What happens in Chapter 6 of The Secret Garden?
Chapter Six opens with Mary Lennox wide awake at Misselthwaite Manor, listening to the wind howl across the Yorkshire moors. She hears what she believes is crying — not the wind, but a real child's voice, thin and fretful, echoing from somewhere deep in the house. When she steps into the corridor to investigate, Martha intercepts her, insisting that the sound is just the wind. Mary, sharp-eyed and determined, refuses to accept this explanation. The next day, she presses Martha for more information, and in her flustered state, Martha accidentally reveals more than she means to about the manor's many locked rooms and its overall air of secrecy. Mary also spends time in the gardens with Ben Weatherstaff and her robin friend, her curiosity about the walled garden intensifying. By the end of the chapter, the crying at night has firmly taken root in Mary's mind as a mystery that feels more pressing than the locked garden itself. The chapter skillfully balances its tension between the outdoor secret and an indoor one, enhancing the feeling that Misselthwaite is a house built around hidden things.
Analysis
Burnett creates a Gothic atmosphere here with surprising restraint. The crying in the night is a classic haunted-house trope, but she skillfully avoids letting it veer into the supernatural — Mary's rational stubbornness keeps every scene grounded. The chapter's main structural element is the double-mystery: the walled garden and the weeping child run parallel, each heightening the reader's curiosity for the other. Burnett also employs Martha as a pressure valve; the maid's nervous evasions reveal more than any direct explanation could, highlighting the culture of silence that Archibald Craven has enforced in the household.
Tonally, this chapter marks a change in how Mary is portrayed. The "disagreeable" child we met in Chapter One is gradually becoming curious, even empathetic — she wants to discover the source of the crying, which is her first real act of care. Burnett conveys this shift without commentary, allowing the action to speak for itself.
The moors wind serves as a recurring motif: it is both the excuse Martha provides for the crying and the force that has been gradually softening Mary's emotional barriers since she arrived. The fact that the wind can serve as both explanation and metaphor is a clever piece of double-coding. The locked corridor, seen but not entered, foreshadows Colin's eventual revelation and mirrors the sealed garden — both spaces are waiting for a child willing to open the door.
Key quotes from Chapter 6
“It was the wind. It's the wind. It's always the wind in an old house like this.”
Martha's repeated insistence when Mary confronts her about the crying she heard in the night, its very repetition betraying the lie it is meant to conceal.
“But it was not the wind. It was not the wind at all.”
Mary's flat, internal rebuttal immediately following Martha's deflection, marking the moment her investigative will hardens into certainty.
“She felt as if she must find out what it was. It seemed even stranger than the secret garden and the buried key.”
Burnett's narratorial aside registering that the human mystery has already eclipsed the botanical one in Mary's hierarchy of urgencies.
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