Comparative Literature Commons^™

Review Of Lectures D'Une Amvre: George Eliot, 'The Mill On The Floss', Maria Tang

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's novels have never been received in France with great enthusiasm. Translatiom have been relatively sparse, and it is still difficult to find more than one or two titles in Paris. even in the best academic bookshops, whereas Jane Austen's novels are widely read. Only a detailed reception history could reveal the reasons for this response, although it no doubt has something to do with the high Victorian tone and sentiments of George Eliot's writing, which would have fallen on deaf ears in late nineteenth-century France and a fortiori in the successive phases of twentieth-century modernism. The renewed interest …

Notes On Contributors 2003

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Kathleen Adams has been Secretary of the Fellowship since 1968. She initiated the Review in 1970, was editor until 1981 and co-editor 1982-91. She published Those of Us Who Loved Her in 1980 and A Community of Interest: The Story of the George Eliot Fellowship 1930-2000 in 2000.

Terence Cave is Emeritus Professor of French, Oxford University, and Emeritus Research Fellow, St John's College. He has edited the Penguin edition of Daniel Deronda (1995) and the Oxford World's Classics edition of Silas Marner (1996). He is the author of Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (1988) and numerous books and articles …

'The Mill On The Floss' And 'Silas Marner': New Casebooks, Nahem Yousaf, Andrew Maunder

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This collection of essays on two of George Eliot's most popular novels adds to the growing number of Casebooks produced by Palgrave. These are useful volumes, particularly for students, providing as they do a selection of recent critical perspectives. That said, I would have thought that The Mill on the Floss might have merited a volume all to itself; however the choice of essays contained herein provides some interesting links both within and across the two novels discussed.

In their Introduction, the editors comment that 'the essays reprinted in this New Casebook serve as a reminder of the dimensions of …

Toast To George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 24 November 2002 The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Andrew Davies

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In November 2002, 'my' adaptation of Daniel Deronda finally reached the screen, on BBCl. The production had been anticipated for years, and many people must have wondered what made it take so long.

Middlemarch, in 1994, had been a great labour of love for all involved in the production, and was received so well that it's not an exaggeration to say that it revived the reputation of the Classic Serial, and the then sagging reputation of the BBC itself. I was keen to adapt more George Eliot, and the BBC were favourably inclined.

I had, shamefully, never read Daniel Deronda, …

Letter To The Secretary Of The Fellowship, David Mendel, Kent

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Dear Kathleen Adams

I am writing to say thank you very much for all the work which you continue to do on behalf of us punters. If I weren't 80 I would volunteer for some job myself to ease your load, but my get up and go has got up and ·is gone.

I was disappointed with Rosalind Miles 's Memorial Lecture. Having set up a pretty spurious list of straw men - and women - she spent the rest of the lecture proving what we all know anyway, which is that GE rises above all that.

In addition she …

Review Of Faithful Realism: Elizabeth Gaskell And Leo Tolstoy A Comparative Study, Josie Billington

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Who is the English novelist worthy of comparison with Tolstoy? The name of George Eliot immediately suggests itself, though even Middlemarch does not have the range of War and Peace. What Henry James said of Eliot - that she is 'also a good deal of a philosopher and it is to this union of the keenest observation with the ripest reflection that her style owes its essential force' - seems to apply to Tolstoy as well. F. R. Leavis, we recall, invoked the name of the Russian novelist in his appraisal of Eliot, arguing that the best parts of …

Review Of George Eliot, Music And Victorian Culture, Delia Da Sousa Correa

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Delia da Sousa Correa takes as starting point 'the yearning for spiritual expansion and sympathetic experience' so evident in George Eliot; and music, an 'undersong' to the desires of transcendence and affinity, is the prime concern in da Sousa Correa's exploration of its transformations in Eliot's fiction. To do this, da Sousa Correa explores a range of intellectual and cultural contexts for Eliot's work, though not all those her title's inclusive 'Victorian culture' might suggest. Da Sousa Correa acknowledges Beryl Gray's George Eliot and Music (1989) and rightly claims her approach differs fundamentally, the two studies being complementary. Da Sousa …

Annual Report 2002, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

2002 was, as always, a busy year, and the one in which we published our Pitkin Guide to George Eliot. This was something of a milestone for us as Pitkin Guides are so well known around the UK and it seemed right that George Eliot should be included in the vast number of Pitkin titles.

