Elizabeth Bennet — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Elizabeth Bennet
Characters
What you need to know
How Austen presents Elizabeth Bennet, and how the character develops across the text: a witty, quick-judging heroine whose prejudice against Darcy gives way to self-knowledge and love.
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: 'a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous', 'I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine', 'You could not make me happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman in the world who would make you so', 'your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others', 'I, who have prided myself on my discernment!', 'I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away', 'I am only resolved to act in that manner which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness', 'I am not to be intimidated into anything so wholly unreasonable', 'It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began'.
Elizabeth as a heroine whose judgement is often wrong, and how the narrator lets readers share her mistakes before she sees them.
Context: a gentleman's daughter with little fortune who turns down two offers of marriage, and the deference expected of a young woman that her wit and independence test.
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.
