19 It has Come!

Chapter 20 I Shall Live Forever — And Ever — AND EVER!

Chapter 21 Ben Weatherstaff

Chapter 22 When the Sun Went Down

Chapter 23 Magic

Chapter 24 Let Them Laugh

Chapter 25 The Curtain

Chapter 26 It’s Mother!

Chapter 27 In the Garden

Chapter 1

There is No One Left

Table of Contents

When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people. She had not wanted a little girl at all, and when Mary was born she handed her over to the care of an Ayah, who was made to understand that if she wished to please the Mem Sahib she must keep the child out of sight as much as possible. So when she was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby she was kept out of the way, and when she became a sickly, fretful, toddling thing she was kept out of the way also. She never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the other native servants, and as they always obeyed her and gave her her own way in everything, because the Mem Sahib would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying, by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived. The young English governess who came to teach her to read and write disliked her so much that she gave up her place in three months, and when other governesses came to try to fill it they always went away in a shorter time than the first one. So if Mary had not chosen to really want to know how to read books she would never have learned her letters at all.

One frightfully hot morning, when she was about nine years old, she awakened feeling very cross, and she became crosser still when she saw that the servant who stood by her bedside was not her Ayah.

Why did you come? she said to the strange woman. I will not let you stay. Send my Ayah to me.

The woman looked frightened, but she only stammered that the Ayah could not come and when Mary threw herself into a passion and beat and kicked her, she looked only more frightened and repeated that it was not possible for the Ayah to come to Missie Sahib.

There was something mysterious in the air that morning. Nothing was done in its regular order and several of the native servants seemed missing, while those whom Mary saw slunk or hurried about with ashy and scared faces. But no one would tell her anything and her Ayah did not come. She was actually left alone as the morning went on, and at last she wandered out into the garden and began to play by herself under a tree near the veranda. She pretended that she was making a flower-bed, and she stuck big scarlet hibiscus blossoms into little heaps of earth, all the time growing more and more angry and muttering to herself the things she would say and the names she would call Saidie when she returned.

Pig! Pig! Daughter of Pigs! she said, because to call a native a pig is the worst insult of all.

She was grinding her teeth and saying this over and over again when she heard her mother come out on the veranda with some one. She was with a fair young man and they stood talking together in low strange voices. Mary knew the fair young man who looked like a boy. She had heard that he was a very young officer who had just come from England. The child stared at him, but she stared most at her mother. She always did this when she had a chance to see her, because the Mem Sahib — Mary used to call her that oftener than anything else — was such a tall, slim, pretty person and wore such lovely clothes. Her hair was like curly silk and she had a delicate little nose which seemed to be disdaining things, and she had large laughing eyes. All her clothes were thin and floating, and Mary said they were full of lace. They looked fuller of lace than ever this morning, but her eyes were not laughing at all. They were large and scared and lifted imploringly to the fair boy officer’s face.

Is it so very bad? Oh, is it? Mary heard her say.

Awfully, the young man answered in a trembling voice. Awfully, Mrs. Lennox. You ought to have gone to the hills two weeks ago.

The Mem Sahib wrung her hands.

Oh, I know I ought! she cried. I only stayed to go to that silly dinner party. What a fool I was!

At that very moment such a loud sound of wailing broke out from the servants’ quarters that she clutched the young man’s arm, and Mary stood shivering from head to foot. The wailing grew wilder and wilder.

What is it? What is it? Mrs. Lennox gasped.

Some one has died, answered the boy officer. You did not say it had broken out among your servants.

I did not know! the Mem Sahib cried. Come with me! Come with me! and she turned and ran into the house.

After that appalling things happened, and the mysteriousness of the morning was explained to Mary. The cholera had broken out in its most fatal form and people were dying like flies. The Ayah had been taken ill in the night, and it was because she had just died that the servants had wailed in the huts. Before the next day three other servants were dead and others had run away in terror. There was panic on every side, and dying people in all the bungalows.

