Love and marriage — Pride and Prejudice — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Love and marriage
Themes
What you need to know
How Austen explores marriage for love, money and security, and the contrasting marriages of the Bennets, Charlotte, Lydia, Jane and Elizabeth 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: 'the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters', 'A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment', 'the violence of my affection', 'solely from the pure and disinterested desire of an establishment', 'It was an union that must have been to the advantage of both', 'how little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple', 'unless you truly esteemed your husband', 'let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life', 'I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy'.
The novel's marriages compared: convenience (Charlotte), passion (Lydia, and the Bennets long ago), and love built on esteem (Jane and Elizabeth).
Context: marriage as a woman's main route to security, and how marrying well could raise a family's standing.
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.
