The Secret Garden — Chapter 17

About This Passage

This is the single most unexpected sentence in the chapter. Burnett openly tells us that a ‘nice sympathetic child’ would have been the wrong child to send into Colin’s room. Colin has been surrounded by kindness that agrees with him for ten years, and it has nearly destroyed him. It takes a child willing to say ‘I hate you!’ at exactly the right moment to break the spell — and Burnett wants you to notice that this is not cruelty, but a truer kind of care.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 17 in your own words. Begin with Mary waking in the night to the screams she cannot block out, trace her change from frightened to furious, recount her storming into Colin’s room with ‘You stop!’, the examination of his bared spine, Colin’s quiet question ‘Do you think I could live to grow up?’, and end with Mary’s soft word-picture of the secret garden carrying him into sleep.

Discussion Questions

1. When Mary first hears the screams she covers her ears and keeps saying ‘I can’t bear it.’ Why does the chapter suggest that her fear so quickly turned into anger, and why does the author treat that turn as the very thing Colin needed instead of as a failure of sympathy?
2. The nurse, who was laughing about Colin’s tantrums at the end of Chapter 16, is now ‘not laughing now by any means’ and looks ‘rather pale.’ What has changed between last night’s pillow-throw and tonight’s hysterics, and what does it say that the trained nurse now has to fetch a ten-year-old girl to do what she and Mrs. Medlock cannot?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide