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.
CEP
takes an unconventional critical approach in applying her theory of causation to a lengthy analysis of literature. She concludes that it is when depicting the subtler operations of the human mind that George Eliot
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Stickney Ellis
Mary Ann Evans
, later George Eliot, read SSE
's conduct manuals in the 1840s, but it is unlikely that Eliot took the advice too seriously, since other intellectual women were vocal in their distaste...
Intertextuality and Influence
Q. D. Leavis
Here and elsewhere she published on a wide range of authors and literary topics, including Trollope
, Hardy
, Gissing
, Forster
, Orwell
, and Aldous Huxley
; the Anglo-Irish, American, French, Italian, and...
Leisure and Society
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB
read much and widely in French as well as English. She recalled having read Eliot
's Adam Bede at least a dozen times, always weeping for Hetty Sorrel.
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland.
262
Leisure and Society
Queen Victoria
Among her favourite writers were Alfred Tennyson
, Sir Walter Scott
, George Eliot
(whose The Mill on the Floss made a deep impression
Victoria, Queen. Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals. Editor Hibbert, Christopher, Penguin.
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
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
Bessie Rayner Parkes
Leighton
and Reynolds
suggest that this poem, together with Barrett Browning
's Aurora Leigh, is one of the few bold attempts to tackle the woman question in verse and it is clearly influenced by...
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
Michelene Wandor
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
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...
