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.
She meanwhile sustained her usual energetic and gossipy flow of correspondence with a wide range of literary and personal connections. She got caught up in the speculation surrounding the split between Effie
and John Ruskin
Friends, Associates
Constance Naden
CN
was a friend of the two poets who shared the name Michael Field
(who also came from Birmingham) and of the medical doctor Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
(who presumably did not hold against her the...
Friends, Associates
Harriet Martineau
Marian Evans
, later George Eliot, visited HM
at her home in Ambleside.
Martineau, Harriet. “Introduction and Editorial Materials”. Selected Letters, edited by Valerie Sanders, Clarendon Press, pp. vii - xxxiii, 235.
xxiii
Health
Adrienne Rich
After her third delivery she decided to be sterilised, though she met with social disapproval even from nurses caring for her in hospital: Had yourself spayed, did you?
O’Mahoney, John. “Poet and Pioneer: Adrienne Rich”. The Guardian, pp. Review 20 - 3.
22
She later recalled her isolation during...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Gaskell
Reviews of Cranford were positive, focusing on its charm and apparent simplicity. In the Athenæum, Henry Fothergill Chorley
commended its touches of love and kindness, of simple self-sacrifice and of true womanly tenderness.
Easson, Angus, editor. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage. Routledge.
194
Intertextuality and Influence
John Oliver Hobbes
She had been still writing it in the USA and after her return to London at the beginning of this year after its serialization had begun.
Richards, John Morgan, and John Oliver Hobbes. “Pearl Richards Craigie: Biographical Sketch by her Father”. The Life of John Oliver Hobbes, J. Murray.
33-4
A New York edition posthumously published this month...
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Martineau
The novel prompted a complimentary letter on 7 November 1849 from Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë
) saying that in it he tasted a new and keen pleasure, and experienced a genuine benefit. In his...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Dickens
's daughter Kate
recalled this as her father's favourite among MEB
's novels, and George Moore
liked it so much he represented his heroine in A Mummer's Wife (1885) as reading it. It may...
Intertextuality and Influence
Amy Levy
This novel too has a third-person narrator, but makes more extensive use of free indirect discourse. Its young Jewish protagonist, a lawyer who is already finding his ambitious plans for his career are a strain...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Gaskell
The plot elements link the novel to its moment of sensation fiction more strongly than any of EG
's other books, but are integrated with a nuanced portrait of a specific locale and a now...
Intertextuality and Influence
John Oliver Hobbes
JOH
's speeches and interviews regularly deal with literature. In an interview with William Archer
, she admits to admiring Arthur Wing Pinero
's characterisation of women, while noting how little individualised are some of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Matilda Betham-Edwards
The poems are printed chronologically (by the author's desire rather than the editor's). MBE
's introduction says nothing about her subject's parentage or his life-history, but canvasses the issues involved in selecting from his poems...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Westray's fall into financial ruin after his marriage recalls that of Lydgate in George Eliot
's recent Middlemarch. His salvation comes through turning his back on the life of fashionable London. He reviles his...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jessie Ellen Cadell
The reader meets Ida as an immature girl of sixteen who, with three elder brothers, wishes herself a boy. Her mother is a clergyman's widow, and she has had an unconventional, economical upbringing, largely abroad...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rosa Nouchette Carey
In an interview of 1893, Helen C. Black
described RNC
as tall, slender, and erect with large blue-grey eyes with long lashes,soft dark hair, and a low, tuneful voice.
Black, Helen C. Notable Women Authors of the Day. Maclaren.
