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.
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...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Jenkins
James Manby Gully
had been widowed, then separated from a second wife, and held liberal views on sex. When he met Florence Ricardo
, who was forty years his junior, he had long been well-known...
Textual Features
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...
Textual Features
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...
MB
's first heroine, Laura Montreville, daughter of a Scottish officer, covets Christian martyrdom as a child, in rather the same spirit as George Eliot
's Dorothea Brooke and other idealistic, immature heroines. As a...
Textual Features
Adelaide Procter
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...
Textual Features
Anne Marsh
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...
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...
Textual Production
Naomi Alderman
NA
says this book was facilitated by the success of fictions about other, distinct communities: Zadie Smith
's White Teeth, Monica Ali
's Brick Lane, and especially influenced by Jeanette Winterson
's Oranges...
Textual Production
Dorothy Richardson
In her correspondence Richardson addresses a great range of topics, including her own varied reading. She comments on women writers from Julian of Norwich
through Jane Austen
, Emily
and Charlotte Brontë
, George Eliot
Textual Production
John Oliver Hobbes
JOH
was also responsible for the George Eliot
entry in the famous tenth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, published in 1902. Written under the title Cross, Mary Ann, this is a somewhat idiosyncratic...
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...
