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 Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR bridges the gap between the Victorians and the moderns. Leslie Stephen found her irritating, and harshly criticized her Dictionary of National Biography entry on Elizabeth Barrett Browning , but noted that everyone who could...
Literary responses Frances Hodgson Burnett
The American reviews were highly flattering. The reviewer for the Boston Transcript could think of no more powerful work from a woman's hand in the English language, not even George Eliot at her best.
qtd. in
Gerzina, Gretchen. Frances Hodgson Burnett. Chatto and Windus, 2004.
67
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 Charlotte Yonge
The Daisy Chain's popularity was long-lasting, though not so intense as that of The Heir of Redclyffe. Jane Austen 's nephew James Austen-Leigh compared it to the work of Austen and Scott ...
Literary responses Hesba Stretton
Calling the novel an offspring of a bold imagination, the Athenæum comments that it is written without labour or spurious ornament, and that certain scenes are very well described.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2046 (1867): 44
Other reviewers compared...
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 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 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 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 Lucas Malet
The Wages of Sin met sharply divided responses: fervent praise, or dismissal as risqué and distasteful. The Athenæum, the Times (which singled out Malet's golden gift of reticence, and a genuine appreciation of the...
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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