Hi
Really this sort of depends on the way your teacher wants you to respond to it: for example have you been given a specific question or a really general, does she want the essay to just be a general exposition of values or to leech from Eliot's biography or something, do you even have a question or are you analysing views and values from an excerpt of the text...because the study design doesn't really lay out these things you've kind of got to rely on your teacher's prompt/criterion and lay out your own work from there...
IF THE QUESTION IS GENERAL:may be set it out thematically according to three key ideas; e.g. if i had to do one on rossetti's poetry i'd probably go:
GENERAL CONTENTION = In Rossetti's work there is a central conflict between romanticism and traditional religious poetical methodologies
PARA ONE = poetry is a reflection of social/aesthetic/theological problems of era
PARA TWO = poetry is innately romantic, the language and symbolism utilised examine Romantic epistemology and mankind’s relationship with the natural world
PARA THREE = while her poetry is innately secular its informed by romantic models, very Tractarian in ideology
this is generally the way the majority of my class did it, the questions we could choose from were both general and specific so they sorta went the general way out. v + v no matter how you end up writing it, is probably the englishiest essay you'll have to write.
SPECIFIC METHOD:i went the opposite way out and i found a specific question and lasered in to make it more specific. i had a specific question on Jane's development (from Jane Eyre) throughout the text and how the text is concerned with identity and belonging...i talked about the way
- the progressive nature of jane's selfhood is linked to the regression of bertha mason ---> how she finds her identity
- bronte's use of racialised metaphor to symbolise english colonial domination in the relationship between rochester and jane -----> belonging in relationship with rochester
- and the use of colonial imagery Jane attributes to those who obstruct her autonomy -----> identity as an independent woman
the ideas are kind of dense/packed together so it's hard to split 'em into topic sentences to show you, but what i did is i took a fragment of the question and applied it really specifically and i talked about views and values in every single paragraph. it's a much harder route to take, but you will gain a far more nuanced textual understanding.
hope this is useful to you! you didn't really specify much on what your sac is going to be like so i had to be as general as possible! goodluck!