The Secret Garden, a week of sunshine

Frances Hodgson Burnett published 1911 454 characters easy

The sun shone down for nearly a week on the secret garden. The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories.

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About this text

The Secret Garden takes its name from this passage, where the child who finds the garden gives it that name. Burnett herself was born in Manchester. She moved to the United States as a girl, and both countries appear in her work. The novel has been filmed many times, first in 1919. Project Gutenberg carries the full text.

Where this text comes fromSeven days pass in the first clause. The passage compresses a whole week of weather into an opening line and then slows down again, which is how this book handles time throughout: long stretches summarized in a sentence, single afternoons given a chapter. What the week does is turn the garden from a place being cleared into a place growing, and the language changes with it, from work to wonder, inside a few lines.

What you might not noticeThe same words appear twice in three lines, first as an ordinary description and then capitalized as The Secret Garden. The edition linked here preserves both, so the shift from phrase to name happens in front of the reader. Source

What it trainsFive sentences and only two commas in 454 characters, so the rhythm is short declaratives with almost nothing dividing them internally. The specific exercise here is capitalization of a repeated phrase: the same three words arrive once in lower case and once with capitals, and the hand that has just typed them one way will type them that way again. Eight capitals in total, three of them inside sentences. The single hyphenated word, fairy-story, is written as one unit where modern English usually gives it a space.

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Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg