How Brontë explores religion, setting Brocklehurst's hypocrisy, Helen's faith and St John's zeal against Jane's own belief across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion', 'Love your enemies; bless them that curse you', 'Read the New Testament', 'the native of a Christian land', 'Where is God? What is God?', 'My Maker and yours', 'I am going to God', 'He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun', 'I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol', 'the servant of an infallible Master'.
Context: evangelical Christianity and William Carus Wilson's school, and the Preface's attack on self-righteousness.
Three versions of Christianity in Brocklehurst, Helen and St John, and the faith Jane makes her own.
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.
