George Eliot

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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.
Portrait of George Eliot, seated, after the 1881 painting of Francois Albert Durade.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Charlotte Yonge
The Daisy Chain's popularity was long-lasting, though not so intense as that of The Heir of Redclyffe. Jane Austen 's nephew James Austen-Leigh compared it to the work of Austen and Scott ...
Literary responses Charlotte Yonge
During her lifetime CY was ranked as a serious novelist with Austen , Trollope , Balzac , and Zola . Contemporaries like Louisa Alcott , Margaret Oliphant , Ellen Wood , and Rhoda Broughton made...
Family and Intimate relationships Virginia Woolf
He was immensely influential. As editor of the Cornhill Magazine from 1871 to 1882, he published Henry James , Thomas Hardy , Matthew Arnold , Robert Browning , and George Meredith , among others.
Rosenbaum, S. P. “An Educated Man’s Daughter: Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group”. Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, edited by Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, Vision; Barnes and Noble, pp. 32-56.
34
Education Virginia Woolf
Between 1 January and 30 June 1897, her reading included but was not limited to the following: Charlotte Brontë , Lady Barlow (a commentator on Charles Darwin ), Dinah Mulock Craik , George Eliot ,...
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...
Textual Features Emma Caroline Wood
The volume included selections from Byron , George Eliot , Samuel Taylor Coleridge , Christina Rossetti , Sir Walter Scott , Alfred Lord Tennyson , Elizabeth Barrett Browning and William Wordsworth .
Literary responses Dorothy Whipple
A reader at Curtis Brown praised DW 's very shrewd and natural gift of depicting her middle-class characters, while Lord Gorell at John Murray wrote: Much her best work and the former was good.
Whipple, Dorothy. Random Commentary. Michael Joseph.
23
Friends, Associates Julia Wedgwood
This friendship was cemented during visits to Linlathen in Forfarshire, the home of Thomas Erskine , who was himself a major spiritual influence on JW . Her letters to Gurney mention meetings with Darwin
Textual Production Julia Wedgwood
For the next thirty-five years she published steadily on religious, scientific, and moral concerns. She also produced profiles of other authors such as George Eliot and Samuel Taylor Coleridge . A collection of this work...
death Augusta Webster
Theodore Watts-Dunton 's tribute in the Athenæum recalled a noble band of women represented by George Eliot , Mrs. Webster, and Miss Cobbe , who, in virtue of lofty purpose, purity of soul, and deep...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Augusta Webster
She omits reviews from this collection, but provides readers with an opportunity to consider literary topics. The Translation of Poetry argues that because [i]n poetry the form of the thought is part of the thought...
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 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 Mary Augusta Ward
Arthur Conan Doyle considered this novel better than anything George Eliot had written.
Sutherland, John. Mrs. Humphry Ward. Clarendon Press.
243
Friends, Associates Mary Augusta Ward
Mary Augusta Arnold (later MAW ) met George Eliot at a Sunday supper given by Mark and Emily Francis Pattison .
Ward, Mary Augusta. A Writer’s Recollections. Harper and Brothers.
107

Timeline

About 1349-1351: Giovanni Boccaccio worked at his cycle of...

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About 1349-1351

Giovanni Boccaccio worked at his cycle of tales entitled (from the fact that the stories are told over the course of ten days) the Decameron. It was first translated into English in 1620.

1495: In a bonfire of the vanities in Florence,...

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1495

In a bonfire of the vanities in Florence, Italy, Girolamo Savonarola destroyed texts by Ovid , Dante , Boccaccio and others.

1677: Baruch or Benedictus de Spinoza's Ethics,...

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1677

Baruch or Benedictus de Spinoza 's Ethics, probably his most important text, was published shortly after his death at the age of forty-four.

January 1802: The Christian Observer was launched, as a...

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January 1802

The Christian Observer was launched, as a journalConducted by members of the established church with the aim of combating Methodism and other Dissenting sects as well as radicalism and scepticism.

