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
Literary responses Olive Schreiner
The book elicited strong reactions, most of them positive. It was highly praised by Philip Kent , who wrote a long article about it instead of his usual shorter reviews in Life, a weekly...
Literary responses Isa Craig
One of the readers of the English Woman's Journal, Marian Lewes , wrote to its proprietor, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon , to say how deeply she had been affected by Infant Seamstresses. Supposing...
Literary responses Charlotte Yonge
During her lifetime CY was ranked as a serious novelist with Austen , Trollope , Balzac , and Zola . Contemporaries like Louisa Alcott , Margaret Oliphant , Ellen Wood , and Rhoda Broughton made...
Literary responses Harriet Beecher Stowe
Reviews were generally derogatory. The poet's admireres could not be swayed. George Eliot , with whom HBS had recently begun corresponding, suggested that she ought not to have brought the Byron question before the public...
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 Julia Kavanagh
This work's simplicity appealed to Geraldine Jewsbury , the reviewer for the Athenæum. She noted that it was a charming and touching story, wrought from the humblest and simplest of materials; but the interest...
Literary responses Anne Ogle
The book was a great popular success. In the Westminster Review, George Eliot advised readers to take up this volume, not . . . in the grave morning hours, when you want something strong...
Literary responses Lucas Malet
Some reviewers discerned a likeness between Lydia's devotion to her father and that of Dorothea to her first husband in George Eliot 's Middlemarch.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
153
Literary responses Queen Victoria
Despite her book's popularity, when Victoria entered the arena of public writing, some Victorians criticized her prose style. After receiving copies of Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, sent 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 Anna Steele
In a lengthy review the Times noted that while Gardenhurst had many faults typical of first novels (citing other examples from Sir Walter Scott , George Eliot , and Charles Dickens ), it nonetheless has...
Literary responses Margaret Oliphant
The Saturday Review suspected the true author (that is, the same who wrote Edward Irving), but thought at least the early part of Salem Chapel worthy of George Eliot . The reviewer found the...
Literary responses George Henry Lewes
A hostile notice by T. H. Huxley in the Westminster Review (owned by John Chapman ) dismissed Lewes as an amateur and ranked his book below Harriet Martineau 's recent abridgement of Comte. George Eliot
Literary responses Augusta Webster
The Athenæum declared the play would strengthen AW 's reputation as a dramatist, calling the dialogue intellectual and subtle.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2878 (1882): 841
But although the review conceded that Webster has not strangled poetic art...
Literary responses George Sand
The sentiments expressed in this and similar novels earned her the nickname the Anti-Matrimonial novelist from the Foreign Quarterly Review.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
The future George Eliot praised Jacques for its psychological anatomy of the early days...

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