HookA historian proved that 'love' has a date of birth
In 1977 the Princeton historian Lawrence Stone published The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 and made a claim that ought to unsettle every reader of love poetry: the emotion itself has a history. Marriage among the propertied, Stone argued, began the period as a cold dynastic bargain — a transfer of land and alliance in which affection was optional and a daughter's obedience was not — and only slowly, over three centuries, warmed into the 'companionate marriage' we now assume is natural, a union of two people who actually choose each other. Historians still argue about his dates, but his provocation stands: what a Jacobean playwright and a Victorian novelist meant by 'love' were not the same thing, because the institution the word sat inside had changed underneath it.
That is the exact discipline Section C tests. The comparison question hands you an aspect of love and asks you to compare how two texts — written in different periods, in different genres, one of them pre-1900 — present it. It is the widest question on the paper, assessing all five assessment objectives at once: your argument (AO1), the writers' methods (AO2), the contexts that shaped them (AO3), the connections between them (AO4) and the interpretations they invite (AO5). The spine that holds all five together is AO4 — connection across time — and once you see the question as a short history of an emotion, the rest of the essay knows where it is going.
ModelConnection is the engine — continuity and change (AO4)
AO4 is what makes this a comparison rather than two essays sharing a page, and at A-level it is more than spotting that both texts 'mention love'. The rich move is to trace continuity and change: the deep concern the two texts share, and the way each period turns it differently. Love bound to mortality, love at war with social duty, love as possession, love as a performance — these run for centuries, but a metaphysical poet, a Romantic novelist and a modern voice each face them with the tools and assumptions of their moment. Your job is to hold the constant and the variable in one hand.
The strongest connections are conceptual, not incidental. 'Both texts use flowers' is thin; 'both treat desire as a force that transgresses the social order, but where the earlier text stages transgression as thrilling, the later stages it as ruinous' is the kind of connection that carries a whole essay. Frame the pairing as a conversation across time in which the later text seems to answer, resist or darken a possibility the earlier one opened.
MechanismOne argument that spans both texts (AO1)
AO1 rewards a single controlling argument, and in a comparison that means an argument built across the pair, not two arguments running in parallel. Decide, before you write, what your overall answer to the question is — the thesis both texts will be marshalled to test — and open with it. Then structure by idea. The fatal habit is the 'slab': all of Text A, then all of Text B, then a paragraph of comparison at the end. It caps the mark because the texts never actually meet. Instead, give each paragraph a shared point of comparison and move between the texts inside it, so the reader sees the two works thinking about the same thing at once.
Balance is assessed. An essay that spends three-quarters of its length on the text you know better cannot reach the top band, however good those paragraphs are. Plan roughly equal weight, and let the comparison — not either text on its own — be the thing the essay is about.
A model integrated paragraph pairing two original demonstration snippets (so no set text is reproduced). Snippet A, in a seventeenth-century carpe-diem register: 'Then let us spend what light we have, / for the grave's a cold and narrow house.' Snippet B, in the register of a Victorian novel: 'She married him in the spring, and by the second winter had learned to call the arrangement contentment.' The paragraph: 'Both texts measure love against time, but they run the clock in opposite directions. The earlier voice uses mortality as a goad — the cold and narrow house of the grave makes seizing desire now feel not reckless but rational, and the urgent imperative let us spend turns love into something to be used before it is lost. The later text inverts the argument entirely: time here is not a spur to passion but the slow tutor of resignation, and the quietly devastating verb learned — one learns contentment as one learns a language, by effort and repetition — reveals a marriage that has replaced desire with endurance. Where the first insists love must outrun time, the second shows love outlived by it.' Notice the AO4 and AO1 machinery: both texts in the same paragraph, a shared idea (love versus time), a precise divergence (seizing versus enduring), method quoted from each (imperative and metaphor against a single loaded verb), and one connective thread — no slab.
ModelComparing methods across genres (AO2)
AO2 here is complicated and rewarded by the fact that the two texts are usually in different genres — often one poem and one prose work — so you are comparing unlike tools doing similar jobs. A poem compresses; it works through the line-break, the image, the volta, the pressure of metre. Prose expands; it works through narrative voice, the shaping of time, free indirect discourse that slips us in and out of a character's head, the accumulation of detail across pages. The comparison is not weakened by the difference in form — it is sharpened by it. Ask how each genre's characteristic method handles the shared idea: how a lyric stages a single charged moment where a novel can show the same feeling curdle over years.
