Metamorphosis In Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden

The early 19th and 20th century were known as the “Golden Age of Children's Literature''. Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, A.A Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, J.R.R Tolkien's The Hobbit, Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden ushered in a tremendous growth in children’s literature. Katharine Jones “recasts ‘children’s literature’ as ‘childs literature’ in order to include readers who are no longer in childhood within its sphere” (Waller,2020,p.7). These books and their characters are retained in the memory of every individual for a long time and has a great impact in our lives. The Secret Garden by Francis Hodgson Burnett is a remarkable work of art for its explication of the bildungsroman concept. In 1986, Faith McNulty, The New Yorker’s children’s book editor, argued that “[t]here is hardly a literate female alive who hasn’t read and loved it” (Kummerling and Muller, 2019, p.158) and emphasizes the beauty in brunette’s novel. Burnett grabs the attention of the children as well as the adult readers who recall their childhood memories. Burnett records the slow gradual and steady progress that took place in the character of Mary and Colin.