Eduqas A-Level Study Guide
Poetry, drama and unseen prose, plus a prose study NEA. Full public-domain texts on WJEC Eduqas A-Level spec A720QS, with margin notes that explain what's actually going on.
Year 12–13 · Ages 16–18 · United Kingdom
Eduqas A-Level English Literature, spec A720QS, is run by WJEC for schools in England. It's also the dominant A-Level English spec in Wales (under the WJEC branding). Three exam components plus a 20% NEA, sat across May and June of Year 13.
Component 1 (Poetry) is 2 hours, 60 marks, 30%. Section A is a Shakespeare essay (extract plus essay); Section B pairs a poetry collection with another poet across periods. Component 2 (Drama) is 2 hours, 60 marks, 30%. Section A is a post-1900 drama text; Section B is a pre-1900 drama text. Component 3 (Unseen Texts) is 2 hours, 40 marks, 20%. A close analysis of an unseen prose extract plus a comparison of two unseen poems.
The NEA (Prose Study) is the final 20%: a 2,500–3,500-word comparative essay on two prose texts of your choice, with one pre-2000 and one post-2000. Eduqas is the most memorisation-heavy of the four boards (closed-book throughout) and the only one that gives unseen poetry an entire component-level weighting. The trade-off is that Eduqas is also the most predictable: stems and structures barely move year-to-year.
Eduqas · spec A720QS
WJEC's English-branded A-Level. Three closed-book components plus the longest NEA word count. Common in Wales and English academies.
Section A: an essay on your Shakespeare play (extract plus essay). Section B: a comparative essay on a poetry collection paired with another poet (Chaucer, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Eliot, Heaney, etc.). Closed book.
Section A: an essay on your post-1900 drama text. Section B: an essay on a pre-1900 drama text (a Shakespeare comedy or a Restoration play). Closed book.
Section A: a close analysis of an unseen prose extract. Section B: a comparison of two unseen poems. Both sections rely entirely on cold-read skills and your training in form, structure and voice.
A 2,500–3,500-word comparative essay on two prose texts (one pre-2000, one post-2000) of your choice, subject to teacher approval. Marked internally, moderated by WJEC.
A-Level Shakespeare goes deeper than GCSE: tragedy, comedy, history and romance, often paired with a critical lens. Hamlet, Othello and King Lear dominate the tragedy options across boards.
William Shakespeare
The most-set A-Level Shakespeare. Revenge, delay, doubt, and a play that's basically a working philosophy seminar in five acts. AQA Spec A's Tragedy text par excellence.
William Shakespeare
Race, jealousy and rhetoric. Iago is the great study in malevolent persuasion. Common on AQA Spec B (Tragedy) and Edexcel.
William Shakespeare
Power, family, blindness and storms. The hardest Shakespeare on the syllabus, but the richest if you go in for sustained pattern-spotting on AO2.
William Shakespeare
Power, colonialism and forgiveness. A late romance increasingly framed through post-colonial readings, central to OCR's Comparative options.
William Shakespeare
A problem play on justice, hypocrisy and gender. Rich in feminist and ethical readings, common on AQA Spec B.
William Shakespeare
Disguise, gender and longing. The strongest A-Level pick for comedy, especially on AQA Spec A's comedy option.
William Shakespeare
Wit, gossip, and the politics of marriage. A polished comedy that pays off if you write about Beatrice as a feminist forerunner.
William Shakespeare
The history play A-Level boards love: Falstaff, Hal, the politics of kingship, and a tavern scene that's a masterclass in dramatic register.
William Shakespeare
A history play that's almost entirely poetic argument. Set on Edexcel and OCR for its rhetoric and meditation on legitimacy.
William Shakespeare
Pastoral comedy, gender play, and Rosalind, the longest female role in Shakespeare. A frequent option on the comedy strand.
William Shakespeare
Comedy that doesn't sit still in modern hands. Brilliant for A-Level if you want to write about gender, performance and the play's reception history.
Extended Victorian and Romantic-era prose. Realism, the Gothic, and the woman question. Most boards expect you to compare two of these (or pair one with a 20th-century text).
Thomas Hardy
Hardy's pastoral tragedy on rural decline, sexual politics and determinism. Set across AQA Spec A's Tragedy and Edexcel's Women and Society pairings.
