View a FREE sample

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

Short Answer Questions

1. In Chapter 12, when Hal decides that she does not feel like an athlete after all, she decides that she instead "feels like a grandmaster before a" (90) what?

2. How many teenage children do Harding and his wife Mitzi have together?

3. What liquid splashes onto Hal's face when the man with the lisp destroys her property?

4. For about how many minutes do Harding and Abel ask questions of Hal in Chapter 13 once she has been introduced to them?

5. What color is Hal's hair?

Short Essay Questions

1. What are the contents of Hester Westaway's will?

2. How does the reader come to find out that Maud and the writer of the diary had been cousins?

3. Describe Hal's job.

4. What does the narrator mean with the claim that Hal tells her clients not only what they wanted to hear, but "What they needed to know as well" (24)?

5. What drastic change in Hal's life occurred just before her 18th birthday?

6. Describe Hal's appearance.

7. What severe mistake does Hal nearly make when talking to Freddie, Harding's 12-year-old son, for the first time?

8. For what occasion must the Westaway family travel to Penzance together and how do they get there?

9. In what way does Hal turn her fear of meeting the Westaway family to her advantage?

10. How does the theme of trust enter the narrative within the diary entry featured at the end of Chapter 10?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Choose an object from The Death of Mrs. Westaway, such as the magpies, Maggie’s diary, or some other symbolic object and discuss its overall meaning and its connection to themes within the text.

Essay Topic 2

William Faulkner once famously claimed that the most important literature deals with the subject of the human heart in conflict with itself. Explain how the theme of Human versus Self is demonstrated within Ware’s novel The Death of Mrs. Westaway. Create a decisive, arguable claim and prove it with quotes from the novel.

Essay Topic 3

Discuss Ware's choice to tell the story of The Death of Mrs. Westaway using a third person omniscient narrator. What elements of the novel's themes lend themselves to this choice and what are Ware’s intended effects on the reader?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,065 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample