I love to kneel down in the grass at the edge of a flowerbed and pull out the weeds fiercely and throw them into a heap by my side. I love to fight with those who can spring up again almost in a night and taunt me. I tear them up by the roots again and again (p. 20).

For Frances Hodgson Burnett, as for her creation Mary Lennox, gardening was a consolation for disappointment and loss, a means of imposing order, an enactment of hope: “As long as one has a garden one has a future, and if one has a future one is alive” (In the Garden, p. 30).

Writing, like weeding, was a defense against painful memories. In The Secret Garden, Burnett recreates and immortalizes her beloved garden at Maytham, complete with its friendly robin, and uses it as a setting in which to revisit and repair some of her own life’s sorrows and dislocations. A pet lamb reappears in the company of Dickon the “animal charmer” (p. 122) and is bottle-fed by the spoiled invalid, Colin, who thereby initiates the process of his emotional and physical recovery through contact with the natural world. Colin shares his pallid face and luminous “agate-grey” (p. 100) eyes with Burnett’s son, Lionel. Unlike the unfortunate Lionel, however, he leaves behind his couch and wheelchair to greet his father, in the final chapter, as a perfectly healthy child. Colin’s cousin Mary, orphaned in India, must learn, like the young Frances Hodgson, to adapt to a new country and unfamiliar customs. Unlike Frances, who shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic through most of her life and dreamed of a permanent home at Maytham, Mary puts down roots in her rose garden at Misselthwaite Manor. The characters in The Secret Garden enact a fantasy of healing and integration in which a dying boy recovers and a lonely girl discovers her true home. In Burnett’s fairy tale the children owe their triumph not to a golden goose or a fairy godmother but to a new kind of magic derived from nature, healthy exercise, and positive thinking, all sources of comfort to Frances herself in later life.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James, brother of Burnett’s friend Henry, describes a new and uniquely American contribution to religious thought and practice that he calls “the religion of healthy-mindedness.” The basis of the movement, also known as the “new thought,” was a belief in the power of the human mind and the ability of faith to influence events in the physical world. Attributing the rise of this philosophy to the “extremely practical turn of character of the American people,” James observes:

The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind (p. 88).

Noting that practitioners claim remarkable effects on their physical health, he records that “one hears of ... people who repeat to themselves, ‘Youth, health, vigor!’ when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day” (p. 88). This late-nineteenth-century meld of religion and therapy, with roots in the writings of, among others, Swedenborg and Emerson, found expression in a range of spiritual and self-help movements from Christian Science to Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 classic The Power of Positive Thinking. Christian Science, a sect founded in 1866 by Mary Baker Eddy, claimed that physical illness was illusory and could be cured by right mental attitudes and a true understanding of the scriptures. Among those who were profoundly affected by the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy were Frances Hodgson Burnett and her son Vivian. Unlike her son, Frances never formally embraced Christian Science, but, as Vivian Burnett observed in The Romantick Lady, his 1927 biography of his mother, “her method of thought, consciously or unconsciously, was influenced importantly by what she learned from Christian Science” (p. 376). Although we may question Vivian’s specific claim that The Secret Garden “is generally credited with being a Christian Science book” (p. 377), the novel is certainly a devout testament of the Jamesian “religion of healthy-mindedness.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett first encountered the new theories of “metaphysical” healing in 1885 when her friend Louisa M. Alcott, author of Little Women, persuaded her to seek treatment for nervous exhaustion from Mrs. Newman, a leading practitioner of the so-called Boston Mind Cure. Burnett was so impressed by Newman that she stayed in Boston for a month under her care. Later in her life, after the best European doctors proved unable to cure her son Lionel of tuberculosis, she turned increasingly to alternative healers.