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 Production Naomi Alderman
NA says this book was facilitated by the success of fictions about other, distinct communities: Zadie Smith 's White Teeth, Monica Ali 's Brick Lane, and especially influenced by Jeanette Winterson 's Oranges...
Education Margaret Atwood
She attended elementary school, and then from 1952 Leaside High School in Toronto, both in the Protestant public school system operating in Ontario alongside a Catholic one. She and her schoolmates got prayers and...
Family and Intimate relationships W. H. Auden
Nicholas Jenkins of Stanford University formerly maintained on his website at http://www.stanford.edu/~njenkins/ a section called W. H. Auden. Family Ghosts, designed to show how Auden's family, despite his claims to ordinariness, sprang from a...
Education Beryl Bainbridge
BB described her reading at nine years old as a mixture: George Eliot and children's writers like Richmal Crompton and Susan Coolidge (Sarah Woolsey ): Just William, What Katy Did, The Mill...
Education Louisa Baldwin
Following her marriage, she studied German, French, and Italian, as well as the works of Shakespeare and the novels of George Eliot .
Taylor, Ina. Victorian Sisters. Adler and Adler.
114-15, 127
Friends, Associates Louisa Baldwin
She became interested in Eliot 's work after her sister Georgiana introduced them.
Taylor, Ina. Victorian Sisters. Adler and Adler.
127
Literary responses Anna Letitia Barbauld
Sarah Trimmer disapproved of Things by their right Names and also of The Rookery, in which she felt the community of birds showed republican tendencies. George Eliot , who read this book at seven...
Intertextuality and Influence Hélène Barcynska
Vista Stuart as first met is no dancer, but a rich little upper-middle-class girl tearing up the Great North Road in a sports car given her by her father, who feels instant, mutual attraction for...
Education Simone de Beauvoir
SB knew her alphabet at three, and learned to read quickly once she suddenly perceived that the letters were symbols.
Beauvoir, Simone de. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Translator Kirkup, James, Penguin.
20
Later, the scanty resources of my city childhood could not compete with the riches...
Intertextuality and Influence Simone de Beauvoir
SB began writing as a child, under the influence of the highly conventional children's books she read. She says she had no idea of writing what she knew, but her first story (The Misfortunes...
Intertextuality and Influence Simone de Beauvoir
The second part of her first section, Facts and Myths, draws valuably on analysis of male writers. SB reads Stendhal as decidedly feministic:
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translator Parshley, H. M., Jonathan Cape.
255
he not only values liberty but accepts it as...
Textual Production Patricia Beer
PB 's Reader, I Married Him: A Study of the Women Characters of Jane Austen , Charlotte Brontë , Elizabeth Gaskell , and George Eliot was a harbinger of serious critical interest in the women's literary tradition.
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop. http://Bookshop.Blackwell.co.uk.
Sherry, Vincent B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 40. Gale Research.
25
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...
Occupation Inez Bensusan
IB 's postwar career has received almost no attention. She continued to act during and after the war. Her acting credentials include two silent films directed by Maurice Elvey , The Grit of a Jew...
Intertextuality and Influence Phyllis Bentley
Philip Joseph Carr bears the name of his birthplace by mere coincidence: the leading local family is called Carr, but his family sprang from working-class origins elsewhere. He is born on the night his father...

Timeline

About 1349-1351: Giovanni Boccaccio worked at his cycle of...

Writing climate item

About 1349-1351

Giovanni Boccaccio worked at his cycle of tales entitled (from the fact that the stories are told over the course of ten days) the Decameron. It was first translated into English in 1620.

1495: In a bonfire of the vanities in Florence,...

Writing climate item

1495

In a bonfire of the vanities in Florence, Italy, Girolamo Savonarola destroyed texts by Ovid , Dante , Boccaccio and others.

1677: Baruch or Benedictus de Spinoza's Ethics,...

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1677

Baruch or Benedictus de Spinoza 's Ethics, probably his most important text, was published shortly after his death at the age of forty-four.

January 1802: The Christian Observer was launched, as a...

