George Eliot

22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880

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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Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
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...
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...
Leisure and Society	Queen Victoria	Among her favourite writers were Alfred Tennyson , Sir Walter Scott , George Eliot (whose The Mill on the Floss made a deep impression Victoria, Queen. Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals. Editor Hibbert, Christopher, Penguin, 1985. 116 on her), and Charles Kingsley , whose Two Years Ago...
Leisure and Society	Mary Elizabeth Braddon	MEB read much and widely in French as well as English. She recalled having read Eliot 's Adam Bede at least a dozen times, always weeping for Hetty Sorrel. Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland, 1979. 262
Literary responses	Felicia Hemans	George Eliot considered the title poem exquisite. Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Editor Haight, Gordon S., Yale University Press, 1954–1978, 9 vols. 1: 72 Critic Gary Kelly argues that this first-person narrative should be considered a dramatic monologue. Hemans, Felicia. “Introduction and Editorial Materials”. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters, edited by Gary Kelly, Broadview, 2002, pp. 12 - 89; various pages. 39
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...
Literary responses	Caroline Scott	This was one of the white neck-cloth Eliot, George. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”. A Victorian Art of Fiction, edited by John Charles Olmsted, Garland, 1979, pp. 277-98. 293 or Evangelical sub-species of fiction which George Eliot distinguished in her notorious attack on the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic Eliot, George. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”. A Victorian Art of Fiction, edited by John Charles Olmsted, Garland, 1979, pp. 277-98. 279 in Silly Novels...
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...
Literary responses	Anne Thackeray Ritchie	ATR bridges the gap between the Victorians and the moderns. Leslie Stephen found her irritating, and harshly criticized her Dictionary of National Biography entry on Elizabeth Barrett Browning , but noted that everyone who could...
Literary responses	Frances Hodgson Burnett	The American reviews were highly flattering. The reviewer for the Boston Transcript could think of no more powerful work from a woman's hand in the English language, not even George Eliot at her best. qtd. in Gerzina, Gretchen. Frances Hodgson Burnett. Chatto and Windus, 2004. 67
Literary responses	Olive Schreiner	The book elicited strong reactions, most of them positive. It was highly praised by Philip Kent , who wrote a long article about it instead of his usual shorter reviews in Life, a weekly...
Literary responses	Charlotte Yonge	The Daisy Chain's popularity was long-lasting, though not so intense as that of The Heir of Redclyffe. Jane Austen 's nephew James Austen-Leigh compared it to the work of Austen and Scott ...
Literary responses	Hesba Stretton	Calling the novel an offspring of a bold imagination, the Athenæum comments that it is written without labour or spurious ornament, and that certain scenes are very well described. Athenæum. J. Lection. 2046 (1867): 44 Other reviewers compared...

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