The Secret Garden — Chapter 9

About This Passage

This paragraph is Burnett's most compressed statement of what Mary has found inside the walls: a place which, though walled against everything else, is open to a sky 'even more brilliant and soft' than the moor's — a small enclosed world that is at the same time the most luminous one Mary has known. Burnett stages the loneliness that is not lonely ('hundreds of miles away from any one, but somehow she did not feel lonely at all'), and lets Mary's only trouble be a wish that the roses are not dead. Copying this passage slowly lets a Mountaineer feel how Burnett uses a single enclosed garden to hold a very large cosmological feeling — sun, sky, life, death, hope — in a child's plain sentences.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 9 as a sequence of thresholds Mary crosses: first into the silent garden, then into kneeling work among the pale green points, then into a shared conspiracy with Martha over the letter to Dickon, and finally into the corridor where the third crying undoes the day's peace. Pay particular attention to what Burnett makes Mary do with her hands at each threshold.

Discussion Questions

1. Burnett opens the chapter with a garden which is 'the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine' and is also, on Mary's own testimony, perhaps 'a quite dead garden.' How does Burnett hold those two judgments together in the same description, and what does this doubled picture — beautiful and possibly dead at the same time — suggest about the moral condition the book is treating Mary herself as being in?
2. Three times in this chapter Mary answers the silence with work: she clears grass from the green points, she digs and weeds for hours without noticing the time, and she asks Martha how to get a spade. What is Burnett arguing about the relation between idle unhappiness and purposeful labor, and how does the fact that Mary chooses this work without being told make her transformation different from one produced by instruction or discipline?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide