Literature A Level English Worksheets, Questions and Revision

Read this opening: 'The house had been shut for eleven years. Miss Harrow moved through it as one moves through the rooms of a memory, touching nothing. In the drawing room the sheets over the furniture had grown a fine grey pelt; she lifted one corner, saw the arm of a chair beneath, and let it fall. Someone had left a cup. It had held tea, once.' Plan and open an answer to: how does the writer present Miss Harrow's relationship with the house?

1. Establish an overview from the whole extract: the house is presented as a preserved past that Miss Harrow visits without reclaiming, so the relationship is one of intimacy held deliberately at arm's length.
2. Find the structural spine. The passage moves from a bare factual statement of time, to a simile about memory, to a single physical gesture, to a small abandoned object. It narrows from eleven years to one cup, and that narrowing is the point: the past is felt through detail, not summary.
3. Choose paragraph one: the simile 'as one moves through the rooms of a memory'. It converts the house from a place into a mental space, and the impersonal 'one' generalises the experience, distancing her even from her own feeling.
4. Choose paragraph two: the refusal of touch. 'Touching nothing' is absolute, and the one gesture she does make is immediately undone by 'let it fall'. The verb sequence lifted, saw, let fall enacts a decision not to disturb.
5. Choose paragraph three: the language of neglect made bodily. 'A fine grey pelt' turns dust into animal fur, so the abandoned house is quietly alive, and the reader feels the passage of time as growth rather than decay.
6. Choose paragraph four: the ending. The short sentence 'Someone had left a cup' is factual and flat after the lyrical simile, and the pluperfect with 'once' in 'It had held tea, once' places the human moment irretrievably in the past. The passive 'someone' refuses to name who, which is exactly what she is not confronting.
7. Write the opening sentence: the writer presents the relationship as one of careful non-possession, in which Miss Harrow's intimacy with the house is expressed through what she declines to touch and what the prose declines to explain.