We held our Annual General Meeting on 15 March and re-elected, with great pleasure, our President, Jonathan Ouvry, for another three-year term. Jonathan is so supportive of everything we do. We had been again without a treasurer until Jill Bridgewater agreed to replace Sophie Pavier …

Review Of George Eliot A Bibliographical History, William Baker, John C. Ross

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This enormously impressive history is the fruit of something like thirty-five years of work by William Baker and John Ross. They have brought together a huge and comprehensive body of bibliographical information, broken down into five main sections and two appenctixes. There are extensive entries and notes on the major works; minor literary works (novellas and poetry); essays and reviews; miscellaneous writing (unpublished works in publishable genres, compilations of short extracts, partly authored writings, unpublished autobiographical writings); collections and collected works (more poetry, essays, novels and complete works); and 'Eliotiana' (sequels, settings for songs from The Spanish Gypsy, collections of …

Review Of George Eliot And Schiller: Intertextuality And Cross-Culural Discourse, Dutch Readings Of George Eliot, Deborah Guth, Deiderik L. Van Werven

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In their very different ways these two studies contribute significantly to our understanding of George Eliot's place in the wider context of European literary culture. Diederik van Werven examines the nineteenth-century reception of her novels in the Netherlands, thus filling in what is, for most of the English-speaking world, a blank space in the map of her contemporary reputation; while Deborah Guth reads her work through the lens provided by the well-known but relatively neglected Schiller, who was the fust German writer to arouse her enthusiasm, but who was later supplanted, both in her own life and in subsequent critical …

Commemorative Occasions In 2002, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The George Eliot Memorial Garden in Nuneaton reached its half century in May 2002. In 1930 several literary men, amongst them George Bernard Shaw, were asked if Nuneaton should erect a memorial to George Eliot. Most of them expressed astonishment that one was not already in existence. They may have been even more amazed to discover that it would be another twenty-two years before one appeared, for it was not until 1952 that the George Eliot Memorial Garden was established.

The Newdegate family at Arbury Hall was one step ahead of Nuneaton as an obelisk had already been erected by …

The Thirty-First George Eliot Memorial Lecture; Jane Austen And George Eliot: Afterlives And Letters, Joanne Shattock

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'A woman and her book are identical' - or so the American writer Edgar Allen Poe reflected when reading an early collection of poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.' Remembering the autobiographical nature of much of Barrett Browning's early work, his comment is not surprising. But it has a more general relevance for nineteenth-century women writers. The charge that they could only write of what they knew, and that what they knew best was themselves, was made regularly by reviewers. The easy association of the life and the work, or more accurately, a refusal to separate them, was crucial to the …

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton 30 June 2002, Jonathan G. Ouvry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I thought that I would talk today about a previously unexplored topic - George Eliot and cats. Unfortunately, I find that the reason why the topic is previously unexplored is that George Eliot, unlike the other Eliot, had very little, or possibly nothing, to say about cats. There may have been the odd un-named farm cat lurking about in Adam Bede, but nothing on which one could construct a ten-minute talk in the open air.

Dogs, of course, are quite another story, both real and fictional. There was Pug, a present from John Blackwood, sadly lost after only eighteen months, …

George Eliot: Elegies And Eulogies, Margaret Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The death of George Eliot on 22 December 1880 occasioned many prose obituaries and also a number of verse tributes.' I have located eleven of these in all, along with a twelfth poem published in her lifetime: nine poets are represented, of whom four are women and five men (assuming J. S. Dawson and 'K. G.' to be male). Together, the poems provide a sidelight on her reputation. Elegy frequently mourns dead poets and establishes poetic genealogies: while George Eliot's fame depends on her fiction rather than her poetry, her eminence in letters as well as her moral and intellectual …

Review Of Middlemarch, Margret Stevens, Annelies Roeleveld

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The recent appearance of a Dutch translation of Middlemarch, in a prestigious series of classics by a leading publishing house, may well be considered as constituting 'cultural justice', and it is justice long overdue. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, there has been a flourishing market for English literature in the Netherlands, in the original as well as in translation. Of recent years, publishing practice has been carefully to coordinate publication of translations with that of English editions, for once an English novel is available, there is hardly a market for translations. That makes it even more remarkable that there is …

