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.
One of the readers of the English Woman's Journal, Marian Lewes
, wrote to its proprietor, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
, to say how deeply she had been affected by Infant Seamstresses. Supposing...
Publishing
Dinah Mulock Craik
Dinah Mulock
's review of George Eliot
's The Mill on the Floss was published in Macmillan's Magazine.
Mitchell, Sally. Dinah Mulock Craik. Twayne.
chronology
Textual Production
Dinah Mulock Craik
DMC
never published under her name, but always as by the author of one or more of her preceding books. In a review of George Eliot
, she said she respected the author's pseudonym in...
Literary responses
Dinah Mulock Craik
Some felt she wrote too much too fast. Elizabeth Gaskell
commented in a letter of 1851, I wish she had some other means of support than writing, which must be pumped up instead of bubbling...
Reception
Georgiana Craik
In a letter to GC
's father
dated 11 December 1862, George Eliot
wrote that she had read one of GC
's stories for children, So-Fat and Mew-Mew. She described it as a little...
Occupation
Charles Darwin
Early in his career, CD
received praise for his work as a geologist, but as a naturalist he achieved fame—after he had undertaken a scientific expedition to South America and especially the Galapagos Islands—for...
politics
Emily Davies
A College Committee was struck and met for the first time on 5 December 1867.
Stephen, Barbara. Emily Davies and Girton College. Constable.
165
ED
approached Lady Stanley
about sitting on the committee, but she declined.
Stephen, Barbara. Emily Davies and Girton College. Constable.
161-2
A meeting held on 28 March...
Literary responses
Jennifer Dawson
The Times Literary Supplement review described The Cold Country as a book in which JD
was a novelist with a mission, and in this respect positioned her with great writers such as George Eliot
...
Textual Features
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
E. A. Dillwyn
EAD
kept a diary from her teens, but it was not until the 1870s that her feelings of uselessness made her resolve, in the absence of anything more constructive to do, to try and write...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Drabble
Imagery of postpartum fluidity, particularly lactation, characterizes the lovers' growing passion and the descriptions of female sexual desire and orgasm. The narrative alternates between a schizoid third-person dialogue
Drabble, Margaret. The Waterfall. Penguin.
130
and first-person narration as Jane attempts...
Education
Toru Dutt
TD
and Aru
were briefly enrolled at a boarding school in Nice where they studied French.
Rao, Raja, and Toru Dutt. “Aru and Toru”. Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, Writers Workshop.
After moving to England they continued their studies and attended the Higher Lectures for Women series begun by Henry Sidgwick
Literary responses
Lady Charlotte Elliot
LCE
received little critical attention either during or after her lifetime. The Athenæum obituary by Theodore Watts
described her as perhaps the latest noticeable addition to that bright roll of female poets of which Scotland...
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
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...
