Comparative Literature Commons^™

A Postcard To Rev.F.R. Evans (George Eliot's Nephew)

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'Re George Eliot' 'A' [in red ink]

(Mary Ann Evans)

Sir, I assume that you read the Ten Commandments in your church - yet in the Nuneaton Chronicle article in The Star of Aug. 7, you are said by A. E. Cross 1 to be in favour of a memorial to this 'evil-liver'. Let us hope that if people who gloat over the uncleanly erect a memorial the 'Scarlet letter' 'A" (Adulteress) will be conspicuously placed - as it is written by many of us on the title page of her works -

Let the silly project die or her …

The George Eliot Review: Journal Of The George Eliot Fellowship 1999 No. 30, Beryl Gray, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors ................................................................................... 5

Editors' Note ........................................................................................... 7

REPORTS Kathleen Adams: Annual Report 1998 ........................................ 9

Yuriko Kani: Japanese Branch Report ................................................... 16

Linda K. Robertson: Report from America .................................................... 18

ADDRESSES Margaret Jennings: Address at the wreath-laying in the George Eliot Memorial Garden, 17 May 1998 ................................................ .19

Lord Hattersley: Address at the wreath-laying in Westminster Abbey, 20 June 1998 .......................................................... 21

Henry Alley: The Twenty-Seventh George Eliot Memorial Lecture, l7 October 1998 ............................................... 23

Tenniel Evans: The Toast to the Immortal Memory: George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 22 November 1998 ......................................... 36

ARTICLES A.G. van den Broek: …

Henry James And George Eliot: Realism, Reality, And Narrative Form, Nicola Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The narratives of the Victorian writers are infused with detailed expositions of living, felt pictures; it was inevitable given the expectations of their audience. Furthermore, writers-cumcritics such as Henry lames testify to the difficulty of 'drawling] a hard and fast line on the border-land of explanation and illustration'.' lames was central to the protracted Great Debate surrounding 'The Art of Fiction' which took place in 1884, and the discussion encouraged Robert Louis Stevenson to respond with his 'A Humble Remonstrance', a gesture which can be interpreted as a tactical manoeuvre to keep the debate open. Andrew Lang's own 'The Art …

The Politics Of Religion In Felix Holt, A.G. Van Den Broek

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In chapter 3 of Felix Holt, the narrator gives an account of the 'social changes in Treby parish', including the altered character of Trebian Dissent. It had

been of a quiescent, well-to-do kind, represented architecturally by a small venerable, dark-pewed chapel, built by Presbyterians, but long occupied by a sparse congregation of Independents, who were as little moved by doctrinal zeal as their church-going neighbours, and did not feel themselves deficient in religious liberty, inasmuch as they were not hindered from occasionally slumbering in their pews, and were not obliged to go regularly to the weekly prayer meeting.

In the …

Annual Report 1998, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Every year I begin this report by saying what a busy year the Fellowship has had. Every year it seems to get busier; certainly the workload increases each year - which must be a measure of our success in reaching out in all directions, not only in the UK but abroad as well.

We begin each year in a fairly uneventful way with the Annual General Meeting, and 1998 was in the same mould, although we followed the business meeting with an excellent slide show by John Burton of the George Eliot Country in the past. John was elected to …

The Twenty-Seventh George Eliot Memorial Lecture: Ego, Anonymity, And Healing In George Eliot, Henry Alley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Eliot's ultimate goal- morally, aesthetically - was to free the individual ego from the suffering of reflecting upon itself. Her fiction, which she saw as a series of evolving psychological phases, achieves this liberation through strongly argued models of balance and through the kinds of recognition linked to anonymous heroism. Mental anguish is to be escaped through the contemplation of others, and it would follow that Eliot's cumulative effort would clarify what it means to acquire achievements on the level of quiet and anonymous bequeathal, rather than self-aggrandizing glory.