Comic George Eliot, George Scott Christian

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's famous digression on the nature of literary realism in chapter 17 of Adam Bede has long been understood as a kind of aesthetic manifesto for the Victorian novel. Much has been written on Eliot's insistence that a faithful narrative representation of reality must take account of low and middle life, much as Dutch genre painting seeks to imitate quotidian life in all its prosaic detail. What has attracted virtually no attention in discussions of Eliot's ideas on realism, however, is the central importance of comic theory to her realist aesthetic.' Indeed, Eliot's comic theory deeply informs and shapes …

The Oswald Review Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 5 Fall 2003

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

No abstract provided.

Review Of Theology In The Fiction Of George Eliot; The Silent Revolution And The Making Of Victorian England, Peter C. Hodgson, Hebert Schlossberg

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The first paragraph of Peter Hodgson's opening chapter on 'George Eliot's Religious Pilgrimage' outlines the conventional wisdom about George Eliot, that 'exposure to higher criticism' caused her to abandon 'the fervent evangelical faith of her youth and become a disciple of the "religion of humanity'" (the lower case letters of this last phrase indicating the problems she had with the dogmatism and sheer rigidity of Auguste Comte's official new religion). So far, so good. It is with the second sentence that he starts to go wrong: 'Thereafter, it is thought, she lost interest in religion and turned to the exploration …

George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, And Dogs, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

[I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Michael Slater for his invaluable comments on a draft of this paper, a version of which was presented at the George Eliot: Life and Letters conference held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, in January this year.)

In Gore Vidal's Two Sisters: A Menwir in the Form of a Novel, the obnoxious Hiram Backhouse boasts to his unreceptive peers of the admiration that his PhD thesis - How The Spaniel Figures in the Novels of George Eliot - had attracted. It was he, he claims, 'who made the discovery …

Notes On Contributors 2002

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Kathleen Adams has been Secretary of the Fellowship since 1968. She initiated the Review in 1970, was editor until 1981 and co-editor 1982-91. She published Those of Us Who Loved Her in 1980 and A Community of Interest: The Story of the George Eliot Fellowship 1930-2000 in 2000.

Lynda Carnes is Chairman of the Bedworth Society.

Mary Wilson Carpenter is Associate Professor of English at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, and has published widely on Victorian literature, including George Eliot and the Landscape of Time (1986).

Stephen Gill is Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. His publications include Wordsworth and …

Review Of George Eliot And The British Empire, Nancy Henry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In this fascinating and forcefully argued study, Nancy Henry addresses the kind of subject that has become the preserve of post-colonial criticism but does so in a way that challenges commonly held assumptions about the relations between empire and fiction in the Victorian period. Where post-colonial criticism tends to emphasize the determining power of the ideological and cultural forces to which individual writers were subordinate - in some cases seeing the novel as an inherently imperialist form, in others assuming the pervasive presence of an imperialist ideology - Henry puts the author and her own distinct experience firmly at the …

Review Of George Eliot, Judaism And The Novels, Saleel Nurbhai, K.M. Newton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Saleel Nurbhai and K. M. Newton break new ground with this consideration of George Eliot's exploitation of Jewish mysticism and mythology in fiction written before the novel that obviously promotes that tradition, Daniel Deronda. In their introductory chapter, Nurbhai and Newton posit the radical theory that the figure of the 'golem', or unformed mass, which is central to Jewish mythology is also a significant presence in all of Eliot's work, beginning with Adam Bede. But they venture even further than this large hypothesis concerning Eliot's work, suggesting that much of the 'golemish' character of her novels is based …

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Gardens, Nuneaton 10 June 2001, Lynda Carnes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Wherefore we come to lay this laurel wreath –

Humbly, in reparation for the past,

Proudly, in honour of thy worth,

With Reverence, as believing still

In beauty, truth and love.

