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English Units 3/4: “ Year of Wonders ” - Some images/references to consider

The reference in the novel The significaance

the few hay stooks and scant wood-pile (3)

Mompellion’s dim, still, silent room (3)

the unswept courtyard and broken scythe (4-5)

The smell of rotting apple (6)

the neighbours’ cottage is empty, “the ivy already creeping across the win-dows and the grey lichen crusting the sills.” (10)

the walnut sapling in the middle of the road (10)

the “rustle of silk” that announces the presence of Elizabeth Bradford (12)

Anna Frith, “a woman who had faced more terrors than many warriors” (15)

Mompellion saying God is a poor lis-tener (17) and dropping the bible to the floor (19)

In contrast to Sam, “Mr. Viccars seemed never to have been confined at all.” (26)

“I held the soft gown up to me ... thrilled as a girl” (30) The gown George Viccars makes for Anna

Elinor’s appearance in contrast to her true character with the “driving energy to make and do” (35)



Josiah Bont “loved a pot (but) the pot did not love him” (36) He was “ever quick with a blow” (37)

Anna wondering about the “faraway craftsman” who fashioned the Mom-pellions’ chest (41)

Mompellion putting down the body of George Viccars “as tenderly as a fa-ther setting down a sleeping babe” (46)

The Gowdies’ garden - “my aunt and I are just the latest in a long line of women who have been charged with its care.” (51)

Anys Gowdie as a ten year old child arriving in Eyam - “she returned every stare and never flinched from the [pointed fingers.” (52)

Anys on marriage - “I’m not made to be any man’s chattel ... I have some-thing very few women can claim: my freedom.” (54)

Anna seeing the women in the Han-cock family through Anys’ eyes - “shackled to their menfolk as surely as the plough-horse to the shares.” (55)

As a soldier, Colonel Bradford was said to heave led his men “with un-common valour.” (57) Contrast this to his response to the plague.

The first mention of “plague” - “The word dropped like an anvil among the tinkling silverware” (60)

Anna ‘s descriptions of Eyam - “bleak country ... This is not a vivid place ... patchwork of greys” (65)Contrast to Oran in the final chapter.



Anna’s admiration for Anys - “I thought that she could teach me much about how to manage alone in the world.” (73)

The plague “is cruel ... its blows fall and fall again upon raw sorrows.” (81)

Anys’ comfort to Anna - “Your arms will not be empty forever. Remember that when the way looks bleak to you.” (84)

“In the midst of life, we are in Death.” (86)

“At the time ... all of us believed that God listened to such prayers.” (95)

Mompellion’s sermon - “the sermon that sealed our fates.” (101)

Mompellion to the villagers: “Good yield does not come without suffering ... struggle ... toil, and ... loss.” (103)

Mompellion to the villagers: “Let the boundaries of this village become our whole world.” (104)

Mompellion to the villagers: “I promise you this:while I am spared no one in this village will face their death alone.” (106)

Colonel Bradford’s descriptions of the villagers - “a few sweaty miners and their snotty-nosed brats.” (114)

While the Bradford carriage leaves Eyam, “men doffed their caps and



women curtsied, just as we had al-ways done, simply because that was what we had always done.” (116)

Mompellion to the villagers: “You are becoming a byword for goodness.” (119)

The birth of Mary Daniel’s baby - “in that season of death, we celebrated life.” (125)

Anna assists with other births - Kate Talbot, Lottie Mowbray (165)

Brand’s “own goodness drew him back” to Maggie in Bakewell (129)

Anna’s confrontation with her father in the tavern (133-135)

The description of Anna’s mother be-ing punished by Joss Bont. (133-135)

The description of how Anna’s mother died in childbirth. (120)

Anna taking the poppy resin (138, 142)

Elinor speaking to Anna about the poppies: “it is natural to want to forget when every day is a brimful of sad-ness. But those souls also forget those that they had loved.” (149)

Anna throws poppies in the fire (158)

