Context — Pride and Prejudice — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The Georgian 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.
Georgian 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: a woman's money and legal rights belonging to her father and then her husband, small dowries, almost no paid work beyond being a lady's companion, 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.
OCR credits context in this essay only where it is relevant to the question: social, historical and cultural ideas, or literary context such as the conventions of the Gothic or of science fiction, woven into the argument rather than written as a paragraph of background.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
