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.

and either the White Devil or the Duchess of Malfi, forget which.

The latter I think...

All really heavy stuff. I'm amazed I passed!

1982 here

King Lear
Metaphysical poets (still have a crush on John Donne)
The Spire (William Golding)
Dubliners (James Joyce)
Paradise Lost
A Handful of Dust

Can't remember any more.

Oh good thread.

1994

Um

Jane Eyre
Wide Sargasso Sea
Antony & Cleopatra
Talking Heads
Keats Collected Poems and Letters (ed Robert Gittings)
The Duchess of Malfi

There just have been more but that's all I've got. It was the Northern Exam Board.

I posted here earlier but couldn't remember all my French A-Level ones which have been racking my brains for all day! For what it's worth a couple more finally came back to me:

Vercors: Le Silence de la Mer (about the Resistance, at the time I thought it was dire)
Françoise Sagan: Bonjour Tristesse. Loved this so much & still dig it out all these years later, was a real rite of passage marker.

Good grief - I just went googling to see if I could find my A Level Eng Lit syllabus - I couldn't but I did find my O Level Eng Lang paper from 1966

www.csts.org.uk/exampapers-olevel-1966.htm

It doesn't ring any bells, amazingly

There are other papers there too - physics, maths, Geog, Art & TD, none of which I did that year, but also French which I did do.

The doodles are amusing

maradesbois, I did French A Level too (in 1969)

We had Racine & Corneille (Andromaque & Le Cid)
Maupassant short stories
Alain-Fournier - Le Grand Meaulnes
Cocteau - Antigone

& again I'm sure there was more but can't remember

Oh yes. To The Lighthouse was another.

(I later read the Penguin Bonjour Tristesse )

There's quite a lot mentioned here that I've read voluntarily & enjoyed - maybe I wouldn't have if I'd had to study them?

Handmaid's Tale
Gatsby
Pride & Prejudice
Wide Sargasso Sea
The Go Between
Cat's Eye
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Curious Incident

Those of you who studied these - did it ruin them for you?

1982 so hard to remember, but these are some of them:

Antony & Cleopatra
Coriolanus
John Donne & other metaphysical poets
Paradise Lost
Keats
Wordsworth
Chaucer - can't remember which
T S Eliot - Murder in the Cathedral
Jane Austen - Persuasion

Since some people are listing their French A level texts, we did:

Moliere - La Malade Imaginaire
Maupassant - short stories
Alain Fournier - Le Grand Meaulnes

Until I read this thread earlier, I'd have sworn I knew them all. However, have been tortured by my inability to remember them now!
Did mine 1991-93...

Definitely:
The White Devil, Webster
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy. Loved Hardy ever since.
The Mill on The Floss, Eliot
Some shite by Seamus Heaney.
Chaucer. No idea which bit now, but again, loved it and it inspired a life long passion of that period.

Don't recall any modern literature at all. Assume I did something..

Think Antony and Cleopatra was probably GCSE.

(In French I recall studying Antigone and something by Maupassant.)

1999-2001:

The Tempest
Richard II
Death Of A Salesman
The Great Gatsby
The Collector
The End Of The Affair
Dubliners
Bits and pieces of poetry - some Ted Hughes, some Yeats

Lovely but very scatty teacher at the local college. He had a way of describing the novels we did and the plays that had us champing at the bit to read them, but he would forget from one week to the next what we had done and not believe us when we told him.

We spent about a year and a half on Richard II and The Tempest just got squeezed in at the end somewhere. I enjoyed the course but some classmates complained so much they sent a substitute teacher for some cramming at the end.

We did some/all of these back in 1979:

Moderns
Philip Larkin - long since forgotten what it was
Robert Lowell - ditto
TS Eliot - The Four Quartets
F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Lawrence - The Rainbow (or was that O'Level?)
Greene - Brighton Rock (or that might have been O'Level)

Victorians
Dickens - Dombey and Son
Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South
George Eliot - Adam Bede ( I think)

Shakespeare
12th Night
Macbeth

We got taken to see Macbeth at the National Theatre with Dorothy Tutin and Albert Finney

1992-94 (I think!).

Chaucer: Prologue to the Canterbury Tales
Catch-22
Antony and Cleopatra
Can't remember what else, there were 4 set texts. Think it was an autobiography though, something about WW2.

In my defense, I did Eng Lit degree as well as moving 6th forms after L6th and I can't remember what I read where :o

1988 to 1990

Hamlet [loved it]
Much Ado About Nothing [aptly titled]
Poems of Wilfred Owen [strangely enjoyable considering the subject matter]
Canterbury Tales: Wife of Bath [everyone but me hated it]
Staying On by Paul Scott [pretty good]

Wuthering Heights [christ on crutches, what an awful book]
Seamus Heaney [zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, what?]
Hotel du Lac [of interest] by Anita Brookner.

Enjoyed most of it, and I did about as well as you can do.

