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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The poems are printed chronologically (by the author's desire rather than the editor's). MBE
's introduction says nothing about her subject's parentage or his life-history, but canvasses the issues involved in selecting from his poems...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Westray's fall into financial ruin after his marriage recalls that of Lydgate in George Eliot
's recent Middlemarch. His salvation comes through turning his back on the life of fashionable London. He reviles his...
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...
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
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.
Trollope
admired her work alongside that of Rhoda Broughton
, though he thought her writing lazy.
Shankman, Lillian F., and Anne Thackeray Ritchie. “Biographical Commentary and Notes”. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters, edited by Abigail Burnham Bloom, John Maynard, Abigail Burnham Bloom, and John Maynard, Ohio State University Press, 1994, p. various pages.
164
Robert Louis Stevenson
dedicated a poem to her, inciting her to further literary biographies after reading A Book...
Literary responses
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Reviews were generally derogatory. The poet's admireres could not be swayed. George Eliot
, with whom HBS
had recently begun corresponding, suggested that she ought not to have brought the Byron question before the public...
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, 2004.
131
Literary responses
Mary Catherine Hume
Bessie Rayner Parkes
recommended this work to George Eliot
. Eliot was not pleased with it and wrote, Heaven preserve me from reading Miss Hume's poems! . . . I was quite cowed by their...
Literary responses
Queen Victoria
Despite her book's popularity, when Victoria entered the arena of public writing, some Victorians criticized her prose style. After receiving copies of Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, sent by...
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
Augusta Webster
In the 1870s and 1880s AW
was mentioned in periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic—in Harper's and Scribner's, for instance, as well as in English publications—as one of the leading women poets of...
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
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...
Literary responses
Julia Kavanagh
This work's simplicity appealed to Geraldine Jewsbury
, the reviewer for the Athenæum. She noted that it was a charming and touching story, wrought from the humblest and simplest of materials; but the interest...