The Story in Brief
Mary Lennox is a spoiled, unloved child orphaned by a cholera epidemic in India and sent to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven at Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire moors. She is disagreeable, lonely, and entirely unaccustomed to being ignored. In the grounds of the estate she discovers a locked garden that has been sealed for ten years — and in restoring it she restores herself, her sickly cousin Colin, and eventually her uncle.
Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 novel is one of the great children's books in the English language and a serious work about grief, recovery, and the therapeutic power of living things. Marc Munden's 2020 adaptation, with a screenplay by Jack Thorne, stars Dixie Egerickx as Mary, Edan Hayhurst as Colin, and Colin Firth as the grieving Archibald Craven. The film was released during the pandemic and received mixed reviews — praised for its visual inventiveness and criticized for its compressed emotional arcs.
The novel has never been out of print and remains a foundational text in children's literature, influencing generations of writers interested in psychological realism and the relationship between environment and wellbeing.
| Character | In the Book | In the The Movie |
|---|---|---|
| Mary Lennox Dixie Egerickx |
Begins as genuinely unpleasant — selfish, imperious, and incapable of empathy — and changes slowly through months of outdoor work and genuine effort. | More immediately sympathetic, with her difficult behavior framed as trauma response rather than character flaw, making her transformation quicker and less psychologically complex. |
| Colin Craven Edan Hayhurst |
A theatrical, self-pitying invalid who has been told he's dying and believes it — his recovery is gradual, stubborn, and one of the novel's central psychological studies. | His arc is compressed significantly, with his transformation from bedridden hypochondriac to healthy boy happening more abruptly than Burnett's careful process allows. |
| Dickon Sowerby Amir Wilson |
A Yorkshire boy who speaks to animals and embodies wholesome outdoor vitality — rendered in rich dialect and given substantial presence as Mary's guide to the natural world. | Warm and appealing but somewhat marginalised in the adaptation, with less screen time and less of the novel's emphasis on his connection to the moors. |
| Archibald Craven Colin Firth |
A distant, grief-stricken figure who has sealed the garden after his wife's death and largely absents himself from the narrative until the quiet ending. | Given a more central role in the film's climax, with Firth delivering a melancholy performance that brings adult emotion more prominently into the resolution. |
| Mrs. Medlock Julie Walters |
The stern housekeeper who enforces the rules of Misselthwaite and represents the household's emotional repression. | Walters brings warmth and authority to the role, maintaining the character's strictness while making her more sympathetic than Burnett's colder portrayal. |
Key Differences
Mary's transformation is slower and less sympathetic in the book
The novel's Mary begins as genuinely unpleasant — selfish, imperious, accustomed to being served and incapable of considering others. Her change is slow, effortful, and convincing precisely because Burnett does not hurry it. She spends weeks being rude to Martha the maid, weeks more learning to dress herself, and months before she can genuinely care about another person.
The film's Mary, played with intelligence by Dixie Egerickx, is more immediately sympathetic. Her difficult behaviour is framed as the consequence of trauma rather than character, which makes her easier to like and her transformation less earned. The novel's version is more honest about how difficult children are and how slowly they change.
The garden becomes fantasy rather than nature
Burnett's garden works on multiple levels simultaneously — it is a real place that needs tending, a metaphor for Mary's interior life, and an argument about the relationship between the natural world and human wellbeing that was ahead of its time in 1911. The work of gardening is physical, repetitive, and unglamorous: pulling weeds, turning soil, waiting for seeds to sprout.
The 2020 film renders the garden with beautiful CGI that tips into fantasy, making it a magical space rather than a natural one. Flowers bloom instantaneously, vines grow with supernatural speed, and the garden becomes a place of spectacle. This visual choice is spectacular and somewhat undercuts the novel's more grounded argument that ordinary nature, tended with patience, is sufficient.
