Contextual Approaches to Prose

AO3 requires you to demonstrate understanding of the significance and influence of the contexts in which literary texts are written and received. For the prose set texts, this means understanding the historical, social, cultural, and literary contexts that shape how love is represented — and how different periods construct different meanings for desire, marriage, gender, and transgression.

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Historical and Social Contexts

The Regency Period: Persuasion (1817)

Context	Relevance
The Napoleonic Wars	Wentworth is a naval captain whose fortune and status depend on war — his career embodies the period's combination of opportunity and danger
The landed gentry	Sir Walter Elliot's obsession with rank and the Baronetage represents the declining authority of inherited status
Women's dependence	Anne has no independent income; her future depends on marriage. Lady Russell's advice to refuse Wentworth was motivated by economic prudence as much as snobbery
The marriage market	Bath functions as a marriage market where eligible women are displayed and assessed — Anne's discomfort in Bath reflects her resistance to being commodified

Austen wrote Persuasion in 1815–16, during the final years of the Napoleonic Wars. The novel values the "new" men — naval officers who have earned their status through merit — over the "old" aristocracy (Sir Walter Elliot) who have inherited theirs. This social context shapes the love plot: Anne's return to Wentworth is also a movement from the values of birth and rank toward the values of feeling and earned worth.

AO3 — Context: Austen's brother Francis was a naval officer who served at Trafalgar. Her detailed knowledge of naval life and the prize money system (by which officers became wealthy through captured enemy ships) informs the novel's representation of Wentworth's career and fortune.

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The Victorian Period: Jane Eyre (1847), Wuthering Heights (1847), Tess (1891)

Context	Relevance
The governess	Jane Eyre occupies one of the few respectable occupations available to an educated woman without money — the governess was a figure of particular social anxiety, inhabiting the space between family and servant
Industrialisation	Wuthering Heights is set in a pre-industrial landscape, but the novel was written in the midst of rapid industrial change — the wildness of the moors represents a world being lost
The "Condition of England" question	Victorian novelists were expected to engage with social problems; Hardy's Tess addresses agricultural poverty, sexual exploitation, and the hypocrisy of Christian morality
The Deceased Wife's Sister Act debates	Legal debates about marriage laws run through the Victorian period, reflecting shifting attitudes toward marriage as an institution
The double standard	Victorian sexual morality punished women for transgressions that men committed with impunity — Hardy's subtitle "A Pure Woman" was a direct challenge to this standard

Hardy published Tess in 1891, but it was so controversial that it was initially rejected by publishers. The novel's frank treatment of seduction, illegitimacy, and the hypocrisy of moral convention made it a sensation — and a scandal.

AO3 — Context: Hardy's subtitle — "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented by Thomas Hardy" — was a provocation. The Saturday Review called the novel "an unpleasant novel" and accused Hardy of "sucking the grapes of Eshcol to intoxication." The hostile reception reveals how deeply the novel challenged Victorian sexual morality.

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The Edwardian Period: A Room with a View (1908), The Go-Between (1953, set in 1900)

Context	Relevance
Social class	Edwardian England had a rigid class structure that The Go-Between dramatises through the Maudsley family and their relationship with tenant farmer Ted Burgess
Sexual repression	Forster's A Room with a View presents English middle-class sexual repression as a form of spiritual death — Italy represents the liberation of the body and feelings
The "New Woman"	The turn of the century saw increasing debate about women's roles; Lucy Honeychurch's struggle between Cecil (convention) and George (passion) reflects this cultural moment
The long Edwardian summer	The Go-Between uses the hot summer of 1900 as a metaphor for the last moment before the modern world — before the wars, before the class system's collapse