George Eliot, or Mary Ann Evans as she was known when she lived here in Nuneaton, died on 22 December 1880. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery, on 29 December, in unconsecrated ground in a grave adjoining that of George Henry Lewes. The coffin was loaded with loving tributes in the shape of lilies, camellias, and other beautiful white flowers with here and there a small bouquet of violets. …

Conference Report: George Eliot: Life And Letters. Institute Of English Studies, University Of London, January 17 And 18 2002, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I'm grateful for the editors' invitation to report on this conference. I was asked to organize it by Warwick Gould, Director of the University of London Institute of English Studies, in response to the auction and sale in 2001, of letters (published and unpublished) from George Eliot to Jane Senior, apparently the first woman to hold a salaried English government appointment. The 'stayed' export of these letters, eventually bought by the British Library, was in the news. The letters seemed too restricted a subject for a work-in-progress conference, and its theme became 'George Eliot: Life and Letters'. Scholars invited were …

Henry James On Digression In The Fiction Of George Eliot, Christine Richards

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Stemming from a genuine desire to grapple with the complex theoretical issues underlying nineteenth-century attitudes to the novel and its aesthetic, Henry James was one of the leading critics of the mid-Victorian period. Yet his conclusion in his early criticism that George Eliot's digressions detracted from her style, was one of his less astute judgements. We know from his correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton in 1866 that James had for some time been looking for a novelist on whom to write a long general essay concerning quality, originally considering and then rejecting Harriet Beecher Stowe,' and a glance across his …

Review Of Felix Holt, The Radical, William Baker, Kenneth Womack

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

William Baker and Kenneth Womack's Felix Holt is part of the relatively recent Broadview Literary Texts series, a Canadian-based series that seeks to publish recognized canonical texts alongside less well known texts from literary history. With that in mind, coverage in the Victorian period means we have editions of often taught novels by Dickens (David Copperfield, Hard Times, and Great Expectations) and Charlotte Bronte (lane Eyre) alongside texts that hitherto have almost never been read or taught widely - Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography, Browning's The Ring and the Book and an edition of poems by Augusta …

Review Of The Cambridge Companion To George Eliot, George Levine

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Dictionary definitions of ‘companion’ stress notions of fellowship and support as in ‘one who associates with or accompanies another’. The question prompted by the use of ‘companion’ in a book title is, for whom is company being provided? I take it that the proliferating series of critical support texts of which the Cambridge Companions are in general fine examples are unabashedly aimed at an undergraduate market, while maintaining significant concern for an academic readership and some for an informed or persistent general readership. It must be admitted that George Eliot is not popular in the way that Dickens and the …

Review Of Women And Literature In Britain 1800-1900, Joanne Shattock

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This book of thirteen essays by leading scholars in the field is an impressive and valuable contribution to the study of nineteenth-century women writers. Canonical figures such as Austen, the Bronte sisters, Gaskell and Eliot are examined in the wider context of the social, cultural and economic conditions which influenced the production and dissemination of their work and reputations. In addition, the very nature and construction of the canon of nineteenth-century woman writers is interrogated.

These essays reveal the tremendous extent and variety of women's contribution to the expanding range of discourses that helped to form the culture of the …

Address At Wreath-Laying In Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey 10 June 2001, A.G. Van Den Broek

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In June 1990, the Revd Dr Edward Carpenter gave this address, exactly ten years after he, as Dean of Westminster, conducted the service when the stone memorializing George Eliot was unveiled. In his address Dr Carpenter reminded his audience that permission for an Abbey burial had been denied Eliot on religious grounds, but that it gave him 'great satisfaction and a unique pleasure' to help memorialize her a hundred years later. She was, he said, 'a person whom, in "character; manner and style", it is almost impossible to praise over much' .1.

It gives me great satisfaction and pleasure, as …

Dorothea And The 'Key To All Mythologies', Daniel Tyler

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In Middlemarch, the 'dead hand' of Edward Casaubon, which seeks to take hold of his wife's future, is applied by two documents. The first is the codicil to his will which endeavours to prohibit Dorothea marrying Will Ladislaw by imposing the condition that to do so she must relinquish her inheritance. The second is the 'Synoptical Tabulation' in which he expresses the intention to have her continue his work on the 'Key to all Mythologies'. As early as 1873, it was observed by Henry James that the subsequent narrative is dominated by the repercussions of the codicil: 'Mr Casaubon's death …