The Secret Garden

Burnett's style in The Secret Garden is, like many of her other books, evocative, confiding, and highly descriptive. She invests a great deal of time in describing the lives and cycles of the natural world, as so much of the novel is set in flowering moorland and manicured gardens.  She often shows this most clearly in long, slow passages describing in detail the contents of the "secret garden," which "bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles." Her diction is highly ornamented and full of imagery, populating the novel with endless vistas of flower-studded and fragrant moors, forbidding dusty corridors and buzzing, bee-sprinkled flowerbeds. The novel takes a slow pace that aligns with the gradual personal improvement of its characters.