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.
The title for the book was taken in part from George Eliot
, who originally coined the phrase meliorist when a friend playfully referred to her as an optimist: I will not answer to the...
Literary responses
Jane Hume Clapperton
A review by Vernon Lee
for The Academy was similarly positive, calling JHC
's book an important,valuable, and noble production, whose primary contribution was its originality: without being actually original in any separate...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Jane Hume Clapperton
JHC
also writes approvingly of free love, particularly George Eliot
's decision to join in domestic partnership with George Henry Lewes
. Eliot's decision, she says, was clearly motivated by Lewes's legal inability to obtain...
After she became established as a novelist, CC
was approached by the editors of the new Once a Week in April 1859 with a request to write a serial for them: she was their first...
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
Education
Frances Power Cobbe
Her continuing studies, particularly of theology, benefitted from access to Archbishop Marsh's Library
in Dublin (though it was ostensibly open only to gentlemen and graduates). Her reading at this period may have included Marian Evans, later George Eliot
Friends, Associates
Frances Power Cobbe
During her 1860 sojourn in Italy she declined an invitation to meet George Eliot
because the latter was living with a married man. Her friendship with distinguished scientist Mary Somerville
blossomed during this trip, and...
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]...
Textual Features
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...
LC
wrote for the British Council
a little book on George Eliot
as one of the Bibliographical Supplements to British Book News, also known as the Writers and Their Work series.
British Book News. British Council.
(1951): 673
Reception
Lettice Cooper
By the time LC
's little book on George Eliot
appeared in late 1951, her best-known novels were reckoned to be this one, National Provincial, 1938, and Three Lives.
Literary responses
Lettice Cooper
The Manchester Guardian reviewer, Charles Marriott
, used a flattering comparison with George Eliot
, writing that LChas done for a contemporary industrial town . . . pretty much what Middlemarch did for a...