Charlotte Brontë
Bildungsroman, Gothic, and the Victorian woman question all in one. The keystone novel for OCR's Women in Literature topic.
Emily Brontë
Brontë's Gothic frame narrative on obsession and class. Heavy on AO2 (narrators, time-shifts) and AO5 (Marxist and feminist readings cluster around it).
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Shelley's framed narrative on creation and responsibility. Set across the Gothic, Science and Society, and the WW1 Aftermath pairings.
Bram Stoker
Stoker's late-Victorian invasion narrative through letters and diaries. Reads cleanly through gender, post-colonial and Marxist lenses.
Charles Dickens
Dickens on class, guilt and self-deception. A frequent A-Level option for narrative voice and bildungsroman conventions.
George Eliot
Eliot's panoramic study of provincial life. The longest read on the syllabus, but the depth of psychological realism is unmatched.
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Gaskell's industrial novel: class, the woman question, and the North/South divide. Strong choice for Edexcel's Women and Society pairing.
Thomas Hardy
Hardy's pastoral romance and tragedy. Lighter in mood than Tess but rich on landscape and female agency.
Jane Austen
Austen's freest indirect-discourse novel. A model for A-Level analysis of unreliable narration and irony.
Jane Austen
Austen on reason and feeling. Pairs cleanly with Frankenstein on the AQA Romanticism topic.
Joseph Conrad
Conrad's framed novella on imperialism, language and moral collapse. Central to OCR's Comparative and Contextual options.
Charles Dickens
Dickens on poverty, criminality and Victorian London. Strong for political and social protest topics on AQA Spec A.
Oscar Wilde
Wilde's only novel: aestheticism, decadence and Gothic doubling. Key text for Gothic comparison on OCR.
Henry James
James's psychological ghost story. The ambiguity of the governess's narration is a goldmine for AO5 (psychoanalytic, ambiguity-led readings).
Wilkie Collins
Collins's sensation novel: doubles, conspiracies, and unstable identity. The original Victorian thriller, set on Eduqas and OCR.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson's gothic novella on duality and repression. Core text for the Gothic option across multiple boards.
Modernism through to mid-century. The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness anchor most American Literature and Modernism options.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald's Jazz Age tragedy of class, longing and the American dream. Universal A-Level fixture, especially on OCR's American Literature and AQA's Love through the Ages.
James Joyce
Joyce's modernist epic. Studied in extracts on most boards rather than in full, but the full text rewards anyone going on to read English at university.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Gilman's short story on madness, gender and the rest cure. Often paired with Jane Eyre or The Awakening on Women in Literature topics.
The Romantics, the war poets, and Milton anchor the poetry components on every board. Reading the full collections (rather than just the anthologised extracts) lifts your AO2 and AO3 dramatically.
John Keats
Keats's odes are the AQA Spec A Romanticism cornerstone. Reading the wider Poetical Works (Hyperion, Lamia, the letters) makes the odes feel earned, not isolated.
William Wordsworth
The Prelude and the shorter lyrics. Central to AQA's Romantic poetry option and Edexcel's pre-1900 poetry strand.
Baron George Gordon Byron Byron
Byron's verse, from Don Juan to the shorter satires. Lighter than Wordsworth, useful as a Romantic-tradition contrast.
William Wordsworth
Wordsworth and Coleridge's joint 1798 collection. The literal foundational text of English Romanticism.
William Blake
Blake's paired Innocence and Experience. Sits on most boards' Romantic poetry options and pairs well with the Gothic.
Wilfred Owen
Owen's war poems are the keystone of the WW1 and Aftermath option on AQA Spec A and Edexcel. Read in full, the patterning across the collection becomes much clearer.
Baron Alfred Tennyson Tennyson
Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade in its Victorian context. Useful for comparing 19th-century war poetry against the WW1 poets.
Emily Dickinson
Dickinson's compressed, dash-punctuated lyrics. Central to OCR's American Literature option and a sharp counterpoint to the Romantics.
John Milton
Milton's epic. Heavy lifting, but a Component 1 poetry option on Eduqas and a regular pre-1900 NEA pairing across boards.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Chaucer's Middle English narrative cycle. The OCR pre-1900 poetry option for students willing to wrestle with the language.
