The Secret Garden — Chapter 26

About This Passage

The extended passage is Burnett’s staged annunciation of Susan Sowerby, built to function as a formal set-piece. Four of this chapter’s Mountaineer words — DAPPLING, ILLUSTRATION, AFFECTIONATE, and TREMULOUSLY — cluster here because Burnett is deploying painting-diction, introduction-diction, and feeling-diction to consecrate a moment the novel has been preparing for since Chapter 8. The timing against “the last line of their song,” the frame-breaking direct statement that she is not an intruder, and Susan’s own “dear lad” — glossed by the narrator as unplanned — are all doing coordinated work.

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 26 with attention to its three movements — Colin’s lecture and rapturous realization, the Doxology sequence with Ben Weatherstaff’s conversion, and Susan Sowerby’s visit — and identify how Burnett shifts the chapter’s register (rhetorical, liturgical, maternal) across each movement. Note the symmetry and asymmetry between the chapter’s opening (Colin lecturing under his tree) and its closing (Colin held under Susan’s blue cloak).

Discussion Questions

1. Burnett has kept Susan Sowerby offstage for twenty-five chapters, present only through Martha’s reports, Mrs. Sowerby’s buns, and Dickon’s testimony. What does the novel’s long deferral of this character purchase when it is finally paid out in Chapter 26, and what would an earlier appearance have cost?
2. The Doxology scene gives us three faiths in one song — Dickon’s unself-conscious belief, Mary and Colin’s earnest learning belief, and Ben Weatherstaff’s raspingly savage, unacknowledged belief. Is Burnett arguing that these three are variations on one thing, or that they are genuinely different things that happen to sound alike for thirty seconds? What does the scene stake on the answer?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide