Elizabeth Lavenza — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Elizabeth Lavenza
Characters
What you need to know
How Shelley presents Elizabeth Lavenza, and how the character develops across the text: Victor's adopted cousin and bride: her goodness, her defence of Justine, and her death on the wedding night.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I have a pretty present for my Victor', 'mine to protect, love, and cherish', 'a possession of my own', 'The saintly soul of Elizabeth shone like a shrine-dedicated lamp in our peaceful home', 'She looked steadily on life, and assumed its duties with courage and zeal', 'who is safe, if she be convicted of crime?', 'when I see a fellow-creature about to perish through the cowardice of her pretended friends', 'men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other's blood', 'when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?', 'Do you not love another?', 'our marriage would render me eternally miserable, unless it were the dictate of your own free choice', 'Something whispers to me not to depend too much on the prospect that is opened before us', 'her bloodless arms and relaxed form flung by the murderer on its bridal bier'.
Context: the women of the novel, Elizabeth, Justine, Caroline and Safie, and Mary Shelley as the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Elizabeth's letters as one of the few women's voices in the novel, and her death as the creature's revenge on Victor.
Edexcel's novel question has two parts, and neither marks context: part (a) on the printed extract marks language, form and structure (AO2); part (b) on the novel elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1), not language analysis. Use context only where it explains a reading, and say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
