Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Evans Family: Familial Relationships In George Eliot's Life And Fiction, Hailey S. Fischer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Biographers of George Eliot, when writing about her childhood, have focused on her close and complicated relationships with two of the most important men in her life, her father Robert Evans and brother Isaac Evans. Less discussed are Eliot’s relationships with her immediate female family members, her mother Christiana Pearson Evans and her sister Christiana (Chrissey) Evans Clarke. This thesis reviews the predominant interpretations of Eliot’s relations with her father and brother. It also pulls together the known information about Christiana and Chrissey from several major biographies and adds new insights from Eliot's letters in combination with two of her …

Gendering Art History In The Victorian Age: Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, And George Eliot In Florence, Antje Anderson

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

This thesis investigates how three professional Victorian women writers, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and George Eliot, wrote about Renaissance art in Florence. As nineteenth-century women, they were excluded from certain realms of knowledge, agency, and influence. This exclusion (complicated by their privilege in terms of class, nationality, and education) influenced the way they experienced and wrote about art. The introduction addresses how changing modes of travel, broader access to publication, and art history’s gradual emergence as an academic discipline helped shape their careers as women art writers—the well-known “Mrs. Jameson” as a popularizer of art history for a broad readership; …

The George Eliot Archive: Current Reception & Comparison Of Dh Projects, Mackenzie Burch

Honors Theses

As the field of Digital Humanities continues to grow, the projects also continue to develop their own identities with unique goals. The interdisciplinary nature of multimedia projects has allowed DH to develop in a number of different directions. As a research assistant for the George Eliot Archive digital project launched in early 2019 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, it is essential for us to stay current this development in the field of DH.

Through exploring twenty digital projects and archives at various stages of development or establishment, I have gained a cohesive and current snapshot of Digital Humanities projects, and …

The Role Of George Henry Lewes In George Eliot’S Career: A Reconsideration, Beverley Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article examines the “protection” and “encouragement” George Henry Lewes provided to Eliot throughout her fiction-writing career. According to biographers, Lewes showed his selfless devotion to Eliot by encouraging her to begin and continue writing fiction; by fostering the mystery of her authorship; by managing her finances; by negotiating her publishing contracts; by managing her schedule; by hosting a salon to promote her books; and by staying close by her side for twenty-four years until death parted them. By reconsidering each element of Lewes’s devotion separately, Rilett challenges the prevailing construction of the Eliot–Lewes relationship as the ideal partnership of …

How Proto-Feminist Was George Eliot?, Ellie L. Feis

UCARE Research Products

The Mill on the Floss shows the struggle of Maggie, a woman who values education over beauty, in a judgmental society. Maggie is shamed by her society after her cousin’s fiancé, Stephen, tricks her into running away with him. Maggie is forced to live in shame and only escapes public oppression when she dies.

Romola is the story of how a young woman who is forced rely on men for a sense of purpose and safety. Her husband is conniving and has extramarital affairs. Romola finds a happy ending when she is free from patriarchal influence and relies solely on …

George Henry Lewes, The Real Man Of Science Behind George Eliot’S Fictional Pedants, Beverley Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This paper demonstrates that George Eliot drew on George Henry Lewes’s actual experience as an emerging scientist in her depiction of two fictional scholars, Edward Casaubon of Middlemarch and Proteus Merman, a lesser-known character from the chapter entitled “How We Encourage Research” in her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. After Thomas Huxley published a devastating review of Lewes’s first book of science, Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences, the evidence suggests that Lewes became highly focused on disproving his critics and earning lasting recognition as a scientist, a feat he expected to achieve with his five-volume series, Problems …