The Little Girl Summary & Notes - CBSE Class 9 English Beehive

Summary of The Little Girl

Chapter 3 of the Class 9 English textbook ‘Beehive’ – The Little Girl is a story about Kezia, a little girl who feared her father. So, did her feelings for her father change with time? To know this, you need to read the prose summary in CBSE English Notes Class 9 format. CBSE Class 9 students can access the prose summary of the CBSE Class 9 English Prose Notes – The Little Girl here to get an in-depth understanding of the chapter.

Students can also know how to write an effective essay during the exam by going through the Essay page at BYJU’S to increase marks in Class 9 English papers.

CBSE Class 9 English The Little Girl Summary

The Little Girl was written by Katherine Mansfield. This story is about a girl named Kezia who lived with her parents and grandmother. However, she was always afraid of her father and avoided him as much as she could. She took a great sigh of relief whenever he left for work. She trembled with fear whenever she confronted him. She would mumble in terror whenever she was near him. According to her, her father was a rude and harsh person, and she would try hard not to approach him directly whenever he was at home.

Kezia’s grandmother would always tell her to understand her parents in a better way. She would often encourage the little girl to chat with her parents in the drawing room. The young girl, however, always received cold treatment from her parents. One day, her grandmother advised Kezia that she should make a pin cushion as a gift for her father’s birthday that was coming the following week. Kezia stitched three sides of the cushion laboriously and kept one side open to stuff the case with something. She wondered what she could stuff it with and wandered into her mother’s bedroom to search for some scraps. There, she found numerous sheets of fine paper; she accumulated them, tore them into small pieces and, stuffed the pin-cushion case, and then sewed the fourth side.

Those papers were actually her father’s great speech for the Port Authority. When Kezia’s mother came to know that the little girl had torn those sheets of paper, she called her daughter to the drawing room immediately. Her father was angry with her, and he didn’t even listen to why she tore the sheets of paper. He simply punished her; he hit her with a ruler on her little, pink palms. Kezia sobbed miserably but failed to understand why she was punished for speaking the truth and accepting the blunder that she had committed. She felt miserable and silently wept and questioned God’s purpose in creating fathers. Later in the evening, she saw Mr. Macdonald playing with his children and having a merry time with them. From this incident, she analysed that all fathers do not have the same behaviour. She realised that there are some fathers like Mr. Macdonald who are kind and loving, whereas there are some who are rude and harsh, like her father.

However, Kezia’s demeanour towards her father soon transformed. One day, suddenly her mother fell ill and was hospitalized. Her grandmother went along with her mother. So, Kezia was left alone in the house with no one around except the cook, Alice. During the daytime, everything went well but during night-time, Kezia found it hard to sleep. She had a dreadful nightmare of a butcher holding a knife and a rope, who came closer smiling wretchedly, and she was unable to move from that place. This nightmare woke her up, and when she opened her eyes, she noticed that her father was standing right next to her.

Soon Kezia’s father took her to his bedroom and made her a cosy and comfortable place to sleep on his bed. Besides he also told her that she could rub her feet against his legs for some warmth. Later, she felt very safe and comfortable in her father’s company and that he wasn’t as bad as she had assumed him to be. She could feel the fatherly love that she felt deprived of all this while and understood that her father loved and cared for her in his own way. Kezia realised that her father was usually cranky every day for the hard work he did to earn a living for his family and was too tired by evening to come and play with her. After that day, the little girl honoured, loved and cared for her father as much as she loved her grandmother and mother.

Conclusion of The Little Girl

The chapter – The Little Girl teaches us how a loving and caring relationship between parents and children can help strengthen the bond and attachment in the family. We should try to understand each other instead of finding faults in others. Here’s a simple attempt from our end to guide students in understanding the chapter thoroughly from this CBSE Class 9 English Beehive Prose Summary of The Little Girl. BYJU’S offers various resources such as CBSE notes and CBSE study material. Students can access question papers of different years and CBSE sample papers by visiting BYJU’S website. For more educational content, they can download BYJU’S – The Learning App and explore a plethora of useful resources.