emagazine Close Reading Competition 2025 – The Results!

Barbara Bleiman reflects on this year's entries

Receiving entries for our annual Close Reading Competition is always a great pleasure, giving us insight into the way A Level students are thinking about texts and conveying these ideas in writing.

When I first read Ada Leverson’s novel The Little Ottleys many years ago, I laughed out loud at its satirical wit and verve. It fizzed like champagne. This extract, the opening of the second in the series about the Ottley family, also filled me with joy. What fun! What deliciously naughty humour at the expense of these characters from her world, so closely observed in their manners. And how very recognisable they were, too, in terms of any family today, with an acute understanding of sibling jealousy, marital power struggles and petty squabbles and their ways of working round each other and accommodating each others’ foibles. Behind all the characters and their schemes is the clever, ironic narrative voice, knowingly guiding the reader to laugh at their everyday foolishness.

So, when the best competition entries recognised the satirical humour and seemed to enjoy it too, my heart leapt. Tone is really important in literary texts and awareness of it can take you a very long way in exploring what’s at stake; it’s important to recognise that not all literature is deadly serious. Not everything is about the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, female oppression or dangerously damaging family relationships. Not everything is about huge themes and the writer having a big, overarching message to convey. Sometimes there can be a more powerful intention to entertain at the heart of a text; as many writers tell us, writers don’t write themes – they write stories. Readers discover the themes behind their complex narratives.

Picking the shortlist, we selected entries that recognised the tone, understood the characters and their motivations and wrote well about these. What do I mean by writing well? The shortlisted entries were broadly clearly written, not over-complicated in their vocabulary and grammar, and in good command of the literary terms they used. Some were more steeped in literary language than others but used it precisely to further their analysis, not to show off. For us, the ideas came first and were most important of all. Good ideas simply expressed would take you further than limited or shaky ideas dressed up in elaborate language.

We could have shortlisted plenty more. Lots of students wrote really interesting and thoughtful pieces and many had moments of real insight. We passed on the impressive shortlist to our judge, Professor Robert Eaglestone, who made the final decision on the winner and runners up. Congratulations to all of you and especially to the shortlisted students, runners up and winner. You can read the winning piece here, a superb commentary on the extract, along with the pieces awarded second and third place..

The winner

• Benoit Patrick Moore, The Alice Smith School

Runner-up – second place

• Emilia Muzzi-Hall, St Paul’s Girls’ School

Runner-up – third place

• Norah Chan, St Mary’s Calne

Highly-commended entries

• Catherine Meakin, John Taylor Free School, Willington, Derbyshire
• Clara Bovey Kenny, The Latymer School
• Rebecca Woolmore, Bromsgrove School
• Orla Douglas, Bromsgrove School
• Betsy Stather, King Edward VI’s School, Stratford upon Avon
• James Cumming, Emmanuel College, Gateshead

In this brisk, witty opening to Ada Leverson’s Tenterhooks (1912), the naming of a newborn and a brother’s innocent dream combine to expose the brittle vanities and indirect rivalries of an Edwardian household. Leverson deploys a satirical naming debate, a succinct narrative voice shot through with irony, and a child’s moral imagination to suggest that, beneath sophisticated civility, every gesture becomes a subtle contest of status and sympathy.

Leverson begins by portraying Edith’s pride in her infant daughter’s ‘long golden hair…rosebud mouth…intellectual forehead’ with gently mocking precision. The baby is a ‘superb beauty of the classic type,’ yet Edith’s suggestion of ‘Matilda’ feels too unimaginative, while Bruce’s telegram, ‘Certainly not Matilda…she were called  Aspasia’, betrays his own eagerness to invest his child with grandeur. The comic clash of ‘Matilda,’ ‘Aspasia,’ and Mrs Ottley’s quip (‘let the poor child be called Asparagus…’) satirises Edwardian anxieties about classical learning versus vulgarity. A name, Leverson implies, is never neutral but a flashpoint for taste, authority, and the aspiration to shape a child’s future. The third‑person narration remains unfazed by these small dramas, its ‘colourless telegraph form’ remark undercutting any romantic gloss. We never hear Bruce’s ironic tone; instead, Edith ‘took it literally,’ and we feel the gendered constraints of polite society: direct assertion is softened into misunderstanding. Leverson’s quiet irony, showing rather than telling, allows the reader to see how the very medium of communication (a telegraph) becomes part of the joke, reinforcing the distance between intention and reception in domestic life. Into this debate of names is introduced Mrs Ottley, whose humouring ‘Yes, dear…so is Vaselyn’ registers both indulgence and authority. As a generational chorus, she punctures Edith’s anxieties: ‘One gets used to a name.’ Her restraint and sarcasm anchor the passage, reminding us that in this world, the elder voice both smooths over disputes and reminds her junior that all writings designed to impress are temporary.

