Contemplating "Queerness" in Anglo-American Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Children's Books: The Case of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars have argued that Frances Hodgson Burnett uses the secret garden of her most famous novel, The Secret Garden , as a place for children to be liberated from gendered expectations in order to later assume and uphold those expectations. Yet, queerness is idealized in Burnett's novel, which suggests that a "queer" child is a singular character, uniquely chosen for the agenda of the plot. Using The Secret Garden as a case study in Victorian notions of queerness, I make connections between the novel and other fictions of the period to understand shifting ideas about childhood development.