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This article contains spoilers for the new Secret Garden.
Usually it’s Frances Hodgson Burnett’s other book about a rich little orphan girl, A Little Princess, that gets a major plot shake-up when being adapted for the screen. But it’s the author’s 1911 novel, The Secret Garden, in which Mary Lennox discovers a hidden garden after being sent to live with her uncle in England, that gets overhauled in a new movie directed by Marc Munden. Unlike previous, much more faithful adaptations, this Secret Garden has a screenplay by Jack Thorne, the English screenwriter and playwright behind everything from HBO’s His Dark Materials to Broadway’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, that makes significant alterations to the source material, changing the time period and characters, and even inventing a new, dramatic climax. We break down the biggest changes below.
Time Period
The book The Secret Garden was first published serially in 1910, and its inciting incident—a cholera outbreak in India that kills Mary’s parents—suggests that it is set even earlier, around the turn of the century. The new movie explicitly announces its own distinct setting at the very beginning, transporting the action decades later, to 1947, “the eve of Partition between India and Pakistan.” As in the book, Mary (Dixie Egerickx) is the daughter of a British officer stationed in India, but the end of British rule in the region changes the context of newly orphaned Mary leaving the country: It’s not just her but a whole ship full of white British children who are being sent away.
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The new time period also comes with some changes to the story’s location. “We are fully electric,” announces housekeeper Mrs. Medlock (Julie Walters) proudly when Mary arrives at her new home in Yorkshire, Misselthwaite Manor, which Mary also learns served as an army base during the war.
Mary Lennox
The Mary Lennox of Burnett’s book is described as being “as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived.” During her 10 years living in India, she was the very worst combination of neglected and spoiled, ignored by her parents but waited on by a staff of servants she does not see as people and abuses without consequence. She loves no one and is loved by no one. She is indifferent when her ayah, the woman who takes care of her, dies, and when she learns her parents have died too, she isn’t sad or afraid, wondering only whether her new home will have servants to wait on her. Other children call her “Mistress Mary, quite contrary” and adults compare her to an old woman, noting—often to her face—how bitter, plain-looking, and thin she is.
The movie’s Mary is a much more conventional young heroine from the get-go. She’s spoiled, yes, but she’s also an imaginative, curious, playful little girl who puts on puppet shows about Hindu gods for her doll and cries out for her parents when she realizes she’s been left alone on their estate. It’s not until after they die that she turns hard and cold, throwing her doll into the ocean and insisting, as she heard another boy on the ship do, that she’s “not a child.
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