Susan Sowerby's Letter
Susan Sowerby's letter to Archibald Craven is a brief, unadorned message that nevertheless carries the weight of the entire novel's restorative movement. Written in a plain woman's hand that Craven does not recognize, it arrives at the Lake of Como just after he has experienced a dream in which his dead wife's voice calls him back to the garden. The letter is direct and respectful, making bold to speak again as Susan Sowerby had once done on the moor when she stopped Craven to advocate for Mary Lennox. She writes not as a servant but as a mother who sees what the master of Misselthwaite cannot: that he is needed at home. Her words are simple and without artifice: "Please, sir, I would come home if I was you. I think you would be glad to come and—if you will excuse me, sir—I think your lady would ask you to come if she was here." The reference to Lilias Craven, whom Susan Sowerby had known and who had visited the Sowerby cottage two or three times, is the letter's most potent stroke. It reminds Craven not of his grief but of his wife's living wishes, and it aligns Susan Sowerby's voice with the voice he heard in his dream calling "In the garden!" Craven reads the letter twice before putting it back in its envelope, and he keeps thinking about the dream. His response is immediate and decisive: "I will go back to Misselthwaite," he says. "Yes, I'll go at once." He orders Pitcher to prepare for his return to England, and within a few days he is in Yorkshire again, thinking of his boy as he has not thought in all the ten years past.
Context and Composition
The letter is written by Susan Sowerby, the mother of Dickon and Martha, who lives in a moorland cottage with her twelve children on sixteen shillings a week. She is a woman of practical wisdom and deep maternal instinct, described by Mrs. Medlock as "that sensible an' hard workin' an' goodnatured an' clean that no one could help likin' her whether they'd seen her or not." She had already intervened once on Mary's behalf, stopping Mr. Craven on the moor to speak about the child's need for fresh air and freedom. That earlier conversation had led Craven to grant Mary permission to play out of doors and to delay hiring a governess. Now, sensing that the time is right, Susan Sowerby writes again. The letter is directed in a hand Craven does not know, and it arrives at a moment of profound psychological change in him. He has been wandering through the most beautiful places in Europe—Norwegian fiords, Swiss valleys, the Austrian Tyrol—carrying a ten-year burden of grief that has made him a shadow to strangers. But on this journey, something has begun to shift. He has sat by a clear stream in a Tyrolean valley and felt, for the first time in a decade, "as if—I were alive!" The letter reaches him just after this fragile awakening, and it speaks directly to the part of him that is beginning to hope.
Narrative Function and Consequence
The letter functions as the final herald in the novel's restoration plot. It does not reveal the secret of Colin's recovery—that revelation is reserved for the reunion itself—but it creates the conditions for that reunion to occur. Craven's response to the letter is immediate: he orders his return to England and, on the long railway journey, finds himself thinking of his son with an attention he has not mustered in ten years. He remembers the black days when he raved like a madman because the child was alive and the mother was dead, and he recalls the small miserable thing that lifted great gray eyes to his face—eyes so like and yet so horribly unlike the happy eyes he had adored. But now, instead of giving way to thoughts of the worst, he actually finds he is trying to believe in better things. He stops at the Sowerby cottage on his way across the moor, though Susan Sowerby is not there—she has gone to help a woman with a new baby—and he gives a golden sovereign to the oldest child, to be divided into eight parts. This small act of generosity, unthinkable in his earlier state of frozen grief, signals the change that the letter has helped to crystallize. When he finally reaches Misselthwaite and walks through the garden, he hears the sounds of running feet and suppressed laughter, and the door in the ivied wall bursts open to reveal Colin—tall, handsome, glowing with life—dashing almost into his arms. The letter, then, is the practical instrument that brings the father home to witness the miracle the garden has wrought.
Thematic Significance
Susan Sowerby's letter embodies the novel's deepest conviction: that healing requires connection, and that connection often comes through the simplest, most direct human speech. The letter is not eloquent or literary; it is the plain speaking of a woman who knows what she sees and is not afraid to say it. It echoes the "broad Yorkshire" that Mary learns to speak and that Colin comes to love, a language of the earth and the moor that carries more truth than the polished phrases of doctors and nurses. The letter also completes the parallel between Susan Sowerby and Lilias Craven. Susan Sowerby tells Colin that his own mother is in the garden, that she could not keep out of it, and the letter she writes to Craven speaks in the same register as the dream-voice that calls "In the garden!" The letter is thus both a practical summons and a spiritual one, the voice of the living mother speaking for the dead one, calling the father home to the place where his son has come alive.
