The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)
“A sour, neglected child finds a locked garden — and in tending it back to life, discovers she can do the same for herself.”
Language Register
Accessible and warm in narration, with periodic elevation to spiritual-mystical register for garden and Magic sequences
Syntax Profile
Burnett's sentences vary by character and setting. Narration of the moor and garden: long, sensory, and periodic. Yorkshire dialect speech: short, contracted, full of elision. Colin's early speech: formal and medical, mirroring his education by adults and books. Colin's later speech: energetic, declarative, physical. Mary's voice shifts most dramatically — from clipped colonial formality to warm directness.
Figurative Language
Moderate — Burnett relies more on direct description than metaphor, but uses the garden consistently as metaphor for psychological state. The locked garden, the buried key, the sleeping roses, the green shoots: these are all symbolic but embedded in concrete botanical description that makes them feel observed rather than constructed.
Era-Specific Language
Yorkshire dialect for 'you' — marks Dickon, Martha, and Susan Sowerby as native moor folk
Yorkshire: beaten about or worn down by wind — applied to Mary after her first walk on the moors
Indian term for a female nurse or nanny — signals Mary's colonial upbringing
Anglo-Indian: a one-story colonial residence — places Mary's India in the British imperial context
Burnett's term for the life force in nature — she capitalizes it to mark its quasi-theological status
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Mary Lennox
Opens with colonial authority ('the most disagreeable child') — imperious, abbreviated commands. Shifts toward curiosity and directness as the novel progresses.
Colonial privilege produced a child who commanded without caring. The moor teaches her to ask instead of demand.
Dickon Sowerby
Full Yorkshire dialect — 'tha',' 'niver,' 'nowt,' 'afore.' Never modifies his speech for class. Names animals familiarly.
The working class as the novel's moral center. Dickon's dialect is the language of health, groundedness, and genuine connection to the natural world.
Colin Craven
Formal, Latinate, medically inflected — 'hypochondria,' 'curvature,' 'hysteria.' Shifts to physical, direct, Yorkshire-influenced speech as he recovers.
Medical language as a form of class performance and self-imprisonment. Recovery means speaking more like Dickon and less like a patient.
Mrs. Medlock
Standard English with Yorkshire undertones — the speech of someone who manages up and down simultaneously.
The housekeeper's linguistic position between gentry and servants mirrors her structural position: loyal to the master, responsible for the staff.
Archibald Craven
Formal, sparse, marked by loss — he barely speaks in the novel, and when he does it is in short sentences haunted by what he cannot say.
Grief has contracted his language as it has contracted his world. His reunion with Colin is marked by speechlessness — the return of feeling before the return of words.
Narrator's Voice
Burnett's narrator is warm, omniscient, and occasionally addresses the reader directly in the manner of Victorian children's literature. She does not maintain ironic distance from her material — she believes in the garden and in the Magic, and the belief shows. This sincerity is the novel's greatest stylistic risk and its greatest strength.
Tone Progression
Chapters 1-4
Cool, comic, observational
The narrator watches Mary with clear-eyed amusement. India, the journey, the moor: all rendered with slight detachment. The tone sets up the transformation by establishing how far Mary has to go.
Chapters 5-9
Warm, curious, building
The garden found, Dickon met, Colin discovered. The prose warms with each chapter. Nature descriptions become longer and more sensory. The comedy of Colin and Mary's first interactions adds energy.
Chapters 10-14
Joyful, physical, occasionally mystical
The Magic sequences introduce a ceremonial register. But it is grounded in the physical comedy of children faking illness and the genuine warmth of garden work. Joy is allowed, unironically.
Chapters 15-17
Elegiac, resolved, quietly triumphant
The adult world reconnects. Archibald's Austrian chapters are the most lyrical. The reunion is rendered with restraint. The final tableau — father and son walking toward the manor — is the novel's earned promise: that what was locked can be opened, and what was sleeping can live.
Stylistic Comparisons
- A Little Princess (Burnett, 1905) — same authorial voice, different transformation: from wealth to poverty and back, where The Secret Garden moves from isolation to connection
- The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame, 1908) — contemporaneous pastoral, different key: Grahame's England is nostalgic and all-male; Burnett's is therapeutic and includes girls
- Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847) — shared elements: moorland house, absent master, hidden life in the walls; Burnett writes Brontë's gothic toward healing rather than tragedy
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions