Within these walls

A remake of The Secret Garden hits cinemas this month with Yorkshire in a starring role.

- Bethan Hyatt

'If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.’ With such childlike optimism and spirit, it’s not difficult to understand why, more than 100 years after its publication, The Secret Garden remains one of the most treasured children’s books of all time. So much so that a shiny new film adaptation of the story is imminent, released this month in cinemas. And, like its author, Frances Hodgson Burnett, the film has strong links to Yorkshire and the North.

Hodgson Burnett’s father was a Yorkshireman, from Doncaster, and she herself was born and raised in Manchester. After her father’s death when she was a teenager, her family emigrated to America, but she returned to England as a successful writer in her thirties, living at Great Maytham Hall in Kent for a time. She wrote most of The Secret Garden while living there; its walled rose garden, which she cared for passionately, is thought to have inspired the story, though she changed the setting to the North York Moors.