ITALKED TO my twenty-four-year-old daughter the other day, and I asked her whether, when she was younger, she had ever read The Secret Garden. I remembered her bedroom from those years, strewn with dirty jeans, the petrified remains of peanut-butter sandwiches, and books about untamable horses, girl detectives, and complicated civilizations on distant planets. But I didn't remember her reading The Secret Garden.

Few children's classics can match the charm and originality of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, the unforgettable story of sullen, sulky Mary Lennox, "the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen." When a cholera epidemic leaves her an orphan, Mary is sent to England to live with her reclusive uncle, Archibald Craven, at Misselthwaite Manor. Unloved and unloving, Mary wanders the desolate moors until one day she chances upon the door of a secret garden. What follows is one of the most beautiful tales of transformation in children's literature, as Mary, her sickly and tyrannical cousin Colin, and a peasant boy named Dickon secretly strive to make the garden bloom once more.

A unique blend of realism and magic, The Secret Garden remains a moving expression of every child's need to nurture and be nurtured--a story that has captured for all time the rare and enchanted world of childhood.