The Secret Garden — Chapter 7

About This Passage

Burnett's rhetorical choice here is to use a cascade of verbs — chirped, talked, coaxed, hopped, flirted, twittered — so that the bird and the child perform a single conversation. The sentence that matters is the last one: 'Mistress Mary forgot that she had ever been contrary in her life.' Copying slowly lets a middle-grade reader feel the moment character change actually lands.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 7 for a reader who has only finished Chapter 6 and knows the cry behind the tapestry but nothing about the morning after. Move from the clearing of the storm over Misselthwaite, through Martha's Yorkshire conversation and her walk home, the talk with Ben Weatherstaff, the robin's second visit, and the finding of the key. Keep the weather — blue sky, fresh earth — in the retelling; Burnett uses it structurally.

Discussion Questions

1. Martha's question to Mary — 'How does tha' like thysel'?' — is an honest, class-inflected piece of working-class moral instruction. What does it mean that the first person to ask Mary to evaluate her own character is a housemaid, not a governess, not Mrs. Medlock, and not her dead mother, and how does Burnett use Martha's accompanying story about her own mother at the wash-tub to soften the question into something Mary can answer?
2. Ben Weatherstaff answers Mary's question about springtime at length — the good rich earth, the crocuses, the snowdrops, the daffydowndillys — and then closes down completely on the garden with the old rose-trees, 'grunted' and 'surly again.' How does Burnett use the contrast between these two gardener-answers in the same conversation to teach the reader how Misselthwaite's silences work, and to distinguish ordinary gruffness from enforced secrecy?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide