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.
The assessment by Nigella Lawson
in the Times Literary Supplement was astonishingly harsh. She argued that the domestic dramatic monologue form used here demands sureness, control and verbal dexterity which MW
did not possess.
Lawson, Nigella. “Collusion and Intrusion”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4324, p. 162.
162
Literary responses
Lady Charlotte Elliot
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
Edith J. Simcox
As noted by Laurie Zierer
in Broomfield
and Mitchell
's anthology of Victorian women writers, EJS
's connection with George Eliot
has saved her from permanent obscurity, [but] her stature as a Victorian writer and...
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
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
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...
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 An Autobiographical Fragment and Biographical Notes, with Personal Sketches of Contemporaries, Unpublished Lyrics, and Letters of Literary Friends.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
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
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
Mary Renault
The book came out five years after the Sexual Offences Act in Britain decriminalised many homosexual practices there, and three years after the Stonewall Inn Riots in New York marked the start of Gay Liberation...
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...
Literary responses
Matilda Hays
In a letter to Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
in 1858, Bessie Rayner Parkes
wrote that all goes on like clockwork at the office, under Max, who is the most methodical of workers, & brings all...
Literary responses
Dinah Mulock Craik
Some felt she wrote too much too fast. Elizabeth Gaskell
commented in a letter of 1851, I wish she had some other means of support than writing, which must be pumped up instead of bubbling...
Literary responses
Anne Mozley
George Eliot
not only praised this review in a letter, but also instructed her publisher to send a copy of her next novel, The Mill on the Floss, to Bentley's
expressly so that it...
Literary responses
Charlotte Yonge
The Daisy Chain's popularity was long-lasting, though not so intense as that of The Heir of Redclyffe. Jane Austen
's nephew James Austen-Leigh
compared it to the work of Austen and Scott
...
