Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
George Eliot
-
Standard Name: Eliot, George
Birth Name: Mary Anne Evans
Nickname: Polly
Nickname: Pollian
Self-constructed Name: Mary Ann Evans
Self-constructed Name: Marian Evans
Self-constructed Name: Marian Evans Lewes
Pseudonym: George Eliot
Pseudonym: Felix Holt
Married Name: Mary Anne Cross
GE
, one of the major novelists of the nineteenth century and a leading practitioner of fictional realism, was a professional woman of letters who also worked as an editor and journalist, and left a substantial body of essays, reviews, translations on controversial topics, and poetry.
LCE
received little critical attention either during or after her lifetime. The Athenæum obituary by Theodore Watts
described her as perhaps the latest noticeable addition to that bright roll of female poets of which Scotland...
Literary responses
Emma Frances Brooke
The book was similarly well-received across the Atlantic. The Brooklyn Eagle found that the first few chapters almost reminds one of George Eliot
.
Brooke, Emma Frances. Sir Elyot of the Woods. William Heinemann.
endmatter
Literary responses
George Sand
The sentiments expressed in this and similar novels earned her the nickname the Anti-Matrimonial novelist from the Foreign Quarterly Review.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
The future George Eliot
praised Jacques for its psychological anatomy of the early days...
Literary responses
Lettice Cooper
The Manchester Guardian reviewer, Charles Marriott
, used a flattering comparison with George Eliot
, writing that LChas done for a contemporary industrial town . . . pretty much what Middlemarch did for a...
Literary responses
Anna Steele
In a lengthy review the Times noted that while Gardenhurst had many faults typical of first novels (citing other examples from Sir Walter Scott
, George Eliot
, and Charles Dickens
), it nonetheless has...
Literary responses
Rhoda Broughton
The Athenæum, describing Belinda as RB
's worst novel, noted a similarity of her central couple to Dorothea and Casaubon in George Eliot
's Middlemarch. It deemed Eliot's characterisation decidedly superior, maintaning that...
Literary responses
Augusta Webster
The Athenæum declared the play would strengthen AW
's reputation as a dramatist, calling the dialogue intellectual and subtle.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2878 (1882): 841
But although the review conceded that Webster has not strangled poetic art...
Procter, Bryan Waller. An Autobiographical Fragment and Biographical Notes, with Personal Sketches of Contemporaries, Unpublished Lyrics, and Letters of Literary Friends. Editor Patmore, Coventry, Roberts Brothers.
113
John Ruskin
wrote shortly after its appearance, I think Aurora Leigh the greatest poem in the English...
Literary responses
Queen Victoria
Despite her book's popularity, when Victoria entered the arena of public writing, some Victorians criticized her prose style. After receiving copies of Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, sent by...
Literary responses
Olive Schreiner
The book elicited strong reactions, most of them positive. It was highly praised by Philip Kent
, who wrote a long article about it instead of his usual shorter reviews in Life, a weekly...
Literary responses
Augusta Webster
In the 1870s and 1880s AW
was mentioned in periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic—in Harper's and Scribner's, for instance, as well as in English publications—as one of the leading women poets of...
Literary responses
Henrietta Camilla Jenkin
The Saturday Review called Once and Again a great advance upon any previous effort of the writer's.
Kirk, John Foster, and S. Austin Allibone, editors. A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors. J. B. Lippincott.
The young Vernon Lee
praised this novel enthusiastically in an Italian article published in La Rivista in October...
Literary responses
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Reviews were generally derogatory. The poet's admireres could not be swayed. George Eliot
, with whom HBS
had recently begun corresponding, suggested that she ought not to have brought the Byron question before the public...
Literary responses
Eliza Lynn Linton
Athenæum reviewer H. F. Chorley
felt that the author was now raving like a pagan Pythoness—the female oracle whose pronouncements were not expected to be comprehensible: There is a positive untruth to the very...
Literary responses
Jane Hume Clapperton
A review by Vernon Lee
for The Academy was similarly positive, calling JHC
's book an important,valuable, and noble production, whose primary contribution was its originality: without being actually original in any separate...
