The Secret Garden
A disagreeable girl is sent to live in a large house on the Yorkshire moors, finds a locked garden and a sick cousin, and begins to bring both back to life. Burnett wrote it in 1911, and it has been adapted so often that the plot feels older than it is.
The book's ideas about health and fresh air are period pieces, and some of its attitudes to class and disability have not aged well. What still works is the physicality of the garden and the honesty about how unpleasant children can be before they are given something to do.
Public-domain status
First published in 1911. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Frances Hodgson Burnett died in 1924, so this work has been free to republish there since 1995.
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Keep reading
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