The Secret Garden

An orphan sent from India to a Yorkshire house of a hundred locked rooms finds a walled garden nobody has entered for ten years, and a boy nobody is allowed to see. Burnett wrote it late, after her own son's death and her turn to spiritualism and Christian Science, and the healing in it is meant literally. The robin, the moor and Dickon are what everyone remembers; the book is actually about two thoroughly unpleasant children. Ninety-eight plates of farmyards, cottages and quiet domestic work, from Bevan to Gilman, keep the Yorkshire of the story close at hand.