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.
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Reviews of Cranford were positive, focusing on its charm and apparent simplicity. In the Athenæum, Henry Fothergill Chorley
commended its touches of love and kindness, of simple self-sacrifice and of true womanly tenderness.
qtd. in
Easson, Angus, editor. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1991.
194
Intertextuality and Influence
Harriet Martineau
The novel prompted a complimentary letter on 7 November 1849 from Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë
) saying that in it he tasted a new and keen pleasure, and experienced a genuine benefit. In his...
Intertextuality and Influence
Amy Levy
This novel too has a third-person narrator, but makes more extensive use of free indirect discourse. Its young Jewish protagonist, a lawyer who is already finding his ambitious plans for his career are a strain...
Intertextuality and Influence
Germaine de Staël
After completing this novel GS
wrote, I'd like a really big [writing] table, it seems to me I've got the right to it now.
qtd. in
Kobak, Annette. “Mme de Staël and Fanny Burney”. The Burney Journal, Vol.
4
, 2001, pp. 12-35.
19
Corinne was enormously influential for nineteenth-century women writers. The model...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rosa Nouchette Carey
In an interview of 1893, Helen C. Black
described RNC
as tall, slender, and erect with large blue-grey eyes with long lashes,soft dark hair, and a low, tuneful voice.
Black, Helen C. Notable Women Authors of the Day. Maclaren, 1906.
147-8
Carey revealed in this...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Gaskell
The plot elements link the novel to its moment of sensation fiction more strongly than any of EG
's other books, but are integrated with a nuanced portrait of a specific locale and a now...
Intertextuality and Influence
Maggie Gee
Like her first novel to see print, Gee says, this one took seven years to find a publisher. Speaking about it at a date fairly early in its long quest for print, she mentioned that...
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
Intertextuality and Influence
Hélène Barcynska
Vista Stuart as first met is no dancer, but a rich little upper-middle-class girl tearing up the Great North Road in a sports car given her by her father, who feels instant, mutual attraction for...
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
Elinor Glyn
The mysterious Lady is in fact queen in her own right of a Slavic country, and tied to a destructive marriage. Her neglectful, abusive, alcoholic, and profligate husband is king only through his marriage to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Augusta Ward
The contemporary story features a self-educated working-class intellectual and freethinker whose characterisation draws on many strands of thought of the day. Drawn after the model of self-made men such as Daniel Macmillan
, William Lovett
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Oakley
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
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, 1971.
130
and first-person narration as Jane attempts...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ali Smith
Smith began working on There But For The following her father's death in 2010, in a crazy time of mourning, where nothing held still and everything changed. It was written, she says, in a kind...
