Context — Jane Eyre — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The contexts of Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë's life, from Cowan Bridge school and her sisters' deaths to her work as a governess and her pen name Currer Bell,
the governess and women's position in early Victorian England, religion and charity schools, the Bildungsroman and the Gothic,
and how later readers have seen Bertha Mason in terms of empire, race and madness.
How to use this context in an answer about the novel rather than as background.
Charlotte Brontë's life: the Cowan Bridge school, where her two elder sisters fell ill before dying at home, her unhappy posts as a governess, and the pen name Currer Bell.
Lowood and Mr Brocklehurst drawn from Cowan Bridge and its founder, the evangelical clergyman William Carus Wilson, and a charity school's hunger, cold and disease.
The governess: an educated, middle-class woman paid to teach in a family's home, neither family nor servant, in one of the few respectable jobs open to her.
Women's position: married women's loss of property and legal independence, and marriage as the expected future for a woman without money.
Religion: evangelical severity against Christian charity, and the Preface's defence of the novel: 'Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion'.
The Bildungsroman, the novel of growing up, and the Gothic, with its imprisoned women, ghosts and doubles, and how Brontë combines them with romance and realism.
Bertha Mason, a Creole heiress from Jamaica, and later readings: empire and race, madness, Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).
Edexcel's 19th-century novel question doesn't mark context: knowing it helps you understand the novel, but exam answers spend their time on the extract's language in part (a) and on the whole novel in part (b).
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.
