Burnett, Frances Hodgson | “If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”

Property from the Workman Collection

Burnett, Frances Hodgson

The Secret Garden. New York, Frederick A. Stokes, 1911

8vo (187 x 123 mm). Half-title, pictorial frontispiece with 3 additional pictorial plates by M. L. Kirk. Publisher's green cloth with color illustration laid down to upper board, spine lettered in gilt. In custom slipcase. 

First edition—an exceptional copy of the scarce first printing (with "August 1911" on the copyright page).

“At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done—then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.”

First serialized in The American Magazine between November 1910 and August 1911, The Secret Garden was one of the first examples of a narrative for children being first published in a magazine with an adult readership. Influenced by Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Burnett's classic novel addresses many mature themes such as male privilege and postcolonialism. 

An exemplary copy of an enduring classic.