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.
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...
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...
Biographer Keith Alexander McKenzie
considers this to be the only one of EJS
's works that retains the power to interest readers, partly because of the style, partly because of the sensitive and often striking...
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
Augusta Ada Byron
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
Lucy Walford
LW
's commentary suggest she was superficial in her judgements, anchoring her opinions time and again on appearance. A prominent example comes in her assessment of George Eliot
, with whom she was invited to...
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...
Reception
Lucy Walford
In 1887 Coventry Patmore
said of LW
that her depictions of contemporary life far surpassed those of Dickens
, Thackeray
, Trollope
, Eliot
, and Gaskell
, declaring her work to be equalled only...
Reception
Sir Walter Scott
Blackwood contrasted Scott's stormy relations with his publishers, with his own personal friendships with his authors, among them George Eliot
.
Reception
Pamela Hansford Johnson
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
Charlotte Maria Tucker
CMT
, whose works sold very well, was regarded as a major female author during the mid-Victorian period. She was incensed when in 1882 some one wrote a sketch of her life, and requested her...
Residence
Jane Hume Clapperton
She
spent almost her whole life in Edinburgh, though she apparently lived for some time in the West Midlands near Coventry, where she moved in the circle of Charles Bray
(social reformer and...
Residence
Vera Brittain
After Winifred Holtby
's death, VB
and her family moved to 2 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea: the same house that George Eliot
had lived in.
Berry, Paul, and Mark Bostridge. Vera Brittain: A Life. Chatto and Windus.
370
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...