OCR's Gothic option, AQA's Elements of Crime and the Gothic, and a frequent NEA pairing across boards. These eight texts cover the canonical Gothic syllabus end to end.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The foundational Gothic novel. Creation, monstrosity and Romantic anxiety. Set on every board's Gothic option.
Bram Stoker
Stoker's late-Victorian Gothic synthesis: epistolary form, invasion fears, and sexual repression. The other Gothic anchor text.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Duality, repression, urban Gothic. Short, dense, and a clean comparison partner to Dracula or Dorian Gray.
Oscar Wilde
Wilde's only novel: Gothic doubling read through aestheticism and the fin-de-siècle. Pairs naturally with Jekyll.
Emily Brontë
Brontë's Gothic-Romantic frame narrative. Useful for the Gothic option's blurred boundary with Romanticism.
Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë's bildungsroman read as Gothic: Bertha, Thornfield, the Red Room. Required for Gothic + Women in Literature comparisons.
Henry James
James's ambiguous ghost story. The psychoanalytic reading is so well-trodden it's almost expected at A-Level.
Wilkie Collins
Collins's sensation novel: doubles, identity, conspiracy. The longer Gothic option, but the multi-narrator structure pays off.
Component 3 (Unseen Texts) is worth as much as your entire NEA, but most students prep for it in the last fortnight. Don't. Read widely outside the syllabus from January of Year 13: a poem a week, a prose extract a week. The unseen prose section especially rewards exposure to a wide range of registers, periods and narrative voices. You can't memorise unseen practice the way you can quotations.
Both Component 1 and Component 2 are fully closed-book. That means around 60 memorised quotations per Shakespeare and per drama text, organised thematically. Daily five-minute quote drills from October beat weekly hour-long sessions in May. Make a deck of theme-tagged quotation cards; cycle through them on the bus.
Section B of Component 1 pairs your studied poetry collection with one other poet (Chaucer, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Eliot, Heaney, etc.). The mistake students make is over-revising the studied poet and assuming the other will be "the unseen partner". It's not unseen. You should know the other poet's collection in nearly the same depth, and have at least 15–20 quotations memorised across both.
Eduqas marker reports consistently identify "vague reference to technique" as the single most common reason candidates cap below the top band. "The poet uses imagery" earns nothing. "The poet uses an extended pastoral metaphor" earns AO2 marks. Specific terms (volta, caesura, anaphora, sibilance, free indirect discourse, dramatic monologue, metafiction) used precisely will lift your AO2 grade more than any other single change.
Eduqas (WJEC) A-Level English Literature is spec A720QS for England. In Wales it's run as WJEC GCE A-Level English Literature with a slightly different code. Past papers and mark schemes are on the WJEC and Eduqas websites.
Three components, each 2 hours: Component 1 (Poetry) 60 marks, 30%. Component 2 (Drama) 60 marks, 30%. Component 3 (Unseen Texts) 40 marks, 20%. Plus a 2,500–3,500-word NEA worth 20%. Total exam time: 6 hours, the longest of any A-Level English board.
No. All three components are closed-book throughout. Printed extracts are provided for the Shakespeare question, the unseen prose question, and the unseen poetry section, but quotations from your studied poetry collection and your drama texts have to come from memory. Eduqas is the most memorisation-heavy of the four A-Level English boards.
Component 1 Section B pairs a Shakespeare play (in Section A) with a poetry pairing. The poetry pairings cycle across periods: Chaucer with a modern poet, Donne with a Romantic poet, Milton with a Victorian poet, the Romantics with the war poets, Browning with Eliot, Heaney with another modern voice. Your school picks one pairing and you study both poets in depth.
Almost. WJEC is the parent board, which runs both the Welsh-language qualifications (offered as WJEC A-Level English Literature in Wales) and the English-language qualifications for English schools (branded as Eduqas, with spec code A720QS). The texts and structure overlap heavily but the specs are not identical. Make sure you're revising the version your school sat for.
The Prose Study is a 2,500–3,500-word comparative essay on two prose texts of your choice. Texts must be from different periods, with one pre-2000 and one post-2000. Negotiated with your teacher across Year 13. Marked internally, moderated by WJEC. Eduqas's NEA is the longest word count of the four boards, which gives you more space to develop AO5 (different interpretations).
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