During the confusion and bewilderment of the second day Mary hid herself in the nursery and was forgotten by every one. Nobody thought of her, nobody wanted her, and strange things happened of which she knew nothing. Mary alternately cried and slept through the hours. She only knew that people were ill and that she heard mysterious and frightening sounds. Once she crept into the dining-room and found it empty, though a partly finished meal was on the table and chairs and plates looked as if they had been hastily pushed back when the diners rose suddenly for some reason. The child ate some fruit and biscuits, and being thirsty she drank a glass of wine which stood nearly filled. It was sweet, and she did not know how strong it was. Very soon it made her intensely drowsy, and she went back to her nursery and shut herself in again, frightened by cries she heard in the huts and by the hurrying sound of feet. The wine made her so sleepy that she could scarcely keep her eyes open and she lay down on her bed and knew nothing more for a long time.

Many things happened during the hours in which she slept so heavily, but she was not disturbed by the wails and the sound of things being carried in and out of the bungalow.

When she awakened she lay and stared at the wall. The house was perfectly still. She had never known it to be so silent before. She heard neither voices nor footsteps, and wondered if everybody had got well of the cholera and all the trouble was over. She wondered also who would take care of her now her Ayah was dead. There would be a new Ayah, and perhaps she would know some new stories. Mary had been rather tired of the old ones. She did not cry because her nurse had died. She was not an affectionate child and had never cared much for any one. The noise and hurrying about and wailing over the cholera had frightened her, and she had been angry because no one seemed to remember that she was alive. Every one was too panic-stricken to think of a little girl no one was fond of. When people had the cholera it seemed that they remembered nothing but themselves. But if every one had got well again, surely some one would remember and come to look for her.

But no one came, and as she lay waiting the house seemed to grow more and more silent. She heard something rustling on the matting and when she looked down she saw a little snake gliding along and watching her with eyes like jewels. She was not frightened, because he was a harmless little thing who would not hurt her and he seemed in a hurry to get out of the room. He slipped under the door as she watched him.

How queer and quiet it is, she said. It sounds as if there was no one in the bungalow but me and the snake.

Almost the next minute she heard footsteps in the compound, and then on the veranda. They were men’s footsteps, and the men entered the bungalow and talked in low voices. No one went to meet or speak to them and they seemed to open doors and look into rooms.

What desolation! she heard one voice say. That pretty, pretty woman! I suppose the child, too. I heard there was a child, though no one ever saw her.

Mary was standing in the middle of the nursery when they opened the door a few minutes later. She looked an ugly, cross little thing and was frowning because she was beginning to be hungry and feel disgracefully neglected. The first man who came in was a large officer she had once seen talking to her father. He looked tired and troubled, but when he saw her he was so startled that he almost jumped back.

Barney! he cried out. There is a child here! A child alone! In a place like this! Mercy on us, who is she!

I am Mary Lennox, the little girl said, drawing herself up stiffly. She thought the man was very rude to call her father’s bungalow A place like this! I fell asleep when every one had the cholera and I have only just wakened up. Why does nobody come?

It is the child no one ever saw! exclaimed the man, turning to his companions. She has actually been forgotten!

Why was I forgotten? Mary said, stamping her foot. Why does nobody come?

The young man whose name was Barney looked at her very sadly. Mary even thought she saw him wink his eyes as if to wink tears away.

Poor little kid! he said. There is nobody left to come.

It was in that strange and sudden way that Mary found out that she had neither father nor mother left; that they had died and been carried away in the night, and that the few native servants who had not died also had left the house as quickly as they could get out of it, none of them even remembering that there was a Missie Sahib. That was why the place was so quiet. It was true that there was no one in the bungalow but herself and the little rustling snake.

