The Secret Garden — Chapter 7

About This Passage

Burnett gives the passage a sharp architecture: a child's question, a gardener's offended correction that is also a tenderness ('he's bent on findin' out all about thee'), and a second, more loaded question that lets the reader hear Mary transfer the language Ben Weatherstaff has taught her about winter earth — 'things stirring down below in the dark' — to the locked garden itself. Copying slowly is how a mountaineer sees a small syntactic step from the robin's perceptive attention to the garden's buried life.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 7 for a reader tracing Burnett's craft. Keep the weather as a structural device, not scenery — the cleared storm, the arched blue sky, the smell of the good rich earth — and notice how it brackets Mary's conversation with Martha, her meeting with Ben Weatherstaff, her second encounter with the robin, and her finding of the buried key. The chapter has five set pieces and one buried discovery; name them and hold them in sequence.

Discussion Questions

1. Martha's question, 'How does tha' like thysel'?', arrives inside a recollected story about her own mother at the wash-tub, and the narrator tells us 'It made me laugh an' it brought me to my senses in a minute.' Burnett has, throughout the novel so far, been careful to route the novel's moral authority through the unseen Susan Sowerby rather than through Mrs. Medlock, Mr. Craven, or a governess. Why does Burnett ground the ethical turning point of Chapter 7 in a working-class woman who has not yet appeared, and what is the novel claiming about the legitimacy of moral instruction that arrives through reported speech rather than direct encounter?
2. Ben Weatherstaff's two answers in quick succession — the expansive lyric about crocuses and daffydowndillys 'in th' good humor makin' ready to grow things,' followed by the grunt and surly withdrawal when Mary asks about the garden of the old rose-trees — do not merely characterize him; they teach the reader how to read silences at Misselthwaite. How does Burnett calibrate the difference between Yorkshire gruffness as social manner and silence as grief-enforced secrecy, and why is it necessary that this calibration occur before the appearance of the buried key rather than after?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide