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.
In July that year her friendship with George Eliot
had been cemented and her opinion of G. H. Lewes
radically improved by a seaside visit to this unconventional couple at Tenby in Wales. (By...
Friends, Associates
Florence Nightingale
Around this time FN
became acquainted with other literary women as well. In July 1852 George Eliot
, who had become her correspondent, remarked in another letter that there is a loftiness of mind about...
Friends, Associates
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
In May 1869 George Eliot
recorded in her diary Bodichon's steady friendship at the time when G. H. Lewes
's son Thornie
was dying of tuberculosis of the spine. Bodichon visited twice a week and...
Friends, Associates
Jane Ellen Harrison
Distinguished guests at Newnham
at this time included Ruskin
and Turgenev
; JEH
recalls giving them tours of the college in her Reminiscences of a Student's Life.
Harrison, Jane Ellen. Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. Hogarth Press, 1925.
44
A great admirer of 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?
qtd. in
O’Mahoney, John. “Poet and Pioneer: Adrienne Rich”. The Guardian, 15 June 2002, pp. Review 20 - 3.
22
She later recalled her isolation during...
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
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
This novel retells The Husband of a Blue, a story by ESP
's mother, Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps
, from the perspective of Avis Dobell, a wife, mother, and would-be artist who sacrifices her...
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, 2001.
The authors use as epigraph a passage from Sylvia Plath
's Three Women: a Poem for Three Voices.
Oakley, Ann et al. Miscarriage. Fontana, 1984.
9
They then begin with some shocking statistics. Nobody knows what proportion miscarriages bear to live...
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
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
Emily Faithfull
The novel brings together the fashionable upper-class society which EF
had experienced in her youth, with the question of women's employment which was the burning issue of her working life. She acknowledges the work of...
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
Jane Hume Clapperton
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Phyllis Bentley
Philip Joseph Carr bears the name of his birthplace by mere coincidence: the leading local family is called Carr, but his family sprang from working-class origins elsewhere. He is born on the night his father...
