AQA A-Level English Literature A

Writers have treated love very differently depending on when they wrote, who they were writing for and what their society allowed them to say. The texts on the love list run from the 1590s to the 2020s, and reading them together works best when you know which ideas of love each one is inheriting, arguing with or rejecting.

Love as a literary convention

Courtly love is the medieval idea, developed in French and Italian verse, that a knight or poet serves a lady he cannot have. The lover suffers, the lady is distant and often married or of higher rank, and the suffering is treated as ennobling. Petrarchan poetry, named after the Italian poet Petrarch (1304 to 1374), turned this into a set of habits: the beloved is praised through a string of comparisons, she is cold or cruel, and the lover is torn between hope and despair. English poets of the sixteenth century, Wyatt first among them, translated and adapted these habits, and Shakespeare's sonnets and many of his comedies gently mock them.

The sonnet is the form most closely tied to this tradition. A sonnet argues a case in fourteen lines, and the turn in the argument (the volta) often falls where the form changes: after eight lines in the Petrarchan sonnet, and near the final couplet in the Shakespearean one. Love poems in other forms, such as the dramatic monologue, the ballad and the free verse lyric, tend to be read against that background.

The seventeenth century adds two further groups. The Metaphysical poets (Donne and Marvell are the ones on the anthology) argue about love with startling, elaborate comparisons called conceits, and treat physical desire as something to be reasoned about. The Cavaliers, who supported Charles I, wrote lighter, more worldly verse (Lovelace is on the anthology), and the court wits of the Restoration, of whom Rochester is the one on the list, took the same worldliness further into frank verse about seduction, fidelity and its opposite. Both groups use the carpe diem argument, the appeal to seize the day before time and death end the chance.

Love, marriage and property

For much of the period, marriage was as much a matter of property and rank as of feeling, and most of the prose texts turn on this. Elizabethan and Jacobean drama assumes that a father gives his daughter to a husband, and that her consent, though it matters in the comedies and tragedies alike, is often overridden. In Jane Austen's world a woman without a fortune has few ways to secure her position except marriage, so a choice between love and security is a real choice about how to live. The Brontës and Hardy write with the same rules in view but push at them: Jane Eyre insists on equality, Catherine Earnshaw marries for status against her own feelings, and Tess is judged by a standard of purity that her society applies to women and not to men.

The nineteenth-century novel also tends to reward or punish characters according to whether their desires match what society approves. Marriage closes most of the plots. By the end of the century, writers such as Kate Chopin were beginning to ask what marriage costs a woman who wants a life of her own, and the twentieth-century novels on the list ask what is left when the old rules no longer hold. Class, money and the fall of the old social order shape The Great Gatsby, A Room with a View and The Go-Between, while Rebecca and Atonement return to the manor house and its secrets.

Love and gender

The poems and novels do not treat men and women as having the same freedoms. Early love poetry is almost always written by men about women, and the woman speaks rarely. Rossetti, Millay, Mew, Sexton and Duffy write from a woman's position, and their poems often ask who gets to speak, who gets to refuse and what a love poem can say that a man's poem has left out. Plays such as The Taming of the Shrew and Othello show women being talked about, given away or blamed, and the plays invite the audience to decide how far the play endorses that treatment or questions it.

Reading with an eye on gender does not mean deciding that a text is simply for or against women. It means noticing whose point of view the text gives, whose voice is missing and what the language does with a woman's body, reputation and choices.

Love, sex and taboo

The list covers romantic love of many kinds, and desire is often at the centre. Donne and Marvell write frankly about seduction, and Hardy's two poems on the list treat sex and social class with a dry humour. Dowson and Keats write of desire that haunts or wastes the person who feels it. The twentieth-century poets on the post-1900 anthology talk about sex in a plainer voice, including its failures and its dullness in long relationships (Larkin, Jennings, Cope). Prose texts push at what the age would print: Tess and The Awakening were both received badly by readers who thought them immoral, and Atonement (a love across class lines) and The Island of Missing Trees (a love across the two communities of Cyprus) deal with love that meets active disapproval.

Taboo and disapproval are themselves subjects. A love that the family, the church, the class system or the law forbids produces secrecy, and secrecy produces the plots of a number of the texts: Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre with their hidden histories, The Go-Between with its messenger carrying letters between forbidden lovers, and Othello with its lie about a secret affair.

Love and loss

Death, separation and betrayal are as common on the list as fulfilment. Rossetti's speaker asks to be forgotten if remembering would cause pain; Hardy's poems and novel look back on love as something time has altered; Gatsby's love is really love of a past he cannot recover; and The Winter's Tale ends with a reunion that comes sixteen years too late for some of the people involved. Jealousy, guilt and deception move the plots of Othello, The Winter's Tale, Jane Eyre, Rebecca and Atonement, and each of these texts shows how love can turn into possession.

Love and time

The theme is called love through the ages because the texts show ideas of love changing. A useful way to compare two texts is to ask what each takes for granted. One assumes that a lover's duty is to a family; another that love and marriage are one thing; another that love outside marriage can be honest; another that the private feelings of an individual matter more than any rule. Where two texts from different periods agree, that agreement tells you something about what stays constant. Where they disagree, the difference tells you what has changed.

Writers also handle time inside a single text. Wuthering Heights covers two generations and sets the second against the first; Persuasion is built on a second chance after eight years; Atonement and The Go-Between are narrated by people looking back on a summer that decided their lives. Structure, in other words, is one of the ways a text says something about love.