Protagonist

Character Role Analysis

Mary Lennox

Well, Mary Lennox definitely starts the book, and she dominates it for the first thirteen chapters. But her character arc is pretty much complete by the time she meets Colin Craven; the rest of the book involves Mary joining Colin on all of his adventures and struggles in the Secret Garden. So we'd say that she's the main character up to about halfway through the novel but she eventually has to hand her baton to Colin Craven.

Colin Craven

Colin Craven only comes in about halfway through, but in a way, it turns out that he has been the hero of The Secret Garden all along—that is, the Secret Garden that so transforms Mary's life was first built by Archibald and Lilias Craven, Colin's parents. As Dickon reports to Mary, Mrs. Sowerby thinks that it's the ghost of Lilias Craven that "set [Mary and Dickon] to work [in the Secret Garden], an' told [them] to bring [Colin] here" (22.31). So Mary's story is important, but in a way, it's mostly a precursor to Colin's slow recovery of his health and reunion of his family.