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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. When does Val cook complex meals?

2. Where is the book that Roland looks at usually kept?

3. What does Cropper do to the letters he is trying to buy from Daisy Wapshott?

4. How old is Roland?

5. How does Roland help Lady Joan Bailey?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Roland like about the library?

2. What do Roland and Maud do on their day trip?

3. What does Roland read at the end of the chapter?

4. In her diary, how does Ellen describe the visit she gets while Ash is away?

5. Who is responsible for ending the affair between Christabel and Ash?

6. What does Sir George plan to do at the end of the chapter?

7. Who are Ask and Embla?

8. How do Christabel and Ash feel about meeting secretly?

9. Describe the relationship between Blackadder and Cropper.

10. How does Roland react to Maud's idea of how to go about reading the letters?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Discuss the structure of the novel.

1) Why and how does the novel use letters, excerpts of poems, and journal entries in its telling of the story?

2) How does the novel gradually reveal the story of Ash and Maud?

3) How do the characters of Roland and Maud change over the course of the novel?

Essay Topic 2

The novel follows two parallel stories, one in the past and one in the present. Discuss the relationship of the past and the present in the novel.

1) How is communication possible between the past and the present?

2) What drives the characters to try to understand the past? Why does Roland study the past?

3) What do parallels between the past and the present say about human experience?

Essay Topic 3

Knowledge and reality are constructed in different ways throughout the novel, and one way is by the consensus of a society. Discuss knowledge and reality as a group agreement in the novel.

1) Discuss the story of the giant that Ash writes about from Yorkshire. How do the local people create knowledge through myth? Identify other examples of this in the novel.

2) How do scholarly groups create reality through consensus in the novel? How does this affect the relationship between what is known and the objective truth?

3) What happens when the individual's perspective is different from the group consensus, as with Swammerdam?

(see the answer keys)

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