Elinor’s past and Mompellion’s past (149-155, 279 - 282)

Anna - “I would try to be the woman



that Elinor wished me to be.” (158)

Elinor describing Mompellion’s will - “it can drive him to do what any nor-mal man cannot do.” (160)

The “Bradfords, safe in their Oxford-shire haven” (166)

Mr Stanley and others from the Puri-tan nonconformists coming to Mom-pellion’s sermons - “that they gath-ered with us at all was a wonder.” (168)

When Anna sees Elinor wearing the miner’s kit, she “wondered again about the strange turns this year was bringing to us.” (178)

Where Brand’s “goodness” drew him to return to help Maggie, Mompellion judges that there is no “goodness” left in the heart of Joss Bont. (193)

Rather than try to warn or help her fa-ther against the angry mob going to ‘deal with’ him, Anna stands like a “stone” and can only recall ‘the sting of his fist and the stink of his breath.” (200)

After telling Elinor of Joss Bont’s vio-lent past, Anna says, “The telling of this rinsed my mind clean and ... at the finish of it, I felt free of him” (209 - 210)

Anna’s growing understanding of the plague - “Perhaps the Plague was neither of God nor the Devil, but sim-ply a thing in Nature, as the stone on which we stub a toe.” (215)

How fear affects people - “Fear ... was working strange changes in all of us, corroding our ability for clear thought.” (227)



Anna’s jealousy for the love and ten-derness she believes exists between Mompellion and Elinor - something she does not have. She smashes the two dishes. (229)

Elinor tells Anna: “I wonder if you know how you have changed. It is the one good, perhaps, to come out of this terrible year ... You were like a flame blown by the wind until it is al-most extinguished. All I had to do was put the glass round you. And now, how you shine!” (235)

The Great Burning - “We had been stripped bare indeed.” (241)

Mompellion’s sermon on the Resur-rection - “Life endures” (254)

Andrew Merrick’s cockerel returns to its home from the hermit-hut where Merrick has been living. (254)

Mompellion greeting Aphra - “He, alone, did not back away.” (258)

Mompellion’s face “was all scored with expression lines and haggard now with exhaustion and grief.” (266)

Mompellion’s loss of faith in God and in life - “Untrue in one thing, untrue in everything.” (267)

Good news in Eyam after the plague - the widow Mary Hadfield is to marry the farrier in the village of Stony Mid-dleton, and there is now a sisterly bond between “the optimistic” Merry Wickford and the “grim and damaged” Jane Martin. (269)

Anna riding Anteros - “Here we are, alive ... and you and I will have to make of it what we can.” She imag-ines the hoofbeats saying, “We live, we live, we live.”



Anna thinks, “I was alive, and I was young, and I would go on until I found some reason for it.” (273)

Anna understood that “where Michael Mompellion had been broken by our shared ordeal, in equal measure I had been tempered and made strong.” (274)

Anna’s realisation after the birth of the Bradford baby girl - “I knew then that this was how I was meant to go on: away from death and towards life, from birth to birth, from seed to blos-som, living my life amongst wonders.” (287)

Mompellion thanks Anna and praises her - You, Anna, have recalled to me what my duties are ...For you grieve, and yet you live, and are useful, and bring life to others ... I think you have saved more than two lives this day.” (293)

Anna leaving Mompellion and Eyam - “I turned away from him and mounted unassisted, preferring an ungraceful scramble to the touch of his hand.” (294)

The descriptions of Oran and Anna’s life there in contrast to Eyam.(297 - 304)

See the earlier notes contrasting the beginning and the ending.

Anna’s realisation - “For I was not Eli-nor, after all, but Anna” and she is go-ing to “make something entirely new.” (299)

In Oran Anna is known as “mother of Jamie”.

Her two girls’ names - Aisha, the word for ‘life’ and ‘bread’; “she sustained



me” AND Elinor.

Brooks’ references to Biblical scrip-ture - pp. 19, 171, 242.








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