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.
SB
began writing as a child, under the influence of the highly conventional children's books she read. She says she had no idea of writing what she knew, but her first story (The Misfortunes...
Intertextuality and Influence
Henry James
This publication in the USA followed on serialisation in Macmillan's Magazine, October 1880-November 1881, and in Atlantic Monthly, November 1880-December 1881.
Edel, Leon et al. A Bibliography of Henry James. Clarendon Press.
53
The bad marriages, moral weightiness, and grand sweep of George Eliot
Intertextuality and Influence
Julia Frankau
Dr Benjamin Phillips is mercenary: he is also a misogynist who looks on women as subordinate beings created for his pleasure, a sensualist who recognises that sex gives a woman power over him even while...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Hume Clapperton
In her youth she had been part of a circle that included Charles Bray
and George Eliot
.
Crawford, Elizabeth. The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866-1928. Routledge.
The second part of her first section, Facts and Myths, draws valuably on analysis of male writers. SB
reads Stendhal
as decidedly feministic:
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translator Parshley, H. M., Jonathan Cape.
255
he not only values liberty but accepts it as...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Stickney Ellis
H. S. Twycross-Martin
argues in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that the Apology for Fiction may have influenced George Eliot
's discussion of domestic realism in Adam Bede.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Intertextuality and Influence
Julia Frankau
This tie broadens the social scope of the novel. Karl is Jewish but not an observant Jew. He wishes he could believe in Christianity for its redeeming message and wants to extend that choice to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Stickney Ellis
Mary Ann Evans
, later George Eliot, read SSE
's conduct manuals in the 1840s, but it is unlikely that Eliot took the advice too seriously, since other intellectual women were vocal in their distaste...
Intertextuality and Influence
Q. D. Leavis
Here and elsewhere she published on a wide range of authors and literary topics, including Trollope
, Hardy
, Gissing
, Forster
, Orwell
, and Aldous Huxley
; the Anglo-Irish, American, French, Italian, and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Antonia Fraser
Fraser quotes here from Eliot
's tribute in Middlemarch to the silent influence of those who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Fraser, Antonia. The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England. Methuen.
xiii
She opens the book proper with a submerged...
Intertextuality and Influence
C. E. Plumptre
CEP
takes an unconventional critical approach in applying her theory of causation to a lengthy analysis of literature. She concludes that it is when depicting the subtler operations of the human mind that George Eliot
Health
Adrienne Rich
After her third delivery she decided to be sterilised, though she met with social disapproval even from nurses caring for her in hospital: Had yourself spayed, did you?
O’Mahoney, John. “Poet and Pioneer: Adrienne Rich”. The Guardian, pp. Review 20 - 3.
22
She later recalled her isolation during...
Friends, Associates
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
Marks (later Ayrton) was the daughter of impoverished Jewish Polish immigrants and was a brilliant mathematician. BLSB
interviewed her for a Girton scholarship, and subsequently became deeply involved with her life and family. Marks spent...
Friends, Associates
Bessie Rayner Parkes
BRP
knew personally and corresponded with many of the Victorian intelligentsia. In addition to her Langham Place associates already mentioned, her literary friends and acquaintances included Matilda Hays
, Harriet Martineau
, Anthony Trollope
,...
Friends, Associates
Frances Eleanor Trollope
In addition to her supportive professional relationship with her husband, FET
was also close to other writers such as Charles Dickens
, her brother-in-law Anthony Trollope
, her mother-in-law Frances Trollope
, and George Eliot