Chapter 2

Mistress Mary Quite Contrary

Table of Contents

Mary had liked to look at her mother from a distance and she had thought her very pretty, but as she knew very little of her she could scarcely have been expected to love her or to miss her very much when she was gone. She did not miss her at all, in fact, and as she was a self-absorbed child she gave her entire thought to herself, as she had always done. If she had been older she would no doubt have been very anxious at being left alone in the world, but she was very young, and as she had always been taken care of, she supposed she always would be. What she thought was that she would like to know if she was going to nice people, who would be polite to her and give her her own way as her Ayah and the other native servants had done.

She knew that she was not going to stay at the English clergyman’s house where she was taken at first. She did not want to stay. The English clergyman was poor and he had five children nearly all the same age and they wore shabby clothes and were always quarreling and snatching toys from each other. Mary hated their untidy bungalow and was so disagreeable to them that after the first day or two nobody would play with her. By the second day they had given her a nickname which made her furious.

It was Basil who thought of it first. Basil was a little boy with impudent blue eyes and a turned-up nose and Mary hated him. She was playing by herself under a tree, just as she had been playing the day the cholera broke out. She was making heaps of earth and paths for a garden and Basil came and stood near to watch her. Presently he got rather interested and suddenly made a suggestion.

Why don’t you put a heap of stones there and pretend it is a rockery? he said. There in the middle, and he leaned over her to point.

Go away! cried Mary. I don’t want boys. Go away!

For a moment Basil looked angry, and then he began to tease. He was always teasing his sisters. He danced round and round her and made faces and sang and laughed.

"Mistress Mary, quite contrary,

How does your garden grow?

With silver bells, and cockle shells,

And marigolds all in a row."

He sang it until the other children heard and laughed, too; and the crosser Mary got, the more they sang Mistress Mary, quite contrary; and after that as long as she stayed with them they called her Mistress Mary Quite Contrary when they spoke of her to each other, and often when they spoke to her.

You are going to be sent home, Basil said to her, at the end of the week. And we’re glad of it.

I am glad of it, too, answered Mary. Where is home?

She doesn’t know where home is! said Basil, with seven-year-old scorn. It’s England, of course. Our grandmama lives there and our sister Mabel was sent to her last year. You are not going to your grandmama. You have none. You are going to your uncle. His name is Mr. Archibald Craven.

I don’t know anything about him, snapped Mary.

I know you don’t, Basil answered. You don’t know anything. Girls never do. I heard father and mother talking about him. He lives in a great, big, desolate old house in the country and no one goes near him. He’s so cross he won’t let them, and they wouldn’t come if he would let them. He’s a hunchback, and he’s horrid.

I don’t believe you, said Mary; and she turned her back and stuck her fingers in her ears, because she would not listen any more.

But she thought over it a great deal afterward; and when Mrs. Crawford told her that night that she was going to sail away to England in a few days and go to her uncle, Mr. Archibald Craven, who lived at Misselthwaite Manor, she looked so stony and stubbornly uninterested that they did not know what to think about her. They tried to be kind to her, but she only turned her face away when Mrs. Crawford attempted to kiss her, and held herself stiffly when Mr. Crawford patted her shoulder.

She is such a plain child, Mrs. Crawford said pityingly, afterward. And her mother was such a pretty creature. She had a very pretty manner, too, and Mary has the most unattractive ways I ever saw in a child. The children call her ‘Mistress Mary Quite Contrary,’ and though it’s naughty of them, one can’t help understanding it.

Perhaps if her mother had carried her pretty face and her pretty manners oftener into the nursery Mary might have learned some pretty ways too. It is very sad, now the poor beautiful thing is gone, to remember that many people never even knew that she had a child at all.

I believe she scarcely ever looked at her, sighed Mrs. Crawford. When her Ayah was dead there was no one to give a thought to the little thing. Think of the servants running away and leaving her all alone in that deserted bungalow. Colonel McGrew said he nearly jumped out of his skin when he opened the door and found her standing by herself in the middle of the room.