In the second half, Archie’s account of his ‘lovely dream’ shifts perspective to a child’s moral universe. He hints at resentment, Edith ‘was there,’ but ‘Dilly…was in the night nursery, with Satan’, using the roundabout tact that mirrors his parents’ passive‑aggressive manoeuvres. His offhand ‘Oh, nothing much…very nice’ becomes charged with unspoken hurt, just as Bruce’s telegram concealed a challenge to Edith’s taste. Through Archie, Leverson suggests that children learn rivalry not by open combat but through insinuation and symbolic imagination.

By linking a newborn’s contested identity to a boy’s innocent yet pointed dream, Leverson shows how naming and narration alike become tools in a quiet struggle for attention, sympathy, and status. The extract’s neat and skillful balance of satire, irony, and childhood insight establishes a tone of amused scrutiny that promises a novel keenly attuned to the cultured vanities and emotional undertones of its time.

Benoit Patrick Moore, The Alice Smith School

Professor Robert Eaglestone comments:

A real sense of the wit in and meaning of the passage, a good and insightful use of the text, with some excellent points made about form, character, the role of the narrator and the shifts in the passage, all clearly and confidently written, with a careful command of literary terms.

Ada Leverson introduces the Ottleys’ dysfunctional family dynamics with understated wit and liberal irony to critique the traditional family structure of the time. Edith and Bruce’s comic failure to communicate while choosing their daughter’s name reflects the emotional estrangement within their unequal relationship; meanwhile, Archie’s striking clarity regarding his sister is refreshingly untainted by social convention.

Edith’s respectful attitude is shown by her letter’s ‘deference’ and ‘solicitude’ and her compliance with Bruce’s name suggestion: she was ‘easily persuaded’ to acquiesce. In contrast, Bruce’s thoughtlessly ironic reply suggests irreverence, while his rapid succession of emotions implies a childish lack of self-control: he is ‘overwhelmed by joy’, then ‘horrified’ and replies ‘impulsively’. Through the experienced Mrs Ottley’s advice to ‘let him feel he has got his own way’, Leverson highlights the injustice that Edith should submit to Bruce’s wishes despite his childishness. Inequality is further exhibited in Bruce’s ‘jealousy of the privileges of the invalid’, ironic considering that his fake illness has taken him to a spa town while those ‘privileges’ apparently consist of giving birth with an absent husband.

As well as the inequality in their relationship, Leverson illuminates the emotional distance between Edith and Bruce. The impersonality of the phrase ‘he heard the news’ indicates inappropriate nonchalance on Bruce’s part and leaves ambiguous whether he heard from Edith or a third party, highlighting the couple’s disconnection. Leverson develops this through Mrs Ottley’s humorous corruption of the suggested names – from Ygraine, who fights against fate in Maeterlinck’s The Death of Tintagiles, to a headache; from Aspasia, one of ancient Athens’s most powerful women, to a vegetable. This trivialisation of the conflict implies such disagreements occur regularly, as does Leverson’s comment that Edith has ‘so often’ observed Bruce’s spirit of rivalry. The geographical separation between Carlsbad and Knightsbridge only further accentuates the couple’s emotional estrangement.

