Literary Houses
from Mrs de Winter by Susan Hill

There was a rough, short path leading to a great gateway, with delicate, high, wrought iron gates between two stone pillars. We approached them almost holding our breath. And stopped and stood in silence, looking, looking down.

Below us, at the end of a drive, set in a bowl surrounded by grassy slopes that rose all around it, was the most beautiful house I had ever seen - more beautiful at once, to me, than Manderley, because it was not so imposing, not so frighteningly large and grand, but a house that went straight to my heart. I closed my eyes, opened them again, half expecting it to have vanished, to have been an illusion, born of my own wishes, but it was there, still, resting in the sun, a house of enchantments and of fairy stories; yet not some towered and turreted fantasy castle, but a rose red, many chimneyed Elizabethan manor house. It was set among lawns and rose-beds and pergolas and fountains and small ornamental ponds, but they were neglected and overgrown, not runback to nature, not quite unkempt, but as though someone who lived there could no longer cope, and had tried and failed to manage without sufficient help. The tree-dotted basin of green rose gently up around it, the barley sugar chimneys and the bricks of the walls were tinted soft ochre and geranium and shell pink, buff and apricot, and all merging and blending together like the walls and roofs of some sunlit Italian hilltop town.

There was no sign of life at all, no sound of voices or dogs, no smoke from the chimneys. Cobbett's Brake was empty now, but I did not think that it was abandoned, or unloved; it was not a lost house, nor beyond recall.

Q1 AF2
Identify precisely two details from the first paragraph which suggest anxiety.

Q3 AF5
How does the choice of language in these quotations, from paragraph two, suggest that the narrator's frist impressions of the house are positive?

Q4 AF4
What, precisely, is the function of each paragraph of this piece? Complete the table.

Q5 AF6
In what ways is this an effective opening to a novel? Suggest two.