Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
George Eliot
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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.
"George Eliot" by Universal Images Group/Contributor,Retrieved from https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/george-eliot-pen-name-of-mary-ann-evans-important-british-news-photo/113634333.
MEB
's His Good Fairy, from the Illustrated London News of 28 May 1894, features a grand duchess of low origin who staves off guilt-induced madness by returning to live as a peasant and...
Textual Features
Sophie Veitch
The other sub-plot takes place among the landed gentry, which the rough and practical Hepburn finds a wholly unknown social circle.
Veitch, Sophie. James Hepburn, Free Church Minister. A. Gardner, 1887.
63
It features the young and beautiful Ellinor, and her much older husband, General...
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Adelaide Procter
Milly's Expiation is interestingly reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell
's North and South, 1855 (to which the Athenæum compared it), and anticipatory of George Eliot
's Felix Holt, 1866. Milly is an idealised elder...
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Flora Macdonald Mayor
While spinsters are again perceived as lonely, self-pitying, garrulous, defensive
in the eyes of some, the heroine here defies such a one-sided image. Leonard Woolf
found Mary Jocelyn very reserved...
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Julia Kavanagh
In this work, set on the outskirts of London, the heroine is a young seamstress who is neither beautiful nor clever and who has to work for a living. As the narrator notes, there...
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Emily Dickinson
She began practising literary techniques in letters written to friends and family at this time. Evidence of a dialogic, corresponding voice permeates her poetry, resulting in what Archibald MacLeish
reads as one of the central...
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Violet Hunt
In March 1910 this journal printed her story The Novelist's Revenge, an exploration both of the end of her own affair with Oswald Crawfurd
and of the broader difficulties (personal and social) faced by...
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Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
While Charlotte Brontë
, MEC
argues, swept the world away in the storm of her passion and George Eliotconquered it with the power of understanding, [Elizabeth] Gaskell
forced it to weep for pity [and]...
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Isabella Ormston Ford
In this pamphlet, which she directed towards the middle and upper classes, IOF
declares herself interested in both the moral condition and the economic position of industrial women.
Ford, Isabella Ormston. Industrial Women and How to Help Them. Humanitarian League, 1901.
1
She argues that prostitution has economic...
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Ivy Compton-Burnett
The protagonist, a clergyman's daughter, lives up to her name. She is a child at her mother's graveside in the book's opening scene: by the age of thirty-three she has repeatedly sacrificed her hopes of...
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Martin Ross
This novel puts its female characters at the centre. Its tightly-interwoven social fabric is reminiscent of George Eliot
; its slow-burning, enduring passions suggest Thomas Hardy
. The way that animals are used as subsidiary...
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Elizabeth Robins
As the title suggests, ER
plays with gender roles in this work about a popular woman novelist who uses a male pseudonym: George Mandeville is in life Lois Wilbraham. Lois's husband, Ralph, is horrified by...
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Jessie Fothergill
Of particular interest is JF
's handling of the benefits of cross-class mutual aid and moral principle
Debenham, Helen. “’Almost always two sides to a question’: the novels of Jessie Fothergill”. Popular Victorian Women Writers, edited by Kay Boardman and Shirley Jones, Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 66-89.
76
as rich and poor, male and female, employer and workers, civil authorities and landowners join forces against...
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Beatrice Harraden
It is no wonder that reference books seem divided as to whether this novel depicts an oppressive marriage or an escape from one. BH
's representation of a marriage of this sort is so exaggerated...
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Margaret Oliphant
MO
's editor and biographer Elisabeth Jay calls the portrait painted in this work a fiction of herself.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press, 1995.
25
Oliphant emphatically distinguishes herself from celebrated women writers (naming George Eliot
and George Sand
), insisting...