Do not compare surfaces; compare effects. 'Both use imagery' is a dead end. 'The poem lands its whole meaning on one withheld word, while the novel achieves the same disenchantment slowly, through a narrator who lets us watch the character deceive herself' compares method to method with the effect in view.
ContextPeriod, values and convention shape each text (AO3)
AO3 asks how the time and place of writing shaped each text, and in a comparison across periods it is doing real work, not ornament. The precise contexts that matter for love are things like the shift Stone described — from marriage as economic contract to companionate, chosen union; the fact that a wife's legal and economic identity was long largely absorbed into her husband's, so a woman's choice in love carried consequences a modern reader underrates; the courtly and Petrarchan conventions that scripted early desire; the Romantic elevation of individual feeling above social rule; and the changing policing of female chastity and reputation. Literary conventions are context too: a metaphysical conceit, a carpe diem argument, a Gothic transgression each belong to a moment.
The mark comes only when context alters a reading. 'This was written in 1650' is inert; 'because a match like this threatened a family's property and standing, the poem's private passion is also a public provocation' turns a date into analysis. Use context to explain why each text treats love as it does — that is the difference across your two periods made visible.
InterpretationsWeighing readings of the pair (AO5)
AO5 rewards awareness that neither text, and neither pairing, has a single settled meaning. The subtle version in a comparison is that the same connection can be read more than one way. Does the later text represent moral progress — a more honest, more equal love — or simply a different set of constraints dressed as freedom? Is the earlier text's passion admirable or alarming? A confident essay stages that debate rather than assuming an answer, and it can borrow real critical lenses to do so: a feminist reading attends to who has power in each courtship; a Marxist reading to the property and class beneath the romance; the historian's lens (Stone, de Rougemont's argument that Western love is inseparable from obstacle and transgression) to the long pattern the two texts sit inside.
Resist the 'Whig' trap — the comfortable story that literature marches from repression towards enlightenment, so the modern text must be the wiser one. The examiner rewards the candidate who notices that change is not the same as improvement, and that each period both loses and gains something in how it imagines love.
ModelApt references, integrated not stacked (AO1)
The final strand of AO1 is the selection and handling of evidence, and a comparison exposes it more than any other question because you are quoting from two texts at once. Choose apt references — short, telling, chosen because they let you make a comparative point, not because they are the famous lines. Embed them inside your own sentences so the quotation and your argument are one movement, and wherever possible set a reference from one text directly against a reference from the other in the same sentence, so the evidence itself performs the comparison.
Avoid the two classic evidence failures: the long undigested quotation that sits on the page doing nothing, and the 'quote sandwich' where evidence from the two texts is stacked in separate paragraphs and never touches. Little and integrated beats long and stranded. A single well-chosen word from each text, placed side by side, is worth more than a paragraph of copied lines.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
Section C is a single 25-mark comparative essay assessing all five objectives — AO1, AO2, AO3, AO4 and AO5 — with at least one text written before 1900. Because AO4 (connection) is unique to this question and is the spine of it, an essay that analyses each text well but never truly compares them cannot climb far, however strong the individual analysis. The band descriptors rise from 'general' and 'descriptive' work through 'clear' and 'coherent' comparison to 'perceptive', 'assured' and 'sophisticated' connective argument at the top.
Win the comparison by design. Decide your thesis about the pair before you write, structure by shared idea rather than by text, and make both works meet in every paragraph with genuine connectives. Braid the objectives instead of segregating them: within one paragraph you can connect the two treatments of love (AO4), quote and analyse a method from each (AO2), explain how each period's values shaped that choice (AO3), read the pair through a critical lens (AO5) and keep it all serving one argument (AO1). Keep the two texts balanced, quote briefly and integrate the evidence side by side, and resist the tidy story of progress — the examiner rewards the candidate who sees that love's history is change, not improvement. Frame the whole essay as a short history of one emotion, and the five objectives fall into place around it.