Family and reputation — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Family and reputation
Themes
What you need to know
How Austen explores parents and children, a family's behaviour in public, and how Lydia's elopement threatens her sisters' reputations 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: 'had her family made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening', 'Our importance, our respectability in the world, must be affected', 'Lydia will never be easy till she has exposed herself in some public place or other', 'this false step in one daughter will be injurious to the fortunes of all the others', 'will connect themselves with such a family?', 'throw off your unworthy child from your affection for ever', 'Do not let us quarrel about the past', 'I defy even Sir William Lucas himself to produce a more valuable son-in-law'.
Parents who fail their children: Mr Bennet's indulgence and Mrs Bennet's encouragement of Lydia, set against the Gardiners' good sense.
Context: why an elopement disgraced a whole family, and how each Bennet daughter's chance of marrying depended on the family's good name.
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.
