Book title : The Secret Garden
Author : France Eliza Hodgson Burnett
Retold by : Clare West
Illustrated by : Jenny Brackley
Publishing hourse : Oxford University Press
The novel belongs to a series named "Oxford Bookworms Library".
This simplified edition was published on 2000.
This story talks about a little girl, Mary Lennox. She originally born and lived in India. Her parents were always busy with their own things, and only her servants kept company with her. It seemed that nobody cared about her. But when her parents died of a serious disease, she was sent back to England to live her uncle's home in Yorkshire. Mary primarily never thought about other people, but only herself. In fact, she was bad-tempered, selfish and disagreeable. When Mary move to her uncle's house, which is big, old and full of many secret. She met some people, and the way they treat her is different from those she used to know. Mary began to adapt to the life in Yorkshire, and at the same time she was learning and changing little by little. After she found the secret garden's key and entered it to take care of plants there, she also found that the child, who often cried in the night, is Colin, her uncle's son. Mary and Dickon, who she made friend with in Yorkshire, helped ill poor Colin get out to breath fresh air and took him to the secret garden. They had much happy time in the garden. In the end, because of Mary and Dickon's help, Colin became health, and found back the love between he and his father.
The author, France Eliza Hodgson Burnett, was born in England in 1849. When she was sixteen, her family moved to USA, and made their home in Knoxville, Tennessee. There, she began to write stories for magazines, and after marrying in 1873, she went on writing stories for both adults and children. "Little Lord Fauntleroy" in 1886, made her famous, and in 1905 came another book , "A Little Princess". "The Secret Garden" came out in 1910. By that time Burnett had two homes ─ a house in Kent, in the south of England, and a house on Long Island in USA, where she died in 1924. Today, most people think "The Secret Garden" is Burnett's best book. In this story the children are more like real children ─ they are selfish and disagreeable, they shout and get angry, they learn and change. The idea for this book came to Burnett from the old rose garden at her home in Kent, where she made friends, like Mary in the story, with a robin that came to take bread from her hand.The story is still a great favourite with children, who love the idea of a secret place that adult do not know about. And this story had been adapted to movie many times.
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