Colin's recovery is compressed and less psychologically detailed
Colin — Mary's bedridden cousin who has been told he is an invalid and has come to believe it — is one of literature's more interesting studies in psychosomatic illness. The novel gives him considerable space: his tantrums, his self-pity, his theatrical suffering, and his eventual physical flourishing when he stops believing in his own fragility. His recovery takes months and involves setbacks.
The film compresses his arc significantly. Edan Hayhurst is affecting as Colin, but his transformation feels more abrupt than the gradual, stubborn process Burnett describes. The novel understands that believing yourself well is not the same as becoming well, and that the latter requires time and effort the film doesn't have room for.
Dickon and the Yorkshire world are thinner in the adaptation
Burnett's Dickon — the local boy who communicates with animals and embodies a kind of wholesome outdoor vitality — is rendered in rich Yorkshire dialect and given substantial presence in the novel. He teaches Mary the names of plants, brings her garden tools, and represents a way of being in the world that is foreign to her class-bound upbringing.
The film's Dickon, played by Amir Wilson, is warm but somewhat marginalised. The broader world of the moors and the local community that surrounds Misselthwaite — which gives the novel much of its texture and grounds its argument about class and access to nature — is thinner in the adaptation. The film focuses more tightly on Mary and Colin, which is dramatically efficient and loses some of Burnett's social observation.
The ending shifts focus from children to adults
The film makes significant changes to the ending, bringing Archibald Craven more centrally into the resolution and staging a more dramatic climax than Burnett wrote. Colin Firth's performance as the grieving uncle is one of the film's strengths, and the adaptation gives him a more active role in the final scenes, including a visually striking sequence that emphasizes adult reconciliation.
The novel ends quietly — Colin's recovery is the achievement, and it belongs to the children. Archibald returns to find his son healthy and the garden restored, but the emotional work has been done by Mary, Colin, and Dickon. Munden's film gives the adults more of the emotional conclusion, which is warmer cinematically and slightly misses what Burnett was arguing about children's capacity for self-renewal without adult intervention.
Yes — the novel's pacing is the point. Burnett understood that healing is slow and unglamorous, and she wrote a book whose rhythm reflects that. The garden doesn't bloom overnight. Mary doesn't become kind in a week. Colin doesn't walk because he decides to. The transformation happens through repetition, through daily work, through the accumulation of small changes that eventually become permanent. Read first for the full experience of Mary's difficult, gradual transformation and for Burnett's patient, psychologically acute account of how recovery actually works.
See the film for its visual imagination and for Colin Firth's melancholy Archibald Craven, which is one of the better performances in the adaptation's history. The 2020 version is visually inventive and emotionally sincere, even if it accelerates what Burnett knew should be slow. If you watch first, you'll get a beautiful, compressed version of the story. If you read first, you'll understand why the compression matters.
Should You Read First?
Yes — the novel's pacing is the point. Burnett understood that healing is slow and unglamorous, and she wrote a book whose rhythm reflects that. The garden doesn't bloom overnight. Mary doesn't become kind in a week. Colin doesn't walk because he decides to. The transformation happens through repetition, through daily work, through the accumulation of small changes that eventually become permanent. Read first for the full experience of Mary's difficult, gradual transformation and for Burnett's patient, psychologically acute account of how recovery actually works.
See the film for its visual imagination and for Colin Firth's melancholy Archibald Craven, which is one of the better performances in the adaptation's history. The 2020 version is visually inventive and emotionally sincere, even if it accelerates what Burnett knew should be slow. If you watch first, you'll get a beautiful, compressed version of the story. If you read first, you'll understand why the compression matters.
Burnett wrote a novel about the slow, difficult work of healing — in a child, in a garden, in a household full of grief. Munden's film is visually beautiful and emotionally accelerated, with CGI gardens that bloom like magic and transformations that happen in weeks rather than seasons. The novel is the more honest account of how recovery actually works: unglamorously, repetitively, with setbacks and stubbornness and the daily choice to keep tending what needs tending. Read it at any age. See the film for the visuals. The garden on the page is the real one.