Read the following quotations from the first chapter of the novel.
For each quotation, firstly, identify the language technique (adjectives; onomatopoeia; use of senses; simile; metaphor; personification; use of short sentences; alliteration).
Secondly, explain the effect on the reader/ the atmosphere created.
| Quotation | Language Technique | What does this suggest to the reader |
| I have always liked…to smell the air, whether it is sweetly scented and balmy with the flowers of midsummer….or crackling cold from frost and snow. | ||
| The moaning rise and fall of the wind | ||
| High Hawthorn hedgerows | ||
| Dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles…locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel-houses and overgrown graveyards. | ||
| Footsteps creaking…fingers tapping…howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains | ||
| And then silence in the room. I shuddered. | ||
| I had always known in my heart that the experience would never leave me, that it was now woven into my very own fibres, an extricable part of my past… | ||
| Like an old wound, it gave off a faint twinge now and again… | ||
| … Of late, it had been like the outermost ripple on a pool, merely the faint memory of a memory. |
Mrs Cox English 