The Secret Garden — Chapter 14

About This Passage

Burnett’s most delicate moral passage in the chapter: a sick child’s performance of doom runs into a well friend’s refusal to perform sympathy. The adverbs do the work — ‘resentful,’ ‘unsympathetically,’ ‘boasted’ — locating the moral content not in event but in tone. Mary’s bluntness is the chapter’s quietest act of love.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 14 in your own words. Begin with Martha’s panic when Mary confesses she has found Colin, move through Colin’s tyrannical command of Martha, Mary’s doubled tales of the Rajah and of Dickon, and end with the arrival of Dr. Craven and Mrs. Medlock upon the laughing children.

Discussion Questions

1. Martha reaches for ‘bewitched’ as the only available vocabulary for what Mary has done; Mary answers, ‘I’ve heard about Magic in India, but I can’t make it.’ What is Burnett suggesting about the moral imagination of a household in which simple human attention has become so absent that its return registers as witchcraft?
2. Colin narrates his own death ‘indifferently’ and, as Mary observes, almost ‘boasted about it.’ Burnett is deploying the adverb as her instrument of diagnosis. How does the undercutting adverb — ‘indifferently,’ ‘fretfully,’ ‘resentfully’ — become the novel’s moral syntax, and what does this technique allow Burnett to do that direct narratorial commentary could not?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide