How Dickens presents Estella, and how the character develops across the text: the girl raised to break men's hearts, her coldness to Pip, her marriage to Drummle and her change through suffering.
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: 'He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!', 'Why don't you cry again, you little wretch?', 'that I have no heart', 'We are not free to follow our own devices, you and I', 'I am what you have made me', 'Take all the praise, take all the blame; take all the success, take all the failure; in short, take me', 'When you say you love me, I know what you mean, as a form of words; but nothing more', 'You address nothing in my breast, you touch nothing there', 'suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be'.
Her parentage: the daughter of Magwitch and of Molly, Jaggers's housekeeper, brought up as a lady to take revenge on men.
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.
