Did you do A-Level English Literature?

[BrilliantineMortality]

When did you study it?
Can you remember what books you read?

For me, I did it between 1993-95. Can't believe I sat my exams 20 years ago . I found some of my set texts recently which jogged my memory as to the other books I studied:

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Have the men had enough - Margaret Forster
Oranges are not the only fruit - Jeanette Winterson
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan
The man who mistook his wife for a hat - Oliver Sacks (non-fiction component to the course)
King Lear
The Merchant of Venice
Ted Hughes' animal poems
John Keats' poems
The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
The Revenger's Tragedy - Tourneur/Middleton (A Jacobean play)

The thing that immediately strikes me is that the novels were all relatively contemporary with a (mostly) feminist slant. Probably because both my teachers were female and in their late twenties/early thirties, so these were probably the books that they had read in the preceding decade or so.

Only the John Keats' poetry from the 19th Century, which is pretty shocking, come to think of it now. Everything was either late 20th Century or much, much earlier. I loved doing my English Lit A Level, but reading this list back I can see that it didn't do me many favours when it came to study it for my degree.

SonorousBip for sheer unmitigated tedium I give you Rousseau's Confessions, 2 massive volumes, all in French, that can be basically summed up as 'me, me, me'. (That was yr 1 of degree in French and English. What were they thinking of???)

I never 'ad the Latin, duh, I was far too fick for that, my comprehensive school didn't even do it to GCSE

Even though Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur

Ah well, Et deinceps sursum

1985 -1987 for me!

Equus
Wuthering Heights
Hamlet
Coriolanus
The Miller's Tale
Prologue to the Canterbury Tales
Mansfield Park
Hardy - poems

Very fond memories of this time of my life. I'd left a small, oppressive school and chosen to do my A' Levels at a Tech College. One of the best decisions I made. My English Lit tutor was a fantastic woman - quite radical and so different from the stuffy, dull teachers I'd encountered up 'til then.

Virgil, Livy, Tacitus.

At university I was nearly killed off by Rabelais. Fuck me. Dumped literature indeed all my French options as soon as possible and eventually jumped ship to Linguistics so as to avoid any further contact. Juvenile.

Great thread. A nice trip down memory lane - but it's bloody hard to remember them all. I must have blocked them out!

Othello
Macbeth
The Woman in White
Heart of Darkness
Christina Rossetti poems
Arcadia
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Paradise Lost
Captain Corelli's Mandolin

We must have done more poetry, but I can't for the life of me remember what.

I quite fancy reinventing myself as an inspirational English teacher from these threads! (Degree in it in 1985!)

Also, Mansfield Park seems strangely popular, although not much liked!

SonorousBip: ""

Sorry, Sonorous. You never know, though, if you re-read it now, you might enjoy it. I find that stuff I hated at 18 I enjoyed years later, and vice versa.

So true, hackmum.

I hated Emma for about 20 years after doing it for A level. Mansfield Park, though, I love (strange, I know). At 18 I adored Hardy and Zola and now I can't read either of them.

Early 1980's, having trouble remembering but Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Persuasion, Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man, some Chaucer, seem to remember some Donne. we had a fantastic eng lit teacher, probably in her forties but old school, and really loved the Jane Austen and the Sassoon, and managed to convey it to a group of hormonal teens.

I did in 1988
Hamlet,
The Tempest
Great Expectations - hated at first, grew to love it!
The Great Gatsby
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Pride and Prejudice
The Wife of Bath's Tale
I remember doing my extended essay on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Have dredged up French A level texts;
La Porte Etroite
Antigone
Manon Lescaut - best of the bunch
Eugenie Grandet - have you seen the length of it! And to think someone up thread said students today do not read whole books for A Level.

French A-level texts:

Less Femmes Savantes (Moliere)
Terre des Hommes (Saint-Exupery))
La Symphonie Pastorale (Gide)
Trois Contes (Flaubert)

The striking thing is that in a subject dominated by female students (four out of five of us were girls), the books are all by male authors and very male-oriented. No female characters in Terre des Hommes, for examples. And the Moliere takes the piss out of clever women - an ideal choice for a bunch of 16-year old girls aiming at university.

