The Secret Garden — Chapter 4

About This Passage

Burnett uses a single long sentence to render Mary's first involuntary softening. The triple repetition of 'big closed house and big bare moor and big bare gardens' builds the emotional weight through rhythm; the em-dash opens a confession about loneliness. The second sentence uses a conditional ('If she had been…') and contrasts 'Mistress Mary Quite Contrary' — the scornful peer-name — against the unexpected 'almost a smile.' Copying this passage teaches students to hold long, suspended sentences together with commas, dashes, and conjunctions, and to feel how a skilled author stacks clauses to produce a change of heart.

Narration Prompt

In your own words, retell this chapter. What were the most important moments? When you reach the garden and the robin, slow down and explain what changes in Mary — and how you know it changed.

Discussion Questions

1. Martha speaks to Mary as if she were an equal, while Mary has been raised to be served by an Ayah who never answered back. Which one of these two ways of talking does the author seem to prefer, and what in the chapter makes you think so?
2. Ben Weatherstaff tells Mary, 'Tha' an' me are a good bit alike…We've got the same nasty tempers, both of us.' Is he being cruel to Mary, or is he offering her a kind of honesty no one in India ever gave her?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide