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.
This novel retells The Husband of a Blue, a story by ESP
's mother, Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps
, from the perspective of Avis Dobell, a wife, mother, and would-be artist who sacrifices her...
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
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...
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.
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.
The Critical Review expressed impatience with yet another collection of memorabilia and complained that the book was deformed by colloquial barbarisms.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
61 (1786): 273
She was attacked in newspapers (even those which began with respect)...
Literary responses
Thomas Hardy
The result was the novel with which he achieved general popularity. The reviewer for The Spectator, writing before the novel's authorship was revealed, commented: If 'Far from the Madding Crowd' is not...
Literary responses
Lucas Malet
Two things about this novel gave offence initially and had a long-term effect on its reputation: its treating the nasty
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.
topic of deformity, and its involving the hero emotionally with three women (his mother as...
Literary responses
Viola Meynell
In The Bookman, C. E. Lawrence
welcomed this novel as an individual effort of work which proves that however much she may have studied in the past . . . Miss Meynell has a...
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...
Literary responses
Edith J. Simcox
As noted by Laurie Zierer
in Broomfield
and Mitchell
's anthology of Victorian women writers, EJS
's connection with George Eliot
has saved her from permanent obscurity, [but] her stature as a Victorian writer and...
Literary responses
Emma Frances Brooke
The book was similarly well-received across the Atlantic. The Brooklyn Eagle found that the first few chapters almost reminds one of George Eliot
.
Brooke, Emma Frances. Sir Elyot of the Woods. William Heinemann.
endmatter
Literary responses
Michelene Wandor
The assessment by Nigella Lawson
in the Times Literary Supplement was astonishingly harsh. She argued that the domestic dramatic monologue form used here demands sureness, control and verbal dexterity which MW
did not possess.
Lawson, Nigella. “Collusion and Intrusion”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4324, p. 162.
162
Literary responses
Rhoda Broughton
The Athenæum, describing Belinda as RB
's worst novel, noted a similarity of her central couple to Dorothea and Casaubon in George Eliot
's Middlemarch. It deemed Eliot's characterisation decidedly superior, maintaning that...
Literary responses
Lettice Cooper
The Manchester Guardian reviewer, Charles Marriott
, used a flattering comparison with George Eliot
, writing that LChas done for a contemporary industrial town . . . pretty much what Middlemarch did for a...
