The Secret Garden — Chapter 5

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 5 in roughly three paragraphs: Mary's deepening relationship with the moor's weather and her first encounter with the robin on the ivy-covered wall at Misselthwaite; the change in her interior life as Burnett catalogues it (the Four good things); and Martha's story of Mrs. Craven's fatal fall, closing with the crying heard through the corridor and Martha's evasion. Aim for a retelling a thoughtful adult reader could use to orient a book-club discussion.

Discussion Questions

1. Burnett gives us Mary's transformation at the end of Chapter 5 as a deliberately numbered inventory—Four good things had happened to her. How should an adult reader assess this catalogue? Is Burnett making a serious psychological claim about how children change, or is she performing a kind of moral arithmetic that suits her didactic project? What does the choice to enumerate rather than narrate tell us about Burnett's aims?
2. Martha's account of Mrs. Craven's death arrives, in Chapter 5, in Yorkshire dialect, framed by Martha's own caution that Mrs. Medlock said it's not to be talked about. Why does Burnett place this key piece of expository information in a servant's voice, under an injunction of silence? What does that placement say about the novel's politics of knowledge—who holds it, who transmits it, who is authorized to speak it?

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