1993-1995

The ones I remember are:
Shakespeare - King Lear
Chaucer - The Nun's Priest's Prologue and Tale
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Doris Lessing - Martha Quest (which I hated)
Poetry was R S Thomas plus a shed load of random poems to prepare us for our literary criticism paper on unseen texts.

French A Level was
Le Grand Meaulnes - Alain Fournier
La Bête Humaine - Zola
Le Blé en Herbe - Colette
L'Avare - Molière
For oral I did a couple of Camus books: La Chute and Le Malentendu

German's a bit fuzzier mainly because I hated it I guess but I do remember Max Frisch's Biedermann und die Brandstifter

1995-97. Cambridge exam board
We did a module on the Gothic which I loved, included things like
Edgar Allen Poe stories
The Monk
Mysteries of Udolpho
Frankenstein

Tess of the D'Urbervilles (loved)
Pride And Prejudice (still one of my very favourite novels)
Hamlet
TS Eliot The Wasteland and Four Quartets (or that might have been GCSE)
Duchess of Malfi (somewhat dry..)
A Streetcar Named Desire (inspired bit of a Tennessee Williams obsession)

All I can remember...

On the whole really enjoyed it and went on to do English lit at Uni.

Poems of Seamus Heaney - I was fascinated by his poems about bog bodies. I used to read archaeology books for pleasure (my screen obsessed children cannot fathom this!) and was a bit disappointed when I realised that the bog bodies he wrote about (Tollund Man and Grauballe Man) were found in Denmark. Then lo and behold in the middle of my A level course a bog body was found not a mile from where I lived - Lindow Man. This all made a huge impression on me and brought those poems to life.

Also studied Othello, Hamlet, Duchess of Malfi, The Go Between, Wuthering Heights, some Chaucer (Miller's Tale I think), Rime of the Ancient Mariner I think as well. JMB Eng Lit, sat in 1985. I still have the annotated texts for some of these on my shelf. It would be strange to go back and read them again I'm not sure whether my middle aged eyes would make out the tiny feint pencil notes filling all the margins!

I remember the French texts I did for A Level too- Vol De Nuit and Courier Sud by Saint Exupery. Extremely boring.
My Russian lit texts were marginally better- Three Sisters- Chekhov, The Brone Horseman (long, long poem) by Pushkin, and a novel called Seryozha - about a little boy called Sergei, which was o.k, although it took forever to read.

I'm quite envious of the OP's syllabus!

I took my A-levels in 1980. For English, we did:

Chaucer - the General Prologue and the nun's priest's tale
Shakespeare - Much ado about nothing and Anthony and Cleopatra
Milton - Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost book 4
Christopher Marlowe - Dr Faustus
Ben Johnson - The Alchemist
Dh Lawrence - Sons and Lovers
Thomas Hardy - Return of the Native
George Eliot - Mill on the Floss
John Donne - selected poems

Think that's it. A pretty traditional selection.

I have no idea why I am so fixated with this thread.

I've just remembered that I also did Jane Eyre (which I loved beyond belief - a real pivotal book for me), Fathers and Sons by Edmund Gosse (bemusing and deathly dull study of the Plymouth Brethren) and Waiting for Godot (mystifying twaddle). Still can't remember doing any poetry. Mine was a very, very traditional selection - nothing later than late 1950's (Look Back in Anger) and no novel later than Victorian times. One of my teachers was a shouty and very uncharismatic nun.

I see your French A level books and raise you German A level. If there is a duller book than "Die verlorene Ehere des Katharina Blum" by Heinrich Boll (you know what - can't even be bothered to dignify it by googling it to check spelling!), then I have yet to read it. And I've read Sir Philip Sydney's "Arcadia" - a special treat of dullness saved for English literature undergraduates.

Latin A-level anyone? The Aeneid Book Six (fantastic) and Lucretus, De Rerum Natura which I could not get my head around. It was part of a philosophy module and I found it impossible to read it as anything other than poetry.

General reading also got me into Catullus and Horace. How I wish I could have done them as set books.

Drama, the only one on your list I did for A Level was Ant n Cleo. I still quite like it, and Shakespeare in general. We also had to read Romeo and Juliet as well, though we weren't examined on it.

Actually, I think it was the Miller's Tale that Squinty banned, not the Wife of Bath. Whichever one it was, it was the rudest, and we had to read the most boring instead.

Ladybird, I only did Latin to O Level - Aeneid IV, Catullus (loved him), Pliny (lots of guff about being at his desk and considering the delights of his country estate, where one can hunt, ride, throw the javelin, yawn, yawn some more, fall asleep in a puddle of sunlight shining through the classroom window).

My mother told me that if I thought Pliny was bad, I should be grateful that I didn't have to do Caesar's Gallic Wars, because that bored her into a coma, c.1945.

I think we did a bit of Juvenal as well. I'm still sad that I wasn't terribly good at Latin, because the Romans are really interesting.