Mothers, daughters and sisters — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Mothers, daughters and sisters
Themes
What you need to know
How Pinnock explores mothers and daughters across three lives, Enid and Mooma, Enid and her girls, Mai and Del, and the bond between the two sisters 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: 'Me gran'mother live til she a hundred and two', 'Many a time you couldn't find Mooma', 'She getting outta hand', 'You think it easy', 'You will look for another job', 'What's it feel like?', 'Did you beg?', 'Look at the little fat one', 'I bring up those two girls on me own'.
Three mothers and their daughters: Enid and Mooma, Enid and her girls, and Mai and Del as a chosen mother and daughter, with the sisters' teasing, rivalry and care.
Women at the head of the family: absent fathers and husbands, Enid as breadwinner, and Del choosing to bring up her baby alone.
OCR has set both relationships: family tension in June 2025 and the sisters in June 2024; its mark schemes trace the sisters from simmering tension in Scene 1 to the tussle at the end of Scene 5.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
