After the death of her parents, the neglected and spoiled Mary Lennox is sent to her uncle's large and lonely house on the Yorkshire Moors. There she discovers a secret garden and with the help of her strange, animal-charming friend Dickon, not only restored the garden but in the process transforms herself from a sullen, unhappy child to an unselfish, happy one, and helps to cure her sick cousin and to rehabilitate his gloomy, grief-stricken father. Frances Hodgson Burnett's passionate belief in the redemptive forces of renewal is shown nowhere more clearly than in The Secret Garden, her most sensitive and popular children's novel. First published in 1911, it lies in the best tradition of the family story developed by such writers as E. Nesbit in Top page Britain and Louisa M.Alcott and Susan Coolidge in America.