Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
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The protagonist, a clergyman's daughter, lives up to her name. She is a child at her mother's graveside in the book's opening scene: by the age of thirty-three she has repeatedly sacrificed her hopes of...
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Amy Levy
She continued: The Jew, as we know him to-day, with his curious mingling of diametrically opposed qualities; his surprising virtues and no less surprising vices; leading his eager, intricate life; living, moving, and having his...
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Martin Ross
This novel puts its female characters at the centre. Its tightly-interwoven social fabric is reminiscent of George Eliot
; its slow-burning, enduring passions suggest Thomas Hardy
. The way that animals are used as subsidiary...
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Marie Belloc Lowndes
MBL
emphasised the Empress Frederick
's strong interest in literature, art, and religion. She liked the fact that the empress insisted, on a visit to England, on meeting George Eliot
.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. A Passing World. Macmillan, 1948.
30
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Elizabeth Robins
As the title suggests, ER
plays with gender roles in this work about a popular woman novelist who uses a male pseudonym: George Mandeville is in life Lois Wilbraham. Lois's husband, Ralph, is horrified by...
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Hannah Lynch
HL
's admiration of Meredith is very evident in the preface and throughout the book, which foregrounds his attention to the New Woman. Lynch refers to him as a master in English literature, and above...
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Jessie Fothergill
Of particular interest is JF
's handling of the benefits of cross-class mutual aid and moral principle
Debenham, Helen. “’Almost always two sides to a question’: the novels of Jessie Fothergill”. Popular Victorian Women Writers, edited by Kay Boardman and Shirley Jones, Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 66-89.
76
as rich and poor, male and female, employer and workers, civil authorities and landowners join forces against...
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Beatrice Harraden
It is no wonder that reference books seem divided as to whether this novel depicts an oppressive marriage or an escape from one. BH
's representation of a marriage of this sort is so exaggerated...
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Flora Macdonald Mayor
While spinsters are again perceived as lonely, self-pitying, garrulous, defensive
in the eyes of some, the heroine here defies such a one-sided image. Leonard Woolf
found Mary Jocelyn very reserved...
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Virginia Woolf
This is the first of Woolf's a London novels, and is set unambiguously in the recent past, in the period of the suffrage struggle before the first world war. It is a story of courtship...
With this novel LMH
perfected her sagely meditative narratorial voice (which looks forward to George Eliot
and Thomas Hardy
). She chose a plot of many characters and complicated interlocking machinations. Her initially unappealing heroine...
In this work, set on the outskirts of London, the heroine is a young seamstress who is neither beautiful nor clever and who has to work for a living. As the narrator notes, there...
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Mary Brunton
MB
's first heroine, Laura Montreville, daughter of a Scottish officer, covets Christian martyrdom as a child, in rather the same spirit as George Eliot
's Dorothea Brooke and other idealistic, immature heroines. As a...
