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.
in the eyes of some, the heroine here defies such a one-sided image. Leonard Woolf
found Mary Jocelyn very reserved...
Textual Features
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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
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.
1
She argues that prostitution has economic...
Textual Features
Anne Stevenson
Despite the strong emotion expressed in some of these poems, AS
later remembered the volume as setting free her gift for irony.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press.
126
The final poem, A Legacy, On my Fiftieth Birthday, is written...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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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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]...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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, pp. 66-89.
76
as rich and poor, male and female, employer and workers, civil authorities and landowners join forces against...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Production
Lettice Cooper
LC
wrote for the British Council
a little book on George Eliot
as one of the Bibliographical Supplements to British Book News, also known as the Writers and Their Work series.
British Book News. British Council.
(1951): 673
Textual Production
Evelyn Sharp
Sharp was an eager reader of Atalanta. She took full advantage of the service it offered of assessing essays on literary figures submitted for its competitions, sending in, among others, an essay on George Eliot
Textual Production
Marghanita Laski
ML
went on to write several literary biographies: Jane Austen
and Her World (1969), and George Eliot
and Her World (1973), as well as her late biography of Kipling The work on Austen includes 137...
Textual Production
Michelene Wandor
MW
has specialized in adapting and abridging novels for radio. Between 1980 and 2004 she adapted a wide array of fiction by women writers, including works by Jane Austen
, Charlotte Brontë
, George Eliot
