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.
James Manby Gully
had been widowed, then separated from a second wife, and held liberal views on sex. When he met Florence Ricardo
, who was forty years his junior, he had long been well-known...
MB
's first heroine, Laura Montreville, daughter of a Scottish officer, covets Christian martyrdom as a child, in rather the same spirit as George Eliot
's Dorothea Brooke and other idealistic, immature heroines. As a...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
Anne Marsh
She supplied this novel with a preface setting out many of her ideas about fiction. She thinks it should uphold the cause of morality, not by inculcating particular maxims but to bring actions and their...
This is the first of Woolf's a London novels, and is set unambiguously in the recent past, in the period of the suffrage struggle before the first world war. It is a story of courtship...
Textual Features
Amy Levy
She continued: The Jew, as we know him to-day, with his curious mingling of diametrically opposed qualities; his surprising virtues and no less surprising vices; leading his eager, intricate life; living, moving, and having his...
Textual Features
Marie Belloc Lowndes
MBL
emphasised the Empress Frederick
's strong interest in literature, art, and religion. She liked the fact that the empress insisted, on a visit to England, on meeting George Eliot
.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. A Passing World. Macmillan.
30
Textual Features
Hannah Lynch
HL
's admiration of Meredith is very evident in the preface and throughout the book, which foregrounds his attention to the New Woman. Lynch refers to him as a master in English literature, and above...
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.
63
It features the young and beautiful Ellinor, and her much older husband, General...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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...
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...
