Secret Garden Chapter 16 Summary

[Imke]

Thenovel opens by introducing us to the main character Mary Lennox, a little girl born in India who is described as being particularly disagreeable and sickly. She is the child of an English statesman and a self-absorbed mother who have left her to be raised by a nanny named Ayah. As the daughter of rich parents, her caretakers have never disciplined Mary, and thus she has grown to be very selfish and misbehaved. One morning when Mary is 9 years old, there is a strange feeling in the air and many of the servants are missing. Mary sees that her mother is in distress. Mary finds out that there has been an outbreak of cholera and many people have died, including Ayah.

Mrs. Medlock and Mary drive to the manor and Mary is curious to see the landscape, including the moor. It is a long drive and finally they see the light of the manor in the distance. When they arrive in the mansion, a servant tells Mrs. Medlock that Archibald does not want to see Mary and to send her to bed immediately.

Mary approaches a groundskeeper and watches him work. She asks him about the gardens and at first he responds coldly, until Mary mentions the secret garden and the red bird, which makes him smile. He coaxes the bird to come out again which delights Mary. The groundskeeper, named Ben Weatherstaff, tells Mary that the bird is a robin, who are known to be very friendly. Mary steps near the bird and stares at him, and she tells the bird that she is lonely. Ben reveals to her that he is also lonely, and in a blunt, gruff way, compares her sourness and unattractiveness to his own. This honesty startles Mary, who has only known the polite remarks of her servants. Yet she feels happier now to have met Ben and the friendly robin.

Dickon is the younger brother of Martha, Mary's main servant at her uncle's estate. Mary immediately takes a strong liking to Dickon as he represents the complete opposite of her former life in India. He is a down-to-earth farm boy who has a...

Mary, a rich British girl, lives in India with her young and selfish parents who often forget they have a child. Mary is mostly raised by servants, who fear her temper and give in to her every demand.

Mary hears crying again in the middle of the night, and this time she goes in search of its source. She finds her cousin, Colin, a sickly boy her age who believes he is dying. He has also been mostly forgotten by his father and is even more spoiled and disagreeable than Mary is.

Mary is not the same at the end of the novel as she was at the beginning. Once she gets outside and begins working to restore the garden, her focus on a goal allows her to become much more pleasant and kind. She also sees in Colin someone who is even more spoiled than she is, which allows her to view her own behavior in a new way. By the end of the novel, not only does she get what she wants (she has found and restored the secret garden) but she also has what she needs: friends, family, and people who care about her. Likewise, she has learned to care about other people in turn.

Tara Gilboy is an award-winning short fiction writer and author of the middle-grade fantasy Unwritten and its sequel Rewritten. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and teaches for San Diego Community College District. She's also worked as a fiction editor at Straylight Literary Magazine, served on the editorial board of PRISM International, and mentored for the PEN Writers in Prisons Program. As an editor, she pays particular attention to plot, structure, and character arcs.

Thank you for this! I came to your site because I was simply looking to remind myself of the plot of one of my favorite books, and found what I was TRULY searching for: Insightful writing advice. I will certainly return to your website!

The first twenty chapters of The Secret Garden introduce Mary Lennox,a neglected and sour girl who is sent to live with her uncle in England afterher parents die. Mary discovers a hidden, neglected garden and begins torejuvenate it. Her transformation parallels the garden's revival, as shebecomes healthier and more compassionate, forming friendships with Dickon andher sickly cousin, Colin.

Who are the experts?

Our certified Educators are real professors, teachers, and scholars who use their academic expertise to tackle your toughest questions. Educators go through a rigorous application process, and every answer they submit is reviewed by our in-house editorial team.

Summary: In the first lines of the novel we learn that Mary Lennox has beensent to live with her uncle at Misselthwaite Manor in England, where everyonethinks she is ugly because she is thin, sour-faced, and has yellowish skin.Most of the chapter, however, focuses on the child's life in India.

We learn that Mary is the only child of British parents. Her father is agovernment official stationed in India. Her mother is a beautiful woman wholikes to socialize, didn't want any children, and keeps Mary shut away withservants so she doesn't have to see her. Her father also has no time forher.

The cholera epidemic that breaks out in India drives the plot of the firstchapter. First, Mary's servants die, and then her parents perish. They don'tget away from the epidemic in time. Mary knows none of this until Britishsoldiers find her all alone in her quarters. They make arrangements to ship thelittle girl to England.

We meet Mary Lennox. She's an eleven-year-old living in India. We learn thather dad works for the English government and that her mom did not "want adaughter at all." Mary was raised mostly by domestic workers. To keep her "outof the way," the workers gave Mary "her own way in everything."

