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.
"George Eliot" by Universal Images Group/Contributor,Retrieved from https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/george-eliot-pen-name-of-mary-ann-evans-important-british-news-photo/113634333.
One of her pupils, her niece Hertha Ayrton
(1854-1923), became a suffragist and a friend of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
and George Eliot
. She obtained only third-class degree results at the end her studies...
politics
Edith J. Simcox
On 12 December 1877 EJS
remarked in her autobiography that a Council was appointed to which I was nominated, then Mrs Besant
, then Mrs Harriet Law
, and Mr Bradlaugh
in between. I had...
politics
Queen Victoria
Most Victorian women writers commented in some way on the Queen's role. Christina Rossetti
engaged with it positively in Our Widowed Queen, while George Eliot
's narrator in Felix Holt, the Radical refers to...
politics
Emily Davies
A College Committee was struck and met for the first time on 5 December 1867.
Stephen, Barbara. Emily Davies and Girton College. Constable, 1927.
165
ED
approached Lady Stanley
about sitting on the committee, but she declined.
Stephen, Barbara. Emily Davies and Girton College. Constable, 1927.
161-2
A meeting held on 28 March...
politics
Herbert Spencer
In Spencer's view, women's inferiority was clearly evolutionary, not cultural. In The Study of Sociology and The Principles of Sociology, he claims that women's biology (or their reproductive role) impairs their intellectual and physical...
politics
May Sinclair
It was an act of great courage for MS
to make herself so conspicuous. Cicely Hamilton
and Catherine Gasquoine Hartley
led the procession. Members of the WWSL each carried a goose quill and a bannerette...
Author summary
Elizabeth Gaskell
Elizabeth Gaskell
, one of the foremost fiction-writers of the mid-Victorian period, produced a corpus of seven novels, numerous short stories, and a controversial biography of Charlotte Brontë
. She wrote extensively for periodicals, as...
Author summary
George Sand
French writer George Sand
(Aurore Dudevant) wrote over one hundred novels and plays. Her correspondence fills twenty-five volumes. She averaged two novels a year after 1831. British writers including Elizabeth Barrett Browning
and George Eliot
Author summary
Mathilde Blind
MB
was one of the leading poets of the later nineteenth century; her burning sense of political and social injustice runs like a unifying thread through her work. Her poetry combines great beauty of sound...
Author summary
George Henry Lewes
At GHL
's death in 1878, Anthony Trollope
praised him as journalist, editor, critic, philosophical populariser, biographer, and scientific writer.
Ashton, Rosemary. G. H. Lewes: A Life. Clarendon Press, 1991.
279
One of the leading Victorian men of letters, he is nevertheless remembered chiefly as...
Author summary
Mary Augusta Ward
Best known for her influential loss-of-faith novel Robert Elsmere, MAW
was among the more prolific and popular novelists of the later Victorian and Edwardian periods. Her fifty-year career spanned an era of enormous transformation...
Author summary
Jessie Fothergill
During her relatively short career in the later nineteenth century, Jessie Fothergill
produced fourteen novels, many of which ran to several editions and appeared in Indian and Australian journals,
AM
wrote for Bentley's Quarterly, during the first year of its brief run, a review of Adam Bede (anonymous, of course), which George Eliot
called on the whole the best review we have seen.
Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Editor Haight, Gordon S., Yale University Press, 1954–1978, 9 vols.
3: 213-14
Wordsworth, John, Bishop of Salisbury, and Anne Mozley. “Memoir”. Essays from "Blackwood", edited by F. Mozley and F. Mozley, William Blackwood and Sons, 1892, p. xii - xx.
x
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2024, 22 vols. plus supplements.
Publishing
Dinah Mulock Craik
Dinah Mulock
's review of George Eliot
's The Mill on the Floss was published in Macmillan's Magazine.
When, however, MH
submitted an article on women's rights to the Westminster Review in early 1856, George Eliot
did her best to prevent its being published.
