The Secret Garden — Chapter 16

About This Passage

Burnett records the exact register of two spoiled children who have never before been contradicted. Her verbs do the moral work: Colin ‘condescends’ even to look at Mary, as though he were nobility and she a petitioner; Mary’s passion is cold and silent, the particular kind that does not scream but simply refuses. The word ‘retorted’ is doing double duty — it tells us both what Mary says and the proud, flat tone in which she says it.

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 16 with attention to the chapter’s shape: Mary’s happy day in the garden with Dickon, Captain, and Soot; her stiff return to Colin; the escalating quarrel about selfishness, Dickon, and the lump; the pillow thrown weakly; the nurse laughing in the hall; Mr. Craven’s surprising kindness; and Mary’s slow, honest ‘perhaps, just perhaps’ at the end.

Discussion Questions

1. Burnett writes that Mary and Colin ‘were no more used to considering other people’ than the other was. What is the effect of telling us, at the start of the quarrel, that both children are in the same moral condition? How does that single observation change the way the reader is invited to side — or refuse to side — with either of them?
2. The nurse, who is supposed to be keeping Colin calm, laughs into her handkerchief after the fight and says a ‘young vixen of a sister’ would be the saving of him. She has watched Colin for years and the doctor has watched him too. Why might the nurse, who has less formal medical authority than the doctor, be seeing something truer about what is wrong with Colin?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide