Comparative Literature Commons^™

A New George Eliot Holograph Letter, Jonathan Ouvry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The letter reproduced above was written by George Eliot, then Mary Ann Evans, to Martha lackson and has been made available to The George Eliot Review by its present owner, Matthew Wilson, who inherited it from his mother, Shirley Wilson, who worked in publishing. Amongst her collection of autographs, letters and rare books were letters originally in the possession of the collector Henry Cunliffe, including this one. Large extracts from it were first printed in The Bookman, 3 (January 1893), and reprinted by Gordon Haight in the Yale edition of the George Eliot Letters, 1954 (I, 188-9)

Martha (or Patty) …

How George Eliot Came To Write Fiction, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

We are celebrating one hundred and fifty years since the publication in volume form of George Eliot's first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, three stories printed first in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine between January and November 1857, and then in two volumes in January 1858. I will tell the story of how George Eliot came to write fiction by moving backwards from the Scenes themselves, via George Eliot's journal entry of 6 December 1857, 'How I Came to Write Fiction', to her literary criticism in the Westminster Review in the earlier 1850s, and finally to two letters, of 1849 …

Orphic Variations In Scenes Of Clerical Life, Kenichi Kurata

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is from Orfeo's climactic aria, Che faro senza Euridice, in Gluck's opera, Orfeo ed Euridice (1762). That the tune may sound too graceful to suit the desperate words can be explained by Orfeo's awareness of the means he has ready to hand of being reunited with Eurydice: he can cross the river Styx again by killing himself. At the moment of this declaration, contrary to the original myth, personified Love intervenes and Orfeo recovers Eurydice for the second time.

What I would like to suggest in the following paper is that this myth of Orpheus' descent to the underworld …

Review Of Eliot's Middlemarch: Reader's Guide, Josie Billington

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This new 'Reader's Guide' successfully complements two preceding works that were written for the same purpose of providing information and interpretation for readers of Middlemarch in a compact form: those by Karen Chase for Cambridge University Press's 'Landmarks of World Literature' series, and by T. R. Wright for Harvester Weatsheaf, both published in 1991. The book is closer to Chase's in terms of the order and structure of the argument. After giving a brief biography of George Eliot and introducing the historical contexts of the novel in the first chapter (Contexts'), Billington goes on to provide close readings of passages …

The Thirty-Seventh George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2008- George Eliot's Dorothea? 'That Fair Bright Useful Woman': Mrs. Nassau Senior In George Eliot's Life And Writing, Sybil Oldfield

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Who was Jeanie Senior before Octavia Hill introduced her to George Eliot in October 1866? Born Jeanie Hughes in 1828, the cherished daughter and only sister of seven brothers, she had started life as a happier Maggie Tulliver - keenly alive, with a questioning intelligence and an intense capacity for feeling. She could bum with indignation as well as overflow with impulsive generosity. Tall, golden haired and blue-eyed, she was also an exceptionally gifted musician with a marvellous singing voice, so it would have seemed that born into an affectionate, lively, well-to-do Squire's family, she had been allotted almost too …

Margaret Wolfit (1929-2008), Lucy Amis

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My Mum, Margaret Wolfit (Amis) passed away on 20th September. I wanted to write to reassure everyone that she didn't suffer for long and that 2008 was a decent year in many ways. As you may know, she'd been treated for breast cancer thirteen years ago and came through well for over twelve years, but in August 2007 was re-diagnosed, this time affecting her chest. At the time (August 2007) she had some fluid drained from her lungs and was more or less fine within about forty-eight hours - indeed she was performing only a few days later. The doctors …

Editors' Note- 2009 Special Issue

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The Conference on 'George Eliot's Beginnings' at the Institute of English Studies on 1 November 2008 was organized by Rosemary Ashton, Beryl Gray and Barbara Hardy. The publication in volume form of Scenes of Clerical Life in 1858 was the point at which Mary Ann Evans became 'George Eliot' and we think it appropriate to mark this event by publishing the proceedings of the Conference as a Special Issue.

Death And Recollection: The Elegiac Dimension Of Scenes Of Clerical Life, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Perversely, though perhaps appropriately for a paper on death, I want to begin at the end. George Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda, ends with a good death: that of Ezra Mordecai, dying with the arms of Mirah and Deronda around him, and feeling 'an ocean of peace beneath him'. The deaths that immediately precede it in her fiction, Grandcourt's drowning in the same novel, or the deaths of Featherstone, Casaubon and Raffles in Middlemarch are of a different order: those figures go more or less unlamented to their graves, and their passing may even be a form of liberation for …

Notes On Contributors - 2009

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Lucy Amis is the daughter of Margaret Wolfit and currently works at the International Business Leaders Forum, a London-based educational charity which focuses on how global companies can conduct their business in ways that demonstrate respect for their workers and nearby communities.

Juliette Atkinson currently teaches at the Open University. Forthcoming works include the monograph Victorian Biography Reconsidered: a Study of Nineteenth-Century 'Hidden' Lives (OUP) and an edition of critical responses to George Eliot's novels that will appear as a volume in the series Bloom s Classic Critical Views (Facts on File, 2009).

