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.
Dorothea thought up the plot for this book while she was supposed to be saying her morning prayers at her bedside. The sisters drafted it at a length sufficient to fill four volumes. They had...
Publishing
Viola Meynell
Certain that the small religious firm Herbert and Daniel
would not want this work, VM
approached Martin Secker
, newly established in 1909, who agreed to publish it even before reading it, on grounds of...
Publishing
Dinah Mulock Craik
Dinah Mulock
's review of George Eliot
's The Mill on the Floss was published in Macmillan's Magazine.
Mitchell, Sally. Dinah Mulock Craik. Twayne.
chronology
Publishing
Edith J. Simcox
EJS
reviewed George Eliot
's Middlemarch for The Academy, again using her pseudonym H. Lawrenny.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
190
McKenzie, Keith Alexander, and Gordon S. Haight. Edith Simcox and George Eliot. Oxford University Press.
84
Publishing
Matilda Hays
When, however, MH
submitted an article on women's rights to the Westminster Review in early 1856, George Eliot
did her best to prevent its being published.
Publishing
Anne Mozley
AM
wrote for Bentley's Quarterly, during the first year of its brief run, a review of Adam Bede (anonymous, of course), which George Eliot
called on the whole the best review we have seen.
Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Editor Haight, Gordon S., Yale University Press.
3: 213-14
Wordsworth, John, and Anne Mozley. “Memoir”. Essays from "Blackwood", edited by F. Mozley and F. Mozley, William Blackwood and Sons, p. xii - xx.
x
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
Publishing
Bessie Rayner Parkes
BRP
's contributions to other periodicals include her article Everybody's Baby which appeared in Saint Pauls magazine in 1871.
Houghton, Walter E., and Jean Harris Slingerland, editors. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900. University of Toronto Press.
III: 377
In 1894 she published articles on her great-grandfather Joseph Priestley
, on George Eliot
Reception
Geraldine Jewsbury
In Blackwood's in May 1855, Margaret Oliphant
declared that we have seen few books so perfectly unsatisfactory as Constance Herbert.
Howe, Susanne. Geraldine Jewsbury: Her Life and Errors. George Allen and Unwin.
121
She criticized GJ
for arranging her book around one woman's insanity, since the...
All this interest led to the naming of an annual Ada Lovelace Day to celebrate women in science. To mark the day in 2009 film-maker and artist Sydney Padua
created a daring duo of dauntless...
Reception
Matilda Betham-Edwards
Geraldine Jewsbury
, reviewing this book for the Athenæum early the next year, was not exactly encouraging. She guessed the author's gender correctly, and judged the novel a pale imitation of Charlotte Brontë
's Jane...
Reception
Elizabeth Gaskell
The quality of EG
's fiction was recognised early by her contemporaries. George Eliot
exempted her, along with Harriet Martineau
and Charlotte Brontë
, from the ranks of Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, noting...
Despite her own claim that she would not regard it as a compliment to be told she was in the mainstream of the contemporary novel,
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Important to Me. Macmillan; Scribner.
34
The Times placed her after her death in the...
Reception
Edith J. Simcox
EJS
dedicated a personal copy of Natural Law to George Eliot
and was extremely interested in her mentor's view of the work. Eliot reportedly offered moderate praise for the text—but given Simcox's admission that out...