You never know, though, if you re-read it now, you might enjoy it. I find that stuff I hated at 18 I enjoyed years later, and vice versa.

I remember reading Cranford at school when I was 13 or so. As we went round the class, reading it aloud, the teacher would often break into little giggles. We honestly could not see what she could possibly be laughing at: it was dull, dull, dull.

Of course, when I re-read it, years later (after my degree, when I actually wrote my dissertation on Mrs Gaskell's 'social problem' novels) I realised how hilarious it was.

I did. In 1999.

I can't remember everything we did but I do remember Paradise Lost, Tess of the D, Wuthering heights, hand maids Tale and Brave New World.

The only one I read was The Handmaids Tale. I got a B

83-85 I think

Richard II
The Return of the Native (and still have my copy)
Wuthering Heights (?)
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Rime of the Ancient Mariner (? - at some point, either O or A level)
Hamlet (and went on a school trip to the Barbican to see it, one of the first time's I'd ever been to London)
Chaucer - can't remember which one

1997
A room with a view and Where angels fear to tread - Forster
Death of a salesman
Some DH Lawrence short stories
Hamlet and Henry V
A streetcar named desire (this may have been gcse?)

Browning and Keats
There must have been some Dickens too.... gteat expectations or perhaps that was gcse too.

91-93

Selected Shorter Poems (Hardy)
The Winter's Tale (Shakespeare)
The Rover (Aphra Benn)
Sons & Lovers (Lawrence)

It was literature and language, so my other texts were

The Color Purple (Walker)
In Cold Blood (Capote)

They were the core texts, which we could take into the exam. I still have all six of them, read and reread and stick together with sellotape.

Actually what amazes me is how similar the texts are across the years.
The most influential thing of all for me was going to Paris just before A level in April 68 on a study fortnight and witnessing the first part of the student riots / revolution.
And here I am 47 years later living in the French countryside in retirement, with my life changed for ever by A level literature.

1980-1982 Oxford General paper

King Lear
Prologue to The Wife of Bath Tale and the Tale itself
Our Mutual Friend -Dickens
The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
Wordsworth don't no what as our teachers didn't teach it, so for the poetry we had no choice but to answer questions on:
Selected Works of TS Eliot
The White Devil

We also did critical appreciation, which meant we had to critique a text we hadn't studied in the exam. In the exam we had a poem about chickens. We kept poultry and I wrote a lot of in depth nonsense that I managed to 'draw out' from the poem. I got a higher grade than anticipated and I'm sure that's why!!

Some of these might be GCSE texts but I recall:

Captain Corellis Mandolin
The go-between (I HATED this book, thought the main character was such a wet weekend)
Silas Marner
Carol Ann Duffy poems
King Lear
Richard II
To Kill A Mockingbird

I studied it as an adult at night class, I think around 2004.

Equus
Othello
The Color Purple
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner (ugh)
Seamus Heaney
A Streetcar Named Desire
Of Mice and Men

DD and I have been going to sixth form open evenings.

Whenever we looked at the English department, they'd lay out the texts they were studying, and I'd get this little frisson of excitement and think I wish it was me doing A-level English rather than DD. (And DD doesn't even read very much so it's wasted on her!)

I have such fond memories of that time of my life. I loved A-level English.

1988

Anthony & Cleopatra
The Tempest

Austen - Emma
Conrad - The Secret Agent

Philip Larkin

Not RTFT yet, (though I will!) but I do remember what I studied as it was all rather old-fashioned...I was studying around 93-95 and it was:
Chaucer: Knights Tale
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Dickens: Tale of Two Cities
Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads
Shakespeare : Hamlet and Antony & Cleopatra
James Joyce : Dubliners

A really short syllabus as our teachers thought studying fewer texts in greater detail would stand us in better stead for the exams. There were loads more books on the curriculum they didn't bother to teach us but we were expected to read for ourselves. (It was a grammar school).

Shocking that there was only one female writer and one 20th century writer!

But the two teachers I had at A Level were the best I ever had and I loved studying everything on this list except bloody Wordsworth.

(Mr Mac and Mrs Thompson you were wonderful. Thank you).

also read Royal Hunt of the Sun - Peter Shaffer