Mary made the long voyage to England under the care of an officer’s wife, who was taking her children to leave them in a boarding-school. She was very much absorbed in her own little boy and girl, and was rather glad to hand the child over to the woman Mr. Archibald Craven sent to meet her, in London. The woman was his housekeeper at Misselthwaite Manor, and her name was Mrs. Medlock. She was a stout woman, with very red cheeks and sharp black eyes. She wore a very purple dress, a black silk mantle with jet fringe on it and a black bonnet with purple velvet flowers which stuck up and trembled when she moved her head. Mary did not like her at all, but as she very seldom liked people there was nothing remarkable in that; besides which it was very evident Mrs. Medlock did not think much of her.

My word! she’s a plain little piece of goods! she said. And we’d heard that her mother was a beauty. She hasn’t handed much of it down, has she, ma’am?

Perhaps she will improve as she grows older, the officer’s wife said good-naturedly. If she were not so sallow and had a nicer expression, her features are rather good. Children alter so much.

She’ll have to alter a good deal, answered Mrs. Medlock. And there’s nothing likely to improve children at Misselthwaite — if you ask me!

They thought Mary was not listening because she was standing a little apart from them at the window of the private hotel they had gone to. She was watching the passing buses and cabs, and people, but she heard quite well and was made very curious about her uncle and the place he lived in. What sort of a place was it, and what would he be like? What was a hunchback? She had never seen one. Perhaps there were none in India.

Since she had been living in other people’s houses and had had no Ayah, she had begun to feel lonely and to think queer thoughts which were new to her. She had begun to wonder why she had never seemed to belong to any one even when her father and mother had been alive. Other children seemed to belong to their fathers and mothers, but she had never seemed to really be any one’s little girl. She had had servants, and food and clothes, but no one had taken any notice of her. She did not know that this was because she was a disagreeable child; but then, of course, she did not know she was disagreeable. She often thought that other people were, but she did not know that she was so herself.

She thought Mrs. Medlock the most disagreeable person she had ever seen, with her common, highly colored face and her common fine bonnet. When the next day they set out on their journey to Yorkshire, she walked through the station to the railway carriage with her head up and trying to keep as far away from her as she could, because she did not want to seem to belong to her. It would have made her very angry to think people imagined she was her little girl.

But Mrs. Medlock was not in the least disturbed by her and her thoughts. She was the kind of woman who would stand no nonsense from young ones. At least, that is what she would have said if she had been asked. She had not wanted to go to London just when her sister Maria’s daughter was going to be married, but she had a comfortable, well paid place as housekeeper at Misselthwaite Manor and the only way in which she could keep it was to do at once what Mr. Archibald Craven told her to do. She never dared even to ask a question.

Captain Lennox and his wife died of the cholera, Mr. Craven had said in his short, cold way. Captain Lennox was my wife’s brother and I am their daughter’s guardian. The child is to be brought here. You must go to London and bring her yourself.

So she packed her small trunk and made the journey.

Mary sat in her corner of the railway carriage and looked plain and fretful. She had nothing to read or to look at, and she had folded her thin little black-gloved hands in her lap. Her black dress made her look yellower than ever, and her limp light hair straggled from under her black crêpe hat.

A more marred-looking young one I never saw in my life, Mrs. Medlock thought. (Marred is a Yorkshire word and means spoiled and pettish.) She had never seen a child who sat so still without doing anything; and at last she got tired of watching her and began to talk in a brisk, hard voice.

I suppose I may as well tell you something about where you are going to, she said. Do you know anything about your uncle?

No, said Mary.

Never heard your father and mother talk about him?

No, said Mary frowning. She frowned because she remembered that her father and mother had never talked to her about anything in particular. Certainly they had never told her things.

Humph, muttered Mrs. Medlock, staring at her queer, unresponsive little face. She did not say any more for a few moments and then she began again.

I suppose you might as well be told something — to prepare you. You are going to a queer place.

Mary said nothing at all, and Mrs. Medlock looked rather discomfited by her apparent indifference, but, after taking a breath, she went on.

"Not but that it’s a grand big place in a gloomy way, and Mr.