An outbreak of cholera strikes the Indian village where Mary and her parentslive. They don't leave right away because Mary's mom wanted to stay and attenda dinner party. The choice to remain is fatal. Cholera kills Mary's mom, dad,and nanny. Now, Mary is an orphan.

Mary enters the secret garden and she expresses her hope that there are somethings still living in it. Later, Mary asks Martha for some tools to help hergarden. Then Mary hears those strange cries again.

At the turn of the 20th century, Mary Lennox is a neglected and unloved 10-year-old girl, born in British India to wealthy British parents who never wanted her and made an effort to ignore her. She is cared for primarily by native servants, who spoil her and allow her to have free rein. After a cholera epidemic kills Mary's parents, the few surviving servants flee the house without Mary.

She is discovered by British soldiers who place her in the temporary care of an English clergyman, whose children taunt her by calling her "Mistress Mary, quite contrary". She is soon sent to England to live with her uncle, Archibald Craven, whom her father's sister Lilias married. He lives on the Yorkshire Moors in a large English country house, Misselthwaite Manor. When escorted to Misselthwaite by the housekeeper Mrs. Medlock, she discovers Lilias Craven is dead and that Mr. Craven is a hunchback.

At first, Mary is as angry and contrary as she was before she was sent there. She dislikes her new home, the people living in it and, most of all, the bleak moor on which it sits. Over time, she becomes more spirited and less cantankerous and befriends her maid, Martha Sowerby, who tells Mary about Lilias Craven, who would spend hours in a private walled garden growing roses. Lilias Craven died after an accident in the garden ten years prior, and the devastated Archibald locked the garden and buried the key.

Mary becomes interested in finding the secret hidden garden herself, and her ill manners begin to soften as a result. Soon, she comes to enjoy the company of Martha, the gardener Ben Weatherstaff, and a friendly robin redbreast. Her health and attitude improve with the bracing Yorkshire air, and she grows stronger as she explores the estate gardens. Mary wonders about the secret garden and about mysterious cries that echo through the house at night.

As Mary explores the gardens, the robin draws her attention to an area of disturbed soil. Here, Mary finds the key to the locked garden, and eventually discovers the door to the garden. She asks Martha for garden tools, which Martha sends with Dickon, her 12-year-old brother, who spends most of his time out on the moors. Mary and Dickon take a liking to each other, as Dickon has a kind way with animals and a good nature. Eager to absorb his gardening knowledge, Mary tells him about the secret garden.

While in the garden, the children look up to see Ben Weatherstaff looking over the wall on a ladder. Startled to find the children in the secret garden, he admits that he believed Colin to be "a cripple." Angry at being called "crippled," Colin rises shakily from his chair and finds that he can stand on his legs, albeit they are weak from long disuse. Mary and Dickon spend almost every day in the garden with Colin, and continue to encourage him to grow stronger and attempt walking. Together, the children and Ben conspire to keep Colin's recovering health a secret from the other staff to surprise his father, who is travelling abroad.

While his son's health improves, Archibald experiences a coinciding increase in spirits, culminating in a dream where his late wife calls to him from inside the garden. When he receives a letter from Mrs. Sowerby, who advises him to come back to Misselthwaite, he takes the opportunity to finally return home. He walks the outer garden wall in his wife's memory, and hears voices inside. He finds the door unlocked and is shocked to see the garden in full bloom and his son restored to health, having just won a race against Mary. The children tell him the entire story, explaining the restoration of both the garden and Colin. Archibald and Colin then walk back to the manor together, observed by the stunned and incredulous servants.

In his analysis of the narrative structures of "the traditional novel for girls," Perry Nodelman highlights Mary Lennox as a departure from the narrative pattern of the "spontaneous and ebullient" orphan girl who changes her new home and family for the better, since those qualities appear later on in the narrative. The revival of the family and the home in these novels, according to Nodelman, "is carried to the extreme in The Secret Garden," in which the garden's restoration and the arrival of spring parallel the emergence of human characters from the home, "almost as if they had been hibernating".[5] Joe Sutliff Sanders examines Mary and The Secret Garden within the context of the Victorian and Edwardian cultural debate over affective discipline, which was echoed in contemporary books about orphan girls. He suggests that The Secret Garden was interested in showing the benefits of affective discipline for men and boys, namely Colin who learns from Mary, understood as "the novel's representative of girlhood" and how to wield his "masculine privilege".[6]

3a8082e126