Putting Down Routes: Translocal Place in The Secret Garden

Although critics frequently classify The Secret Garden as British or Anglo-American, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel resists those national affiliations. Place in Garden is translocal; Yorkshire here functions as an embodied site constituted through literary and lived global networks that transcend its intimate physical borders. Reading this novel within the broader context of Burnett’s U.S. regionalist fiction, short stories that indicate her career-long commitment to hybrid localities, this essay argues that Garden shows us how we might rethink literature’s spatialization outside familiar local-national-transnational paradigms.