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Copywork
About This Passage
Frances Hodgson Burnett personifies the Yorkshire wind as an invisible giant besieging Misselthwaite, then pivots immediately to the safety of an interior warmed by firelight. The free indirect discourse collapses narrator and child-consciousness: Mary translates a dialect word by listening to the world, and the reader learns it with her. This passage is a masterclass in sensory imagery, sentence-rhythm, and the Gothic trope of threatening exterior against sheltering hearth.
Mary did not know what “wutherin’ ” meant until she listened, and then she understood. It must mean that hollow shuddering sort of roar which rushed round and round the house as if the giant no one co...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell Chapter 5 in three paragraphs. First, summarize Mary's new outdoor routine and her encounter with the robin redbreast on the ivy-covered wall. Second, account for Mary's first moments of curiosity, laughter, and kindness toward another creature. Third, recount Martha's story of Mrs. Craven's death and the closing scene of the crying heard through the corridor at Misselthwaite Manor.
Discussion Questions
- Burnett tells us at the end of Chapter 5 that Four good things had happened to Mary at Misselthwaite: she had understood a robin, run until her blood grew warm, been healthily hungry, and found out what it was to be sorry for some one. Which of these four is the most ethically significant, and why does Burnett list them in this particular order?
- When Martha tells Mary about Mrs. Craven's death—the branch that broke, the garden that was loved, the husband who would not speak of it—the chapter gives us a story within a story. What does the embedded narrative reveal about Mr. Craven that his own behavior so far has only hinted at, and how does placing this revelation in a servant's dialect-speech rather than in the narrator's voice change its moral weight?
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
trembling convulsively; shaking with a deep, low vibration, as from cold, fear, or force.
Item 2
striking repeatedly with force; knocking about violently, as wind or waves against a solid object.
Item 3
empty inside; also, of a sound, having the deep, resonant, echoing quality of something that issues from an empty space.
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Critical Thinking
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