Context — Pride and Prejudice — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The Regency context of Pride and Prejudice: the landed gentry and the ranks above and below it, money and income as signs of status,
marriage as a woman's route to security, the entail on Longbourn, women's limited choices and legal position, and Austen's own life and narrative style.
How to use this context in an answer about the novel rather than as background.
Regency society: the gentry who lived on the income of their land, the ranks from Lady Catherine's titled family down to the Lucases and the Gardiners in trade, and incomes from Darcy's ten thousand a year to Mr Bennet's two thousand.
Marriage as almost the only route to security for a gentleman's daughter, and why Charlotte Lucas, at twenty-seven and without fortune, accepts Mr Collins.
Inheritance and the entail: why Longbourn must pass to Mr Collins rather than to any of Mr Bennet's five daughters, and what that means for them when he dies.
Women's limited options: coverture, small dowries, the governess as almost the only respectable work, and the disgrace an elopement could bring.
Austen's life and writing: First Impressions, drafted in 1796 and 1797 and revised into Pride and Prejudice for publication in 1813, and the ironic narrator and free indirect style of her novels.
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.
