Jane Bennet and Mr Bingley — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Jane Bennet and Mr Bingley
Characters
What you need to know
How Austen presents Jane Bennet and Mr Bingley, and how the character develops across the text: two gentle, trusting natures whose courtship is broken off by others and then renewed.
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: 'she is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld', 'All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes', 'their brother's fortune and their own had been acquired by trade', 'a woman had better show more affection than she feels', 'Whatever I do is done in a hurry', 'He may live in my memory as the most amiable man of my acquaintance, but that is all', 'the slave of his designing friends', 'my confidence was as natural as your suspicion', 'by far too much. I do not deserve it', 'so easy, that every servant will cheat you; and so generous, that you will always exceed your income'.
Jane and Bingley as foils to Elizabeth and Darcy: open, trusting and easily guided, where the other pair are proud and quick to judge.
Context: Bingley's fortune from trade, his sisters' wish to forget it, and his father's plan to buy an estate that Bingley has yet to carry out.
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.