Leverson introduces Archie with the abrupt paragraph ‘Archie called his sister Dilly’. Its bluntness immediately brings Aspasia down to earth, following Edith’s description of her as angelic with her ‘long golden hair’ and ‘talent for music’ (although the artificial sounding ‘sweeping lashes’ and ‘pencilled brow’ suggest she is more doll-like). The childish name ‘Dilly’ shows Archie’s disillusionment: it echoes ‘Archie’ (both names are disyllabic and stressed on the first syllable) and comically contrasts the lofty ‘Aspasia Matilda’ – a reminder that she too is only a child.

During Archie’s dialogue with Edith, Leverson emphasises Archie’s indirectness through pleonasm, as in ‘hints and suggestions’; negative phrases, such as the ironic ‘not that he was jealous’; and the generically pleasant, repeated adjectives ‘lovely’ and ‘nice’. This roundabout build-up intensifies the reveal: Dilly was ‘in the night nursery, with Satan’. Archie’s allusion to ‘night’ and Aspasia’scomradeship with Satan associate her with darkness and evil, contrasting the lightness of Edith’s description (‘golden’ and ‘rosebud’) and his dream (‘heaven’). His unexpected directness diverges refreshingly from his parents’ miscommunication. Not yet bound by social convention like his mother, we find ourselves hoping that he will not lose this amusingly innocent sharpness.

Emilia Muzzi-Hall, St Paul’s Girls’ School

Professor Robert Eaglestone comments:

This is lively and insightful work, with a really good sense of the text, how it shifts and, most of all, how it illuminates character and sets up the narrative in complex ways. Written with confidence and a good sense of the literary.

Ada Leverson utilises the comedy of miscommunication, exacerbated by a typical British aversion to directness, to explore the differences between men and women. Whilst the women operate under pretences of maturity and sophistication, the men perpetuate the petty jealousies and impulsive protestations of children: in this way they almost speak two languages. As such, Leverson constructs a situation of domestic absurdity that is almost Wildean, positing the idea that miscommunication between the genders is inherent or even inevitable. 

This male-female disconnect manifests not in explosive arguments, but through frivolous miscommunications. Leverson’s omniscient narrator is tongue-in-cheek, speaking in petty ironies and hedging inferences to great comic effect: grossly underplaying Edith’s pregnancy by boiling it down to her ‘not feeling very well’, then describing the child with an absurdly hyperbolic asyndetic list of beauty traits: ‘long golden hair’, ‘a rosebud mouth’, ‘a tall, elegant figure’. Leverson thus presents the genders as operating on opposite linguistic extremes: women exaggerate; men underplay. Where Edith speaks with ‘deference and solicitude’, engaging in frivolous small talk about Bruce’s rheumatism before finally providing a ‘detailed description’ of the central topic at hand, Bruce replies ‘impulsively’ with a flippant male pragmatism. This disconnect is also inherent in both their locational divide and in Leverson’s choice of their contrasting mediums of communication: Edith’s letter; Bruce’s wire.

Despite their pretences of Victorian civility and sensibility, with both Edith and Bruce restraining their true sentiments in an effort to preserve domestic harmony, they seem to share an equally stubborn childishness. Leverson’s use of the negative description ‘not aggressively’ in describing Edith’s decision to retain some degree of her original name choice suggests a childish desire to have the last word, whereas Bruce’s behaviour is more ostensibly immature, from his childish ‘jealousy’ at Edith’s pregnancy being ‘the centre of interest’ to his ‘curious spirit of rivalry’. In such a way, Bruce is petulant and reactionary in the same way Archie is. Leverson wittily justifies their petty jealousies as altruism through drawing conclusions that make no sense: Bruce ‘[diverts] public attention’ from his wife as if it is some grand act of self-sacrifice; likewise Archie selflessly frets over the ‘unnecessary excitement’ about Dilly, worrying it will make her ‘egotistical and vain’.

