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.
"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.
MO
's editor and biographer Elisabeth Jay calls the portrait painted in this work a fiction of herself.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press, 1995.
25
Oliphant emphatically distinguishes herself from celebrated women writers (naming George Eliot
and George Sand
), insisting...
Textual Features
Violet Hunt
In March 1910 this journal printed her story The Novelist's Revenge, an exploration both of the end of her own affair with Oswald Crawfurd
and of the broader difficulties (personal and social) faced by...
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Emily Dickinson
She began practising literary techniques in letters written to friends and family at this time. Evidence of a dialogic, corresponding voice permeates her poetry, resulting in what Archibald MacLeish
reads as one of the central...
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Isabella Ormston Ford
In this pamphlet, which she directed towards the middle and upper classes, IOF
declares herself interested in both the moral condition and the economic position of industrial women.
Ford, Isabella Ormston. Industrial Women and How to Help Them. Humanitarian League, 1901.
1
She argues that prostitution has economic...
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Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
While Charlotte Brontë
, MEC
argues, swept the world away in the storm of her passion and George Eliotconquered it with the power of understanding, [Elizabeth] Gaskell
forced it to weep for pity [and]...
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Elizabeth Jenkins
James Manby Gully
had been widowed, then separated from a second wife, and held liberal views on sex. When he met Florence Ricardo
, who was forty years his junior, he had long been well-known...
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Ivy Compton-Burnett
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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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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Anne Marsh
She supplied this novel with a preface setting out many of her ideas about fiction. She thinks it should uphold the cause of morality, not by inculcating particular maxims but to bring actions and their...
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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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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...
Textual Production
Patricia Beer
PB
's Reader, I Married Him: A Study of the Women Characters of Jane Austen
, Charlotte Brontë
, Elizabeth Gaskell
, and George Eliot was a harbinger of serious critical interest in the women's literary tradition.
Sherry, Vincent B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 40. Gale Research, 1985.
25
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Geraldine Jewsbury
Although she disapproved of The Mill on the Floss, GJ
praised George Eliot
's Adam Bede for its genius and also liked Silas Marner for its depictions of human nature, however humbly embodied it...
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Michelene Wandor
MW
has specialized in adapting and abridging novels for radio. Between 1980 and 2004 she adapted a wide array of fiction by women writers, including works by Jane Austen
, Charlotte Brontë
, George Eliot
