I've read this one several times both as a child and as a grown up -- it's one of my comfort reads.
I find this analysis by Sarah Rees Brennan really interesting:
https://www.sarahreesbrennan.com/ext...happy-endings/ She is, among other things, comparing The Secret Garden with Jane Eyre, and discussing the different ways adult books and children's books treat monsters.
Quote:
Now Mrs Rochester and Colin both count as monsters. One has inherited (and drunk her way faster to) madness from her mother, and has in consequence of her madness become physically grotesque and murderous. Colin, while a much more milquetoast monster, thinks he’s inherited his father’s hunchback, and is legitimately a very sickly kid. Plus he’s deranged enough by physical weakness and a truly morbid imagination to have become a shrunken Gollum-like creature brooding over his dead mother’s portrait and peering around his dark little world with his dead mother’s eyes huge in his ashen face. And he’s got a house full of adults, including the doctor who is Colin’s social equal (and indeed his cousin), in his power. Because he’s psychologically tormented, his instinct is to torment, which for me is a pretty good working definition of a monster.
We get plenty of sympathy for the monsters in adult fiction. In Frankenstein and Interview with the Vampire put out a bucket because it’s raining Authorial Sympathy. But in the more static world of adult fiction, that doesn’t change anything. Sympathetic or not, the monster is doomed. Frankenstein’s creation goes into the ice. Bertha Rochester leaps into the fire. The monster often actually commits suicide or at least sows the seed for its eventual destruction by its very nature.
And Colin is on course. He’s practically willing himself to death, death is his secret and his one obsession. He’s killing himself like the other monsters.
It doesn’t happen. The monster is reformed. The monster is reclaimed, and the monstrous energies (largely Colin’s imagination) are not destroyed but used in positive rather than negative ways. (Claiming the monster also, and more literally, happens in Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.)
Horrible things often happen in children’s fiction. Parents have about the same life expectancy as a little piggy in a straw house. But children’s fiction is a genre with a lot of hope in it, a promise of resilience, and in the end, I hold with neither fire nor ice. I am a sucker for a happy ending.
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