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.
Milly's Expiation is interestingly reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell
's North and South, 1855 (to which the Athenæum compared it), and anticipatory of George Eliot
's Felix Holt, 1866. Milly is an idealised elder...
She supplied this novel with a preface setting out many of her ideas about fiction. She thinks it should uphold the cause of morality, not by inculcating particular maxims but to bring actions and their...
Textual Features
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...
She continued: The Jew, as we know him to-day, with his curious mingling of diametrically opposed qualities; his surprising virtues and no less surprising vices; leading his eager, intricate life; living, moving, and having his...
Textual Features
Marie Belloc Lowndes
MBL
emphasised the Empress Frederick
's strong interest in literature, art, and religion. She liked the fact that the empress insisted, on a visit to England, on meeting George Eliot
.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. A Passing World. Macmillan.
30
Textual Features
Hannah Lynch
HL
's admiration of Meredith is very evident in the preface and throughout the book, which foregrounds his attention to the New Woman. Lynch refers to him as a master in English literature, and above...
Textual Features
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB
's His Good Fairy, from the Illustrated London News of 28 May 1894, features a grand duchess of low origin who staves off guilt-induced madness by returning to live as a peasant and...
Textual Features
Isabella Ormston Ford
In this pamphlet, which she directed towards the middle and upper classes, IOF
declares herself interested in both the moral condition and the economic position of industrial women.
Ford, Isabella Ormston. Industrial Women and How to Help Them. Humanitarian League.
1
She argues that prostitution has economic...
Textual Features
Flora Macdonald Mayor
While spinsters are again perceived as lonely, self-pitying, garrulous, defensive
in the eyes of some, the heroine here defies such a one-sided image. Leonard Woolf
found Mary Jocelyn very reserved...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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]...
Textual Features
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...