Eliot discovered that a broad perspective beyond ego may be developed …

Daniel Deronda- 1921 Style, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

While we are still awaiting news of the completion of a new film of Daniel Deronda, something that has been in the pipeline for some years, it is interesting to discover that in 1921, a cinema film of the novel was made by Butcher's Film Services Ltd of Camera House, Farringdon Avenue, London EC4. In the 5,500 feet of film Butcher's made a gallant attempt to transfer George Eliot's last great novel onto the screen but previews seemed somewhat disenchanted with the results. The Kinematograph Weekly of 19 May 1921 reported that 'Although George Eliot is not ideally suited to …

Report From America, Linda K. Roberston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The ninth annual George Eliot Dinner was held during the Modem Language Association meeting in San Francisco, California. Members of the Fellowship and friends met at Puccini and Pinetta on December 29 for excellent conversation and food. The evening included the traditional Toast to the Immortal Memory, greetings from members who could not attend, and much discussion of recent books on George Eliot and related topics. Harriet Williams located the superb Italian restaurant, which was very conveniently located, and made the arrangements.

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon: The Toast To The Immortal Memory 1998, Tenniel Evans

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Sixty-two years ago, almost to the day - a freezing 25 November 1936 - I arrived at the London docks from Africa and came, without realizing it at the time, to live in the country of my background. I was to live with Alison and Rupert Winser and their family in the Rectory at Allesley, just outside Coventry, and it became my home for the next five years. By the end of that time, of course, the war had blown away the old life and it would never be the same again. So I was lucky that at least I …

Wreath-Laying In Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey 1998, Roy Hattersley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I take a strange pleasure in being associated, no matter how vicariously, with the greatest novelist in the English language. I am by no means sure that she would approve of this event. Asked about God, Immortality and Duty - strange topics of conversation to be raised during an afternoon's stroll - 'she pronounced with terrible earnestness how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second and how peremptory and absolute the third'. But there she is in black, polished marble on the floor of Westminster Abbey - the junkyard of the nation's vanities.

She keeps appropriate company, in a …

Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden Nuneaton, May 1998, Margaret Jennings

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In paying tribute to George Eliot today we acknowledge a debt of gratitude owed to her for the legacy of wonderful novels which have enriched so many lives during both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As we approach the twenty-first century I find myself considering how her work will be greeted by the coming generations, indeed not just in a new century but in a new millenium.

In the early part of this century, the Bloomsbury writer Virginia Woolf helped restore George Eliot's standing as a great novelist by claiming that Middlemarch was one of the few novels for grown-up …

Obituary- Ezell

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

We are sad to report the death on February 23rd. of Dr. Ezell at his home in Vermont. He had been one of our most supportive and active members. In the early 1970's a literary lady wrote a somewhat patronising letter to the Times Literary Supplement about the Fellowship's efforts to raise funds for a memorial stone to George Eliot in Westminster Abbey. It was read in the United States by Dr. Ezell. He felt so strongly about the dismissive tone of the letter that he immediately became a life member of the Fellowship, enrolled some of his patients, appealed …

The Idea Of An English Gentleman: Mr. Knightley And Arthur Donnithorne, David Ball

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My modest purpose in this essay is to develop the interesting suggestion of Ellen Moers in Literary Women that George Eliot's inspiration to write Adam Bede may well have lain in her attentive reading of Emma: that Adam Bede himself is the heroic and detailed portrait of Robert Martin that Emma has no place for. George Eliot's father, Robert Evans, was a mari similar to Robert Martin and Adam Bede, in both status and ability, and the creation of Adam is Eliot's first fictional tribute to him. Ellen Moers also briefly compares Harriet Smith and Hetty Sorrel as sharing 'the …

The George Eliot Review: Journal Of The George Eliot Fellowship 1998 No. 29, Beryl Gray, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors ...................................................................................... 5

REPORTS Kathleen Adams: Annual Report 1997 ........................................... 7

Shoshana Milgram Knapp: American Branch Report.................................... 14

