Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
George Eliot
-
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.
Trollope
admired her work alongside that of Rhoda Broughton
, though he thought her writing lazy.
Shankman, Lillian F., and Anne Thackeray Ritchie. “Biographical Commentary and Notes”. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters, edited by Abigail Burnham Bloom et al., Ohio State University Press, p. various pages.
164
Robert Louis Stevenson
dedicated a poem to her, inciting her to further literary biographies after reading A Book...
Literary responses
Frances Power Cobbe
The preface was admired by George Eliot
, and Lydia Maria Child
called it a truly manly production: thus we are obliged to compliment the superior sex when we seek to praise our own.
Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. University of Virginia Press.
131
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
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
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
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...
Most literary reviews were positive, some comparing MC
to Charlotte Brontë
or George Eliot
; The Spectator called the novel brilliant and exhilarating.
Colby, Vineta. “’Devoted Amateur’: Mary Cholmondeley and Red Pottage”. Essays in Criticism, Vol.
20
, No. 2, pp. 213-28.
214
An Edinburgh Review article written in 1900 praised Red Pottage in...
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
Mary Augusta Ward
MAW
's friend Benjamin Jowett
praised David Grieve as the best novel since George Eliot
.Walter Pater
also approved, but critics were not enthusiastic.
Colby, Vineta. The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century. New York University Press.
150
Sales were good, but there were some hostile reviews...
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...
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
Charlotte Brontë
CB
received inquiries about the novel's ambiguous conclusion and the fate of M. Paul; she would not say which way the book was to end, commenting wrily that Drowning and Matrimony are the fearful alternatives...
Literary responses
Jessie Fothergill
The subject-matter led one reviewer to comment that JFdoes not deal with the most agreeable of subjects.
