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.
Portrait of George Eliot, seated, after the 1881 painting of Francois Albert Durade.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Features Virginia Woolf
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 Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
With this novel LMH perfected her sagely meditative narratorial voice (which looks forward to George Eliot and Thomas Hardy ). She chose a plot of many characters and complicated interlocking machinations. Her initially unappealing heroine...
Textual Features Emma Caroline Wood
The volume included selections from Byron , George Eliot , Samuel Taylor Coleridge , Christina Rossetti , Sir Walter Scott , Alfred Lord Tennyson , Elizabeth Barrett Browning and William Wordsworth .
Textual Features Patricia Beer
PB here considers a series of canonical authors, Austen , Eliot , Charlotte Brontë , and Elizabeth Gaskell , and the way that the Woman Question was handled in fiction. Critic John Mullan notes her...
Textual Features Mary Brunton
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 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...
Textual Features Elizabeth Jenkins
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...
Textual Features Jane Hume Clapperton
Her almost innumerable sources include Charles Darwin , Herbert Spencer , Thomas Malthus , Thomas Huxley , Francis Galton , Edward Carpenter , John A. Hobson , and Sidney Webb . She was also inspired...
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...
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, 1998.
126
The final poem, A Legacy, On my Fiftieth Birthday, is written...
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 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, 1948.
30
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...
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...

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