Josie Billington teaches at the University of …

George Eliot's Middlemarch As A Translation Of Spinoza's Ethics, Miriam Henson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 1846 John Chapman of Newgate Street published a translation of David Strauss's Das Leben Jesu. Although no translator was accredited, this book was the result of two years' arduous work by Mary Ann Evans, the woman who would later achieve renown as George Eliot. Strauss's presentation of Jesus is that of a historical figure; he denies his divine status, and suggests that the miracles written about in the Gospels are mythic in nature. Although Mary Ann was distressed by Strauss's destruction of all the 'miraculous and highly improbable' elements of the Gospel, she too had, for some time, been …

Orchestrating Society: The Merging Of Language And Voice To Create Social Bonds In Romola, Jennifer Diann Jones

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's Romola (1863) reflects her interest in using musical metaphor to explain how relationships are formed. She explores more fully than she has done before this point in her career how language and the human voice function as music; she theorizes the function of voice more explicitly than she had done before as she examines how it can possess the listener and incite people to action.

There are very few scenes of actual musical performance in Romola and in George Eliot and Music, Beryl Gray correctly observes that the few musical scenes we are given are unsatisfying. It is …

Japanese Branch Report- 2008, Miwa Ota

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Saturday 29 November 2008, the twelfth Annual Convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Kinki University.

The morning session began with an opening remark by Yosie Abe (Shoin University), followed by a welcome address by Itsuyo Shimizu (Kinki University). In the morning, we had three papers presented. The first two papers were introduced and commented upon by Chizuko Watari (Kanasai Gaidai University), and the third by Keiji Yata (Tokyo Kasei University). The first paper was 'Maggie's Struggle in The Mill on the Floss' by Muneaki Shinoda (the Graduate School of Osaka City University). He drew …

Review Of Private Sphere To World Stage From Austen To Eliot, Elizabeth Sabiston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Elizabeth Sabiston's Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen to Eliot is a somewhat perplexing book. Ostensibly, Sabiston sets out to contribute to ongoing discussions about the difficulties faced by nineteenth-century women writers, who 'were confronted with the dilemma of effecting an elision of public and private spheres' (2). The first three chapters, on Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, lane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights, argue that the central protagonist of each novel offers an image of confident female authorship. Anne Elliot is presented as a heroine who 'against all odds ... strives for autonomy' (36), Jane Eyre moves from making amateur …

'The Stream Of Human Thought And Deed' In 'Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story', Melissa Raines

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In George Eliot: The Emergent Self, Ruby Redinger explains that it was through the demands of authorship that the woman Marian Evans 'evolved into another self, her writing self', essentially becoming George Eliot. Literary biographies of George Eliot in the last few decades have all, to varying degrees, focused on this transformation of the woman into the author. When considering George Eliot's first work of fiction, I think it significant that it is during the writing of the second 'scene' of Scenes of Clerical Life, 'Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story', that Marian Evans first chose to write and sign a professional letter …

George Eliot And The Female Tradition: A Little-Known Source, Lorna J. Clark

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In an essay published in the Westminster Review in 1856, George Eliot delivered a scathing indictment of 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' which (she claimed) lack verisimilitude, 'intellectual power' and 'moral qualities'. The skill of such a writer 'is in inverse proportion to her confident eloquence'; the picture of life that she draws is 'totally false'. Her motivation is merely 'the foolish vanity of wishing to appear in print' or 'busy idleness'. Finally, these hapless female novelists are likened to La Fontaine's ass. Not surprisingly, faced with such a sweeping condemnation, critics have found Eliot's relationship with gender issues and …

Idlers And Collaborators: Enter The Dog, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Both George Eliot and her older contemporary, Charles Dickens, introduced dogs into their fiction before introducing any into their homes. By the time Dickens was given the first of his many dogs he had invented Ponto, the sagacious pointer described by Jingle in The Pickwick Papers; Bull's-eye for Oliver Twist; and Jerry's performing dogs for The Old Curiosity Shop. Before George Eliot received her first dog - the Pug presented to her by her grateful publisher John Blackwood - the narrator of her first story, 'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton', had justified in the following terms the …

Review Of Victorian Turns, Neovictorian Returns: Essays On Fiction And Culture, Penny Gay, Judith Johnston, Catherine Waters

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The inside of this volume offers exactly the pleasurable variety and range of interest promised by its outside (the beautifully reproduced cover image is Ernest Dudley Heath's Piccadilly Circus at Night, 1893). As its title suggests, the volume, divided into two sections, seeks to capture, in Part One, the diverse ways in which the Victorians explored in fiction the multiple 'turns' in new directions the age was taking, and, in Part Two, the imaginative updatings of these fictions, in literature, film and theatre, as well as in scholarship, in the burgeoning afterlife of Victorianism.

