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.
in the eyes of some, the heroine here defies such a one-sided image. Leonard Woolf
found Mary Jocelyn very reserved...
Textual Features
Virginia Woolf
This is the first of Woolf's a London novels, and is set unambiguously in the recent past, in the period of the suffrage struggle before the first world war. It is a story of courtship...
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Emily Dickinson
She began practising literary techniques in letters written to friends and family at this time. Evidence of a dialogic, corresponding voice permeates her poetry, resulting in what Archibald MacLeish
reads as one of the central...
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Julia Kavanagh
In this work, set on the outskirts of London, the heroine is a young seamstress who is neither beautiful nor clever and who has to work for a living. As the narrator notes, there...
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Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
While Charlotte Brontë
, MEC
argues, swept the world away in the storm of her passion and George Eliotconquered it with the power of understanding, [Elizabeth] Gaskell
forced it to weep for pity [and]...
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Violet Hunt
In March 1910 this journal printed her story The Novelist's Revenge, an exploration both of the end of her own affair with Oswald Crawfurd
and of the broader difficulties (personal and social) faced by...
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Jessie Fothergill
Of particular interest is JF
's handling of the benefits of cross-class mutual aid and moral principle
Debenham, Helen. “’Almost always two sides to a question’: the novels of Jessie Fothergill”. Popular Victorian Women Writers, edited by Kay Boardman and Shirley Jones, Manchester University Press, pp. 66-89.
76
as rich and poor, male and female, employer and workers, civil authorities and landowners join forces against...
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Ivy Compton-Burnett
The protagonist, a clergyman's daughter, lives up to her name. She is a child at her mother's graveside in the book's opening scene: by the age of thirty-three she has repeatedly sacrificed her hopes of...
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Sophie Veitch
The other sub-plot takes place among the landed gentry, which the rough and practical Hepburn finds a wholly unknown social circle.
Veitch, Sophie. James Hepburn, Free Church Minister. A. Gardner.
63
It features the young and beautiful Ellinor, and her much older husband, General...
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Elizabeth Robins
As the title suggests, ER
plays with gender roles in this work about a popular woman novelist who uses a male pseudonym: George Mandeville is in life Lois Wilbraham. Lois's husband, Ralph, is horrified by...
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Martin Ross
This novel puts its female characters at the centre. Its tightly-interwoven social fabric is reminiscent of George Eliot
; its slow-burning, enduring passions suggest Thomas Hardy
. The way that animals are used as subsidiary...
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Beatrice Harraden
It is no wonder that reference books seem divided as to whether this novel depicts an oppressive marriage or an escape from one. BH
's representation of a marriage of this sort is so exaggerated...
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Margaret Oliphant
MO
's editor and biographer Elisabeth Jay calls the portrait painted in this work a fiction of herself.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press.
25
Oliphant emphatically distinguishes herself from celebrated women writers (naming George Eliot
and George Sand
), insisting...
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Anne Stevenson
Despite the strong emotion expressed in some of these poems, AS
later remembered the volume as setting free her gift for irony.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press.
126
The final poem, A Legacy, On my Fiftieth Birthday, is written...
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Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
With this novel LMH
perfected her sagely meditative narratorial voice (which looks forward to George Eliot
and Thomas Hardy
). She chose a plot of many characters and complicated interlocking machinations. Her initially unappealing heroine...
