The Forgotten Garden

The Forgotten Garden is the second novel by Australian author Kate Morton. First published in 2008, the book is classified as a historical mystery and won the Australian Book Industry Award for General Fiction in 2009. It later became a New York Times Best Seller. The Forgotten Garden is heavily influenced by the Gothic novel genre and pays homage to The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Events in the story were inspired by the author’s own family history.

Plot Summary

The novel takes place in a variety of locations and spans more than a century between 1900 and 2005. The limited third-person narrative unfolds in nonchronological order and is principally told from the perspective of its three major characters: Eliza Makepeace from 1900 to 1913 in London and Cornwall; Nell O’Connor from 1913 to 2005 in Australia, London, and Cornwall; and Cassandra O’Connor from 1975 to 2005 in Australia, London, and Cornwall.

The plot concerns a 4-year-old girl abandoned on a boat dock in Australia in 1913. The tale of her adult search to find her birth family is interwoven with her mother’s attempt to create a meaningful life for herself and her granddaughter’s efforts to solve the abandonment mystery. Through the combined experiences of Eliza, Nell, and Cassandra, the novel examines the themes of family secrets, loss and survival, and what home truly means.

In 1913, an ocean liner from London makes port at the Maryborough Dock in Australia and deposits a 4-year-old girl carrying a white suitcase. She can’t remember her name or where her family is. The dockmaster and his wife adopt the girl and name her Nell. On her 21st birthday, Nell’s foster father tells her that she isn’t one of his own children. This disclosure alienates Nell for the rest of her life. Even though she later marries and has a daughter of her own, Nell can’t escape her sense of loss and abandonment.

When Nell’s foster father dies in 1975, he bequeaths her the little white suitcase. Inside is a book of children’s fairy tales written by a woman named Eliza Makepeace. Nell vows to find out who her parents were by tracing the mysterious Eliza. The quest takes her to Cornwall and Cliff Cottage, the home of Eliza, whom she calls “the Authoress.” Cliff Cottage acts as a trigger to awaken Nell’s earliest memories. Nell realizes that she is the daughter of American artist Nathaniel Walker and the aristocratic Rose Mountrachet. Nell’s parents were killed in a train crash when she was four, and the Authoress placed her on a ship bound for Australia.

On impulse, Nell buys Cliff Cottage. Intending to settle in Cornwall, she briefly returns to Australia to set her affairs in order. Just as she’s packing to leave, her daughter, Lesley, abandons Nell’s granddaughter, Cassandra, to Nell’s care. Nell puts off her return to Cornwall and eventually partners with the adult Cassandra in an antique business until Nell’s death in 2005. She leaves Cliff Cottage to Cassandra in her will.

Cassandra regards the mystery of Nell’s past to be her true inheritance and sets off to Cornwall to find out why Cliff Cottage mattered so much to her grandmother. Cassandra ultimately discovers that Nell’s real mother was Eliza, who was killed before she could flee with her daughter to Australia. While restoring Eliza’s garden, Cassandra unearths her bones in an unmarked grave, thus finding the final piece of the puzzle that was Nell’s life.