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 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 Pamela Hansford Johnson
This novel marked a step forward in the public valuation of PHJ . Walter Allen called it one of the best novels of our time.
qtd. in
Lindblad, Ishrat. Pamela Hansford Johnson. Twayne, 1982.
125
It reminded him of George Eliot : he praised...
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...
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 Agnes Maule Machar
Responses to this novel were mixed. Poet William Wilfred Campbell thought it a watered-down version of George Eliot 's Felix Holt, but The Week called Machar our most gifted authoress.
qtd. in
Gerson, Carole, and Agnes Maule Machar. “Introduction”. Roland Graeme, Knight, Tecumseh Press, 1996, p. vii - xxiv.
xix
A review in...
Literary responses Augusta Webster
In the 1870s and 1880s AW was mentioned in periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic—in Harper's and Scribner's, for instance, as well as in English publications—as one of the leading women poets of...
Literary responses Jennifer Dawson
The Times Literary Supplement review described The Cold Country as a book in which JD was a novelist with a mission, and in this respect positioned her with great writers such as George Eliot ...
Literary responses Mary Catherine Hume
Bessie Rayner Parkes recommended this work to George Eliot . Eliot was not pleased with it and wrote, Heaven preserve me from reading Miss Hume's poems! . . . I was quite cowed by their...
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...

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Texts

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