Superb in the middle, indefensible at the start

Three quarters of this is superb and the other quarter I have to explain away every time I hand it to somebody. A tiring way to love a book, that.

The indefensible part first. Mary arrives from India as a small colonial monster, and Burnett's idea of what has made her monstrous is that Indian servants waited on her; they are described in terms I shan't reproduce and not one is given a name. There is a line about Martha expecting Mary to be black that used to stop a room dead. I read that chapter aloud exactly once, in about 1989, and never again after that; I simply put the book out and let children meet it on their own, and that was cowardice, and I've never entirely settled it.

Now the rest. The middle of it is one of the best things ever written about a child getting better, and I do mean physically better: appetite, sleep, mud, weather, the ordinary animal facts of it. Nobody writes recovery. Everybody writes illness. Burnett understood that being unwell for a long time makes a person insufferable, and that the cure for insufferableness is not kindness but work, cold air and somebody who won't put up with you. Martha and Dickon and Ben Weatherstaff all refuse to indulge her, in their different ways, and it is exactly what she requires.

Colin is the problem child of this novel in both senses. He arrives late, takes it over, and the closing section turns into a health lecture with the Magic business, capital M, which is Burnett's spiritualism getting the better of her novel. Then the father comes home and gets the closing scene, and the two children who did every bit of the actual work are left standing in the garden watching him walk up the lawn. Ruth and I argued about this more than once and she said I'm reading it as a woman of my generation. Possibly so.

The Yorkshire, though. Nobody transcribes dialect that well now because nobody is allowed to; it looks patronising in print and half the time it is. Martha's speeches are the warmest thing here, and I could still manage a passable "Eh! it's graidely" if pushed, which Ruth would rather I didn't.

For the shelf: it goes out far less than it did. The fall started around 2004 and never recovered, and the cover on the edition most schools have is doing it no favours whatsoever, a girl in a pinafore in a mist. Where in that picture is the boy screaming in a locked room upstairs?

Seven. Priya read it in a fortnight and came back saying it was slow, which is fair, and then quoted the robin at me for a year, which is also fair. Give it to a patient reader of nine or ten, with a word first about the opening chapters.