The editors note in their introduction …

Scenes Of Clerical Life: George Eliot's Own Version Of Conversion, Alain Jumeau

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Before the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life, few people would have thought that Miss Evans had all the qualities for writing fiction, or, what is more, that she would become a great novelist. She was in her late thirties when she came to fiction writing, although, at the approach of middle age, most novelists have already tried their hand at it. Yet, as she confessed in her Journal, when she started writing the first story of Scenes of Clerical Life, it marked a new beginning for her, because she had always dreamt of writing fiction: 'September 1856 made a …

Contents, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Tom Mack, Ph.D.

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Oswald Review Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 11 Fall 2009

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Naïve Narrators: The Voice Of The Child In The Poetry Of Paul Muldoon, Stephanie Jean Osburn Alexander

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, author of eleven volumes of poetry and two books of criticism and the recipient of numerous other accolades, is often the subject of literary criticism. A complicated and multi-faceted poet known for his use of dense reference and allusion, clever wordplay, and dazzling technical prowess, Muldoon is often branded a "difficult" poet. In the face of this difficulty, this project attempts to navigate a new point of entry to Muldoon's work through the identification and study of na1ve narrators, or child speakers, and to study them alongside the larger themes of performance and play within …

Review Of Felix Holt, The Radical, Michael Eaton, Lucy Bailey

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Felix Holt, with its large cast of characters, and above all with its notoriously complicated legal plot, presents a real challenge when adapting and reducing it for a three hour, serialized radio dramatization. Michael Eaton is to be congratulated on neatly simplifying the plot, by omitting Thomas Trounsem's sale of his rights to Durfey and the exchange of names between Bycliffe and Scaddon. Admittedly this left a few loose ends, and listeners might have been puzzled by the name Scaddon, mentioned without explanation, but on the whole the necessary simplification was skillfully done and the main plot threads made clear. …

Japanese Branch Report 2007, Maiko Ohtake

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The eleventh annual convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Chuo University on Saturday 24 November 2007.

The morning session began with an opening address by Miwa Ohta (Chuo University). Four papers were presented in the morning; the first two were introduced and commented upon by Michiko Kurisu (Daito Bunka University), and the last two by Shigeko Tomita (Koshien University).

The first paper was titled 'Rethinking Adam Bede - Why Does No One Help Hetty?' by Mayumi Fujita (Kwansei Gakuin University). Starting with a question about the severe treatment of Hetty, Ms. Fujita examined the moral …

Editor's Notes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Middlemarch has been in the public eye since our last issue: Erica Wagner's column in the Times for Saturday 13 October 2007 bore the heading 'How good is Middlemarch if you reread it? Better'; and on 24 May 2008 the Review section of the Saturday Guardian devoted two and- a half broadsheet pages to Zadie Smith's tribute to George Eliot, 'On Middlemarch'. We have recently received Josie Billington's new Reader's Guide to the novel, Eliot's 'Middlemarch' (Continuum, 2008). This will be reviewed in our next issue.

Another work just received - Elizabeth Sabiston's Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen …

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton 17 June 2007, Don Jones

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

As I reflected on 'famous sons and daughters of Nuneaton', I came up with a short list. George EliotlMary Anne Evans, Larry Grayson, Ken Loach.

George Eliot must have cut quite an unconventional figure in her day. Larry Grayson, that rather gentle comedian, was also quite an unconventional character. Then Ken Loach, perhaps not so controversial in his personal life, none the less often espousing unconventional causes through his films. Is it something about Nuneaton that those it throws up into the arms of fame should have something of the unconventional about them? - or at least an eye for …

Review Of Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction And Other Information Systems, Richard Menke

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Richard Menke's study draws illuminating connections between the development of literary realism and the revolutionary changes which the nineteenth century saw in methods of communication and information management. Innovations such as the Penny Post, the telegraph, photography and wireless communication all raise fundamental questions about the representation in media both of the material world and of human subjectivity and social interconnection. Menke's discussion of these provides the context in which he examines how novelists grapple with similar issues, and he thus offers fresh new ways of thinking about realism as a self-conscious representational practice and about how the novel form …

George Eliot's Poetry Of The Soul, Gregory Tate

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The poetic epigraph to Daniel Deranda, written by George Eliot herself, anticipates and encapsulates the novel's interest in the complex processes that make up human psychology:

Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, 'mid the throngs of hurrying desires That trample on the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhalations laden with slow death, And o’r the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence.

The epigraph describes psychological phenomena that will feature prominently throughout Daniel Deranda: the multiple and contradictory elements of individual character; the often self-defeating nature of human thought and …

Address At Celebration For Kathleen And Bill Adams, Jonathan Ouvry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know of the existence of the George Eliot Fellowship until 1980, which was of course the great year of the stone-laying in Westminster Abbey. I can't remember how it came to be known that one of George Henry Lewes's great-great-grandsons just happened, conveniently, to have an office next door to the Abbey, but then I suppose that that is one of the many secrets of Kathleen's success in her role as Secretary of the Fellowship - she was very good at finding out useful connections and unlikely information in the highways and byways …