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.
Leighton
and Reynolds
suggest that this poem, together with Barrett Browning
's Aurora Leigh, is one of the few bold attempts to tackle the woman question in verse and it is clearly influenced by...
Literary responses
Lucas Malet
Some reviewers discerned a likeness between Lydia's devotion to her father and that of Dorothea to her first husband in George Eliot
's Middlemarch.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
153
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
Margaret Oliphant
The Saturday Review suspected the true author (that is, the same who wrote Edward Irving), but thought at least the early part of Salem Chapel worthy of George Eliot
. The reviewer found the...
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
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
George Henry Lewes
A hostile notice by T. H. Huxley
in the Westminster Review (owned by John Chapman
) dismissed Lewes as an amateur and ranked his book below Harriet Martineau
's recent abridgement of Comte. George Eliot
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
Lucas Malet
The Wages of Sin met sharply divided responses: fervent praise, or dismissal as risqué and distasteful. The Athenæum, the Times (which singled out Malet's golden gift of reticence, and a genuine appreciation of the...
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
Jennifer Dawson
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
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, 1990.
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
Georgiana Cavendish Duchess of Devonshire
Bound in with the Bodleian
's copy of ?1795 is a fair scribal copy of Verses addressed to the Duchess of Devonshire upon reading her poem written in Switzerland, in 23 stanzas by W. Drummond