What separates Archie’s jealousy from his father’s is that he does explicitly acknowledge his own schemes of circuitous indirectness, stating his desire to give ‘hints and suggestions’ of his views rather than outright statements, but simultaneously fails spectacularly at the art of British hedging by condemning his infant sister to ‘the night nursery, with Satan’. Leverson’s juxtaposition of innocuous breakfast-table discussions about dreams with Archie’s entirely unsubtle damnation of his sister reveals the absurdities of the family’s performance of politeness, lending itself to this extract’s humour. Fundamentally, Leverson’s comedy is heightened by the beautiful frivolousness of everything in this passage: even its central conflict, that of an easily avoidable miscommunication over the child’s name, is ultimately rendered redundant by Archie’s anticlimactic nicknaming of the child as ‘Dilly’.

Norah Chan, St Mary’s Calne

Professor Robert Eaglestone comments:

With a wonderful concluding point, this is insightful and, through its reading, argues a clear case about gender dynamics. It uses the text well, and follows the shifts of meaning and flow of description really well. It’s especially good on how characters – in several layers – are revealed.

Chapter 1: A Verbal Invitation

Because Edith had not been feeling very well, that seemed no reason why she should be the centre of interest; and Bruce, with that jealousy of the privileges of the invalid and in that curious spirit of rivalry which his wife had so often observed, had started, with enterprise, an indisposition of his own, as if to divert public attention. While he was at Carlsbad he heard the news. Then he received a letter from Edith, speaking with deference and solicitude of Bruce’s rheumatism, entreating him to do the cure thoroughly, and suggesting that they should call the little girl Matilda, after a rich and sainted – though still living – aunt of Edith’s. It might be an advantage to the child’s future (in every sense) to have a godmother so wealthy and so religious. It appeared from the detailed description that the new daughter had, as a matter of course (and at two days old), long golden hair, far below her waist, sweeping lashes and pencilled brows, a rosebud mouth, an intellectual forehead, chiselled features and a tall, elegant figure. She was a magnificent, regal-looking creature and was a superb beauty of the classic type, and yet with it she was dainty and winsome. She had great talent for music. This, it appeared, was shown by the breadth between the eyes and the timbre of her voice.

Overwhelmed with joy at the advent of such a paragon, and horrified at Edith’s choice of a name, Bruce had replied at once by wire, impulsively:

‘Certainly not Matilda I would rather she were called Aspasia.’

Edith read this expression of feeling on a colourless telegraph form, and as she was, at Knightsbridge, unable to hear the ironical tone of the message she took it literally.

She criticised the name, but was easily persuaded by her mother-in-law to make no objection. The elder Mrs Ottley pointed out that it might have been very much worse.

‘But it’s not a pretty name,’ objected Edith. ‘If it wasn’t to be Matilda, I should rather have called her something out of Maeterlinck – Ygraine, or Ysolyn – something like that.’

‘Yes, dear, Mygraine’s a nice name, too,’ said Mrs Ottley, in her humouring way, ‘and so is Vaselyn. But what does it really matter? I shouldn’t hold out on a point like this. One gets used to a name. Let the poor child be called Asparagus if he wishes it, and let him feel he has got his own way.’

So the young girl was named Aspasia Matilda Ottley. It was characteristic of Edith that she kept to her own point, though not aggressively. When Bruce returned after his after-cure, it was too late to do anything but pretend he had meant it seriously.

Archie called his sister Dilly.

Archie had been rather hurt at the – as it seemed to him – unnecessary excitement about Dilly. Not that he was jealous in any way. It was rather that he was afraid it would spoil her to be made so much of at her age; make her, perhaps, egotistical and vain. But it was not Archie’s way to show these fears openly. He did not weep loudly or throw things about as many boys might have done. His methods were more roundabout, more subtle. He gave hints and suggestions of his views that should have been understood by the intelligent. He said one morning with some indirectness:

‘I had such a lovely dream last night, Mother.’

‘Did you, pet? How sweet of you. What was it?’

‘Oh, nothing much. It was all right. Very nice. It was a lovely dream.

I dreamt I was in heaven.’

‘Really! How delightful. Who was there?’

This is always a woman’s first question.

‘Oh, you were there, of course. And father. Nurse, too. It was a lovely dream. Such a nice place.’

‘Was Dilly there?’

‘Dilly? Er – no – no – she wasn’t. She was in the night nursery, with Satan.’