ADDRESSES Ruth Harris: Address at the wreath-laying in the George Eliot Memorial Garden, 15 June 1997 ................................................. 15

Carol A. Martin: Address at the wreath-laying in Westminster Abbey, 21 June 1997 .......................................................................... 18

Gillian Beer: The Twenty-Sixth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 11 October 1997................................................ 24

Geoffrey Beevers: The Toast to the Immortal Memory: George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 23 November 1997........................................ .30

ARTICLES David Malcolm: 'Grand and Vague': Why is Daniel Deronda about the Jews? (Prize-winning Essay)................................................................................ .33

David Bell: …

Wordsworth And The Victorians, Stephen Gill

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Words worth belongs to a generation that re-invented posterity as the true judge of artistic worth, a truth beyond fashion and faction, the eternal justification of a misunderstood life. His exact contemporary Holderlin asked 'Wozu Dichter in diirftiger Zeit, meaning, among other things, why be a poet in an age that does not know how to value poetry? Romantic poets invested very heavily in the future, and for that reason, leaving aside others, their reception makes a fascinating study, full of veneration, misprision, irony, bathos, creative imitation and unconscious symbiosis.

Stephen Gill's book IS about both the Victorianization of Words …

Baraba Leigh-Smith Bodichon: Feminist, Artist And Rebel, Pam Hirsch

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is impossible not to be impressed by Barbara Leigh-Smith Bodichon. Her life is interesting for its diversity, rather than for any single accomplishment, and therefore she has posed a challenge for biographers. Most accounts of Bodichon, such as Sheila Hemstein's A Mid- Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1985) and Candida Ann Lacey's collection, Barbara Bodichon and the Langham Place Group (1987), have focused on her activities as a social reformer. The first complete biography since Hester Burton's Barbara Bodichon, 1827- 1891 (1949), is Pam Hirsch's Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: Feminist, Artist and Rebel. Hirsch recognizes the relative neglect …

A Note Of Daniel Deronda's Circumcision, Derek Miller

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

For the last twenty years or so critics have wondered if Daniel Deronda, the eponymous hero of George Eliot's last novel, was circumcised or not. If he was, he would scarcely have to wait for his mother's revelations to know he was a Jew. Some commentators, however, say that, for medical reasons, circumcision was not uncommon among middle class people at the time of Deronda's infancy, and he might therefore not have given much attention to the matter.

Professor John Sutherland, recently entering this lively discussion! points to the rebellion by Deronda's mother against her father's Judaism as a prime …

Gwendolen's Story From Daniel Deronda, Gabriel Woolf, Rosalind Shanks

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 1902, the essayist, Leslie Stephen, wrote that Daniel Deronda was 'two stories put side by side' and the 'Gwendolen Story' taken by itself was a 'masterly piece of social satire'. In his biography of George Eliot, Gordon Haight makes a general reference to 'Gwendolen's story' as part of the whole narrative of Daniel Deronda including the Jewish portion. He showed some disdain towards 'careless readers' who thought the Jewish elements could be separated from the story of Gwendolen.

George Eliot herself, writing to Barbara Bodichon, seemed displeased with readers who 'cut the book up into scraps and talk of …

American Branch Report 1997, Shoshanan Milgram Knapp

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The eighth annual MLA dinner, a typically informal and festive occasion, was held at the Ristorante Amalfi in Toronto on Sunday, 28 December 1997. Present were Michael Ballin, Margaret Barfield, Nancy Cervetti, Connie Fulmer, Bonnie Gerard, Gabe Gerard, Shoshana Milgram Knapp, and Richard Maxwell. Shoshana conveyed greetings from Linda Robertson, the new coordinator of the American branch, and from Kathleen Adams.

Review Of Sisters In Literature: Female Sexuality In 'Antigone', 'Middlemarch', 'Howard's End' And 'Women In Love', Masako Hirai

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

While the main theme of this book