The Secret Garden — Chapter 8

About This Passage

Burnett stages the door's discovery as a collaboration of wind, bird, and hand. The gust is strong enough to 'sway the trailing sprays of untrimmed ivy'; the robin 'kept singing and twittering away and tilting his head'; Mary's own hands move from pocket to ivy to lock. Copying this passage slowly lets a Mountaineer trace how Burnett distributes agency across a scene she could have written as pure coincidence — and see how the untrimmed ivy, neglected for ten years, has been hiding exactly what Mary has been looking for.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 8 in full, attending to the chapter's hinge points: the pocketed key, Martha's return from the cottage, the skipping-rope and the mother who bought it, Mary's stiff thank-you, Ben Weatherstaff's teasing in the kitchen-garden, the robin on the wall, the gust of untrimmed ivy, and Mary's crossing of the threshold into the secret garden.

Discussion Questions

1. Burnett writes that Mary's 'inactive brain' has been 'set . . . to working' and her imagination 'awakening.' What is the theory of the self that this chapter proposes — that is, what does Burnett think produces a thinking, feeling child — and how does it contrast with the Anglo-Indian household we met in Chapter 1?
2. Susan Sowerby, who never appears on stage, spends two of her fourteen-person household's pennies on a toy for Mary. What kind of moral presence is Burnett building for this absent mother, and why does she keep her absent? What would the novel lose if Susan appeared directly?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide