At the time Burnett began working on The Secret Garden, she had already established a literary reputation as a writer of children's fiction and social realist adult fiction.[14] She had started writing children's fiction in the 1880s, with her most notable book at the time being her sentimental novel Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886).[15] Little Lord Fauntleroy was a "literary sensation" in both the United States and Europe, and sold hundreds of thousands of copies.[14] Prior to The Secret Garden, she had also written another notable work of children's fiction, A Little Princess (1905), which had begun as a story published in the American children's magazine St. Nicholas Magazine in 1887 and was later adapted as a play in 1902.[16]
Little is known about the literary development and conception of The Secret Garden.[17] Biographers and other scholars have been able to glean the details of Burnett's process and thoughts on her other books through her letters to family members; during the time she was working on The Secret Garden, however, she was living near to them and thus did not need to send them letters.[17] Burnett started the novel in spring 1909, as she was making plans for the garden at her home in Plandome on Long Island.[18] In an October 1910 letter to William Heinemann, her publisher in England, she described the story, whose working title was Mistress Mary, as "an innocent thriller of a story" that she considered "one of [her] best finds".[19] Biographer Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina offers several explanations as to why there is so little surviving information on the book's development. Firstly, Burnett's health faltered after moving to her home in Plandome, and her social excursions became limited as a result. Secondly, her existing notes about The Secret Garden, along with a portrait of her and some photographs, were donated by her son Vivian after her death to a lower Manhattan public school serving the deaf in remembrance of her visit there years previously, but all the items soon vanished from the archive of the school. Lastly, a few weeks before the novel's publication, her brother-in-law died in a collision with a trolley, an event that likely darkened the novel's publication.[20]
Burnett's story My Robin, however, offers a glimpse of the creation of The Secret Garden.[21] In it, she addresses a reader's question on the literary origins of the robin that appears in The Secret Garden, whom the reader felt "could not have been a mere creature of fantasy".[22] Burnett reminisces on her friendship with the real-life English robin, whom she described as "a person—not a mere bird" and who often kept her company in the rose garden where she would often write, when she lived at Maytham Hall.[22] Recounting the first time she tried to communicate with the bird via "low, soft, little sounds", she writes that she "knew—years later—that this is what Mistress Mary thought when she bent down in the Long Walk and 'tried to make robin sounds'".[23]
Maytham Hall in Kent, England, where Burnett lived for a number of years during her marriage, is often cited as the inspiration for the book's setting.[24] Biographer Ann Thwaite writes that while the rose garden at Mayham Hall may have been "crucial" to the novel's development, Maytham Hall and Misselthwaite Manor are physically very different.[24] Thwaite suggests that, for the setting of The Secret Garden, Burnett may have been inspired by the moors of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, given that Burnett only went once to Yorkshire, to Fryston Hall.[25] She writes that Burnett may have also taken inspiration from Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre, noting parallels between the two narratives: both of them, for example, feature orphans sent to "mysterious mansions", whose master is largely absent.[26] Burnett herself was aware of the similarities, remarking in a letter that Ella Hepworth Dixon had described it as a children's version of Jane Eyre.[19]
Scholar Gretchen V. Rector has examined the author's manuscript of The Secret Garden, which she describes as "the only record of the novel's development".[27] Eighty of the first hundred pages of the manuscript are written in black ink, while the rest and subsequent revisions were made in pencil; the spelling and punctuation tend to follow the American standard. Chapter headings were included prior to the novel's serialization and are not present in the manuscript, with chapters in it delineated by numbers only.[28] The pagination of the manuscript was likely done by a second person: it goes from 1 to 234, only to restart at the nineteenth chapter.[28] From the title page, Rector surmises that the novel's first title was Mary, Mary quite Contrary, later changed to its working title of Mistress Mary.[27] Mary herself is originally nine in the manuscript, only to be aged up a year in a revision, perhaps to highlight the "convergent paths" of Mary, Colin, and the garden itself; however, this revision was not reflected in either the British or the American first editions of the novel, or in later editions.[29] Susan Sowerby is initially introduced to the readers as a deceased character, with her daughter Martha perhaps intended to fill her role in the story; Burnett, however, changed her mind about Susan Sowerby, writing her as a living character a few pages later and crossing out the announcement of her death.[30] Additionally, Dickon in the manuscript was physically disabled and used crutches to move around, perhaps drawing on Burnett's recollections of her first husband, Dr. Swan Burnett, and his physical disability. Burnett later removed references to Dickon's disability.[31]
