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.
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
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
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
John Oliver Hobbes
JOH
's speeches and interviews regularly deal with literature. In an interview with William Archer
, she admits to admiring Arthur Wing Pinero
's characterisation of women, while noting how little individualised are some of...
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.
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
Mary Renault
The book came out five years after the Sexual Offences Act in Britain decriminalised many homosexual practices there, and three years after the Stonewall Inn Riots in New York marked the start of Gay Liberation...
Literary responses
Anna Steele
In a lengthy review the Times noted that while Gardenhurst had many faults typical of first novels (citing other examples from Sir Walter Scott
, George Eliot
, and Charles Dickens
), it nonetheless has...
Literary responses
Augusta Webster
The Athenæum declared the play would strengthen AW
's reputation as a dramatist, calling the dialogue intellectual and subtle.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2878 (1882): 841
But although the review conceded that Webster has not strangled poetic art...
Literary responses
George Sand
The sentiments expressed in this and similar novels earned her the nickname the Anti-Matrimonial novelist from the Foreign Quarterly Review.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
The future George Eliot
praised Jacques for its psychological anatomy of the early days...
Literary responses
Pamela Hansford Johnson
This novel marked a step forward in the public valuation of PHJ
. Walter Allen
called it one of the best novels of our time.
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
...
Literary responses
Agnes Maule Machar
Responses to this novel were mixed. Poet William Wilfred Campbell
thought it a watered-down version of George Eliot
's Felix Holt, but The Week called Machar our most gifted authoress.
qtd. in
Gerson, Carole, and Agnes Maule Machar. “Introduction”. Roland Graeme, Knight, Tecumseh Press, 1996, p. vii - xxiv.
xix
A review in...
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...
