Mary Lennox loses her parents to the plauge of Cholerea, she gets shipped to live with her uncle

who is usually not home in his mansion. She learns of a secret garden her uncle once loved but now hates. She makes friends with her maid,Martha. and hears a lot about her family she is particularly interested in her Marthas younger brother, at his talent of charming animals as Martha addresses it. Mary is interested and is determined to find the secret garden. When she goes into the mansions garden, she meets the mansion gardener,Ben Weatherstaf, she is very determined to find the secret garden hat she had learned about from Martha. Will Mary find the secret garden? Will she find out why her uncle despised the garden so much? \ The writers style of writing is very interesting,. The way she writes is very long-winded, but in writing this way, she grips the reader with suspense. The book while trying to keep to the main idea, has quite a few extras which mean not only does the plot get revealed, but it unravels so slowly that by the time you finally put the book down, you would have read the last word. The writer makes you feel that when you read this book, you are not just flipping through pinted pages filled with words, but actually in the story itself

The author, Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in Manchester, England on 24th November 1849. although she was born English, Frances took up an American citizenship in New York. In the first years of her life she lived in he Victorian slums of Manchester along with her mother, four other siblings and herself. Sadly her father died in 1854 when she was only five years old making it even harder for her mother to support her family in 1865 hteir family emigrated to Knoxville, Tennessee thus becoming an American citizen. married Dr. Swan Burnett of Washington, D.C. in 1873. but she divorced him. She later re-married, this time to Stephen Townsend (1900), her business manager. Her second marriage would last less than two years, ending in 1902. Her books were mostly on childrens literature and fantasy.

She was also known for writing Her first novel, That Lass o' Lowrie's, was published in 1877 and was a story of Lancashire life. After moving with her husband to Washington, D.C., Burnett wrote the novels Haworth's (1879), Louisiana (1880), A Fair Barbarian (1881), and Through One Administration (1883), as well as a play, Esmeralda (1881), written with William Gillette. In 1886 she published Little Lord Fauntleroy. It was originally intended as a children's book, but had a great appeal to mothers. It created a fashion of long curls (based on her son Vivian's) and velvet suits with lace collars (based on Oscar Wilde's attire), which became a stereotypical image for 'rich kids' for years (see Robert Redford's film, 'The Candidate' (1972) for a typical example). The book sold more than half a million copies. In 1888 she

won a lawsuit in England over the dramatic rights to Little Lord Fauntleroy, establishing a precedent that was incorporated into British copyright law in 1911. In 1898 she divorced Dr. Burnett. She later re-married, this time to Stephen Townsend (1900), her business manager. Her second marriage would last less than two years, ending in 1902. Her later works include Sara Crewe (1888), later rewritten as A Little Princess (1905); The Lady of Quality (1896), considered one of the best of her plays; and The Secret Garden (1911), the children's novel for which she is probably best known today. The Lost Prince was published in 1915, and The Head of the House of Coombe was published in Canada in 1922. The Making of a Marchioness was published in 1911 and was one of Nancy Mitford's favorite books, mentioned in Love in a Cold Climate.[4] In 1893 she published a memoir of her youth, The One I Knew Best of All. From the mid1890s she lived mainly in England, and in particular at Great Maytham Hall (from 1897 to 1907) where she really did discover a secret garden, but in 1909 she moved back to the United States, after having become a U.S. citizen in 1905.