April 1817: The first issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh...

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April 1817

The first issue of Blackwood's EdinburghMagazine appeared; founder William Blackwood intended to offer Tory competition to the liberal Edinburgh Review.

1826: The English Gypsy, or Roma, population was...

National or international item

1826

The English Gypsy, or Roma, population was grouped by authorities with all nomadic or vagrant peoples, who were estimated by William Cobbett to number around 30,000.

1828: The first issue of the successful annual...

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1828

The first issue of the successful annual gift bookThe Keepsake appeared; lavish production and distinguished contributors raised the price of this and other such publications to a guinea.

22 March 1832: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died at Weimar...

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22 March 1832

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died at Weimar in Germany in his early eighties.
Chisholm, Hugh, editor. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Cambridge University Press.

20 March 1839: The Anti-Corn Law League was founded....

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20 March 1839

The Anti-Corn Law League was founded.

1841: Ludwig Feuerbach published Das Wesen des...

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1841

Ludwig Feuerbach published Das Wesen des Christentums, an influential philosophical work demythologising Christianity.

1843: Charles Edward Mudie opened his first circulating...

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1843

Charles Edward Mudie opened his first circulating library .

March 1848: Chartist uprisings took place in London,...

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March 1848

Chartist uprisings took place in London, Glasgow, and Manchester.

1851: French medical researcher Charles-Edouard...

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1851

French medical researcher Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard experimented with the effects of blood transfusion on the responsiveness of nerves in human corpses.

January 1852: Publisher John Chapman purchased the Westminster...

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January 1852

Publisher John Chapman purchased the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly and began issuing it as the Westminster Review (which, twenty-eight years and several mergers back, had been its original name).

July 1855: Alfred Tennyson published Maud and Other...

Writing climate item

July 1855

Alfred Tennyson published Maud and Other Poems.

Texts

Eliot, George. Adam Bede. W. Blackwood, 1859.
Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. W. Blackwood, 1876.
Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. Editor Cave, Terence, Penguin, 1995.
Eliot, George. “Editorial Materials”. Essays of George Eliot, edited by Thomas Pinney, Columbia University Press, 1963, p. various pages.
Eliot, George. Essays of George Eliot. Editor Pinney, Thomas, Columbia University Press, 1963.
Eliot, George. Felix Holt. W. Blackwood, 1866.
Eliot, George. Felix Holt. Editor Thomson, Fred C., Clarendon, 1980.
Eliot, George. Impressions of Theophrastus Such. W. Blackwood, 1879.
Eliot, George. Letter to Katharine S. Macquoid.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. W. Blackwood, 1872.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Editor Haight, Gordon S., Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Editor Carroll, David, Clarendon, 1986.
Eliot, George, and Felicia Bonaparte. Middlemarch. Editor Carroll, David, Oxford University Press, 1997.
Eliot, George. “Preface”. The George Eliot Letters, edited by Gordon S. Haight, Yale University Press, 1954, p. 1: ix - lxxvii.
Eliot, George. Romola. Smith, Elder, 1863.
Eliot, George. Romola. Editor Brown, Andrew, Clarendon, 1993.
Eliot, George. Scenes of Clerical Life. W. Blackwood, 1858.
Eliot, George. Scenes of Clerical Life. Editor Noble, Thomas A., Clarendon, 1985.
Eliot, George. Silas Marner. W. Blackwood, 1861.
Eliot, George. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”. Westminster Review, Vol.
66
, pp. 442-61.
Eliot, George. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”. A Victorian Art of Fiction, edited by John Charles Olmsted, Garland, 1979, pp. 277-98.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Translator Eliot, George, J. Chapman, 1854.
Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Editor Haight, Gordon S., Yale University Press, 1978.
Eliot, George. The Journals of George Eliot. Editors Harris, Margaret and Judith Johnston, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Eliot, George. The Legend of Jubal. W. Blackwood, 1874.