Helen Burns and Miss Temple — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Helen Burns and Miss Temple
Characters
What you need to know
How Brontë presents Helen Burns and Miss Temple, and how the character develops across the text: Jane's models at Lowood: Helen's patient faith and Miss Temple's kindness and self-control.
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: 'It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself', 'Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs', 'I am, as Miss Scatcherd said, slatternly', 'It was as if a martyr, a hero, had passed a slave or victim, and imparted strength in the transit', 'By dying young, I shall escape great sufferings', 'when you hear that I am dead, you must be sure and not grieve', 'I have ordered that a lunch of bread and cheese shall be served to all', 'her brow settled gradually into petrified severity', 'when a criminal is accused, he is always allowed to speak in his own defence', 'had stood me in the stead of mother, governess, and, latterly, companion', 'I had imbibed from her something of her nature and much of her habits'.
Context: Helen's death from consumption, which recalls the deaths of Charlotte Brontë's elder sisters after Cowan Bridge.
Helen's patience against Jane's anger, and Miss Temple's self-control as a model Jane copies and then outgrows.
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.
