2019

AP English Literature
®

and Composition
Free-Response Questions

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 2019 AP® ENGLISH LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS
ENGLISH LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION
SECTION II
Total time—2 hours

Question 1

(Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)

Carefully read P. K. Page’s 1943 poem “The Landlady.” Then, in a well-organized essay, analyze the speaker’s
complex portrayal of the landlady. You may wish to consider such elements as imagery, selection of detail, and tone.

The Landlady

Through sepia air the boarders* come and go, Yet knows them better than their closest friends:
impersonal as trains. Pass silently their cupboards and the secrets of their drawers,
the craving silence swallowing her speech; their books, their private mail, their photographs
click doors like shutters on her camera eye. are theirs and hers.
Line
5 Because of her their lives become exact: 25 Knows when they wash, how frequently their clothes
their entrances and exits are designed; go to the cleaners, what they like to eat,
phone calls are cryptic. Oh, her ticklish ears their curvature of health, but even so
advance and fall back stunned. is not content.

Nothing is unprepared. They hold the walls And like a lover must know all, all, all.
10 about them as they weep or laugh. Each face 30 Prays she may catch them unprepared at last
is dialled to zero publicly. She peers and palm the dreadful riddle of their skulls—
stippled with curious flesh; hoping the worst.

pads on the patient landing like a pulse, *boarders: people who rent rooms in a private home
unlocks their keyholes with the wire of sight,
15 searches their rooms for clues when they are out, Reprinted from KALEIDOSCOPE by P.K. Page by permission of the
Porcupine’s Quill. Copyright © The Estate of P.K. Page 2010.
pricks when they come home late.

Wonders when they are quiet, jumps when they move,

dreams that they dope or drink, trembles to know
the traffic of their brains, jaywalks their street .
20 in clumsy shoes.

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 2019 AP® ENGLISH LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS
Question 2
(Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)
Carefully read the following excerpt from William Dean Howells’ novel The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Then, in
a well-constructed essay, analyze how the author portrays the complex experience of two sisters, Penelope and Irene,
within their family and society. You may wish to consider such literary elements as style, tone, and selection of
detail.

They were not girls who embroidered or about in the hotel parlors, looking on and not knowing
abandoned themselves to needle-work. Irene spent her 40 how to put themselves forward. Perhaps they did not
abundant leisure in shopping for herself and her care a great deal to do so. They had not a conceit of
Line mother, of whom both daughters made a kind of idol, themselves, but a sort of content in their own ways
5 buying her caps and laces out of their pin-money,1 that one may notice in certain families. The very
and getting her dresses far beyond her capacity to strength of their mutual affection was a barrier to
wear. Irene dressed herself very stylishly, and spent 45 worldly knowledge; they dressed for one another;
hours on her toilet2 every day. Her sister had a they equipped their house for their own satisfaction;
simpler taste, and, if she had done altogether as she they lived richly to themselves, not because they were
10 liked, might even have slighted dress. They all three selfish, but because they did not know how to do
took long naps every day, and sat hours together otherwise. The elder daughter did not care for society,
minutely discussing what they saw out of the window. 50 apparently. The younger, who was but three years
In her self-guided search for self-improvement, the younger, was not yet quite old enough to be ambitious
elder sister went to many church lectures on a vast of it. With all her wonderful beauty, she had an
15 variety of secular subjects, and usually came home innocence almost vegetable. When her beauty, which
with a comic account of them, and that made more in its immaturity was crude and harsh, suddenly
matter of talk for the whole family. She could make 55 ripened, she bloomed and glowed with the
fun of nearly everything; Irene complained that she unconsciousness of a flower; she not merely did
scared away the young men whom they got not feel herself admired, but hardly knew herself
20 acquainted with at the dancing-school sociables. discovered. If she dressed well, perhaps too well, it
They were, perhaps, not the wisest young men. was because she had the instinct of dress; but till
The girls had learned to dance at Papanti’s; 3 but 60 she met this young man who was so nice to her at
they had not belonged to the private classes. They did Baie St. Joan,4 she had scarcely lived a detached,
not even know of them, and a great gulf divided them individual life, so wholly had she depended on her
25 from those who did. Their father did not like mother and her sister for her opinions, almost her
company, except such as came informally in their sensations. She took account of everything he did and
way; and their mother had remained too rustic to 65 said, pondering it, and trying to make out exactly
know how to attract it in the sophisticated city what he meant, to the inflection of a syllable, the
fashion. None of them had grasped the idea of slightest movement or gesture. In this way she began
30 European travel; but they had gone about to mountain for the first time to form ideas which she had not
and sea-side resorts, the mother and the two girls, derived from her family, and they were none the
where they witnessed the spectacle which such resorts 70 less her own because they were often mistaken.
present throughout New England, of multitudes of
girls, lovely, accomplished, exquisitely dressed, 1 pin-money: money used for small expenses and incidentals
35 humbly glad of the presence of any sort of young 2 toilet: dressing and grooming
3 Papanti’s: a fashionable social dance school in nineteenth-century
man; but the Laphams had no skill or courage to make
Boston
themselves noticed, far less courted by the solitary 4 Baie St. Joan: a Canadian resort
invalid, or clergyman, or artist. They lurked helplessly

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2019 AP® ENGLISH LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION FREE-RESPONSE QUESTIONS
Question 3

(Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)

In his 2004 novel Magic Seeds, V. S. Naipaul writes: “It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where
the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.”

Select a novel, play, or epic poem in which a character holds an “ideal view of the world.” Then write an essay in
which you analyze the character’s idealism and its positive or negative consequences. Explain how the author’s
portrayal of this idealism illuminates the meaning of the work as a whole.

You may choose a work from the list below or one of comparable literary merit. Do not merely summarize the plot.

The Alchemist The Importance of Being Earnest

Antigone Invisible Man
The Awakening King Lear
The Bluest Eye Lolita
Brave New World The Mill on the Floss
Brideshead Revisited My Ántonia
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Native Son
Candide Odyssey
The Catcher in the Rye The Portrait of a Lady
Death of a Salesman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Don Quixote The Sound and the Fury
A Gesture Life The Sun Also Rises
Great Expectations The Tempest
The Great Gatsby To Kill a Mockingbird
The Handmaid’s Tale When the Emperor Was Divine
The House of Mirth

STOP

END OF EXAM

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