Writing climate item

January 1802

The Christian Observer was launched, as a journalConducted by members of the established church with the aim of combating Methodism and other Dissenting sects as well as radicalism and scepticism.

April 1817: The first issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh...

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April 1817

The first issue of Blackwood's EdinburghMagazine appeared; founder William Blackwood intended to offer Tory competition to the liberal Edinburgh Review.

1826: The English Gypsy, or Roma, population was...

National or international item

1826

The English Gypsy, or Roma, population was grouped by authorities with all nomadic or vagrant peoples, who were estimated by William Cobbett to number around 30,000.

1828: The first issue of the successful annual...

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1828

The first issue of the successful annual gift bookThe Keepsake appeared; lavish production and distinguished contributors raised the price of this and other such publications to a guinea.

22 March 1832: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died at Weimar...

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22 March 1832

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died at Weimar in Germany in his early eighties.
Chisholm, Hugh, editor. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Cambridge University Press.

20 March 1839: The Anti-Corn Law League was founded....

National or international item

20 March 1839

The Anti-Corn Law League was founded.

1841: Ludwig Feuerbach published Das Wesen des...

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1841

Ludwig Feuerbach published Das Wesen des Christentums, an influential philosophical work demythologising Christianity.

1843: Charles Edward Mudie opened his first circulating...

Building item

1843

Charles Edward Mudie opened his first circulating library .

March 1848: Chartist uprisings took place in London,...

National or international item

March 1848

Chartist uprisings took place in London, Glasgow, and Manchester.

1851: French medical researcher Charles-Edouard...

Building item

1851

French medical researcher Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard experimented with the effects of blood transfusion on the responsiveness of nerves in human corpses.

January 1852: Publisher John Chapman purchased the Westminster...

Writing climate item

January 1852

Publisher John Chapman purchased the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly and began issuing it as the Westminster Review (which, twenty-eight years and several mergers back, had been its original name).

July 1855: Alfred Tennyson published Maud and Other...

Writing climate item

July 1855

Alfred Tennyson published Maud and Other Poems.

Texts

Eliot, George. Adam Bede. W. Blackwood, 1859.
Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. W. Blackwood, 1876.
Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. Editor Cave, Terence, Penguin, 1995.
Eliot, George. “Editorial Materials”. Essays of George Eliot, edited by Thomas Pinney, Columbia University Press, 1963, p. various pages.
Eliot, George. Essays of George Eliot. Editor Pinney, Thomas, Columbia University Press, 1963.
Eliot, George. Felix Holt. W. Blackwood, 1866.
Eliot, George. Felix Holt. Editor Thomson, Fred C., Clarendon, 1980.
Eliot, George. Impressions of Theophrastus Such. W. Blackwood, 1879.
Eliot, George. Letter to Katharine S. Macquoid.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. W. Blackwood, 1872.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Editor Haight, Gordon S., Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Editor Carroll, David, Clarendon, 1986.
Eliot, George, and Felicia Bonaparte. Middlemarch. Editor Carroll, David, Oxford University Press, 1997.
Eliot, George. “Preface”. The George Eliot Letters, edited by Gordon S. Haight, Yale University Press, 1954, p. 1: ix - lxxvii.
Eliot, George. Romola. Smith, Elder, 1863.
Eliot, George. Romola. Editor Brown, Andrew, Clarendon, 1993.
Eliot, George. Scenes of Clerical Life. W. Blackwood, 1858.
Eliot, George. Scenes of Clerical Life. Editor Noble, Thomas A., Clarendon, 1985.
Eliot, George. Silas Marner. W. Blackwood, 1861.
Eliot, George. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”. Westminster Review, Vol.
66
, pp. 442-61.
Eliot, George. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”. A Victorian Art of Fiction, edited by John Charles Olmsted, Garland, 1979, pp. 277-98.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Translator Eliot, George, J. Chapman, 1854.
Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Editor Haight, Gordon S., Yale University Press, 1978.
Eliot, George. The Journals of George Eliot. Editors Harris, Margaret and Judith Johnston, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Eliot, George. The Legend of Jubal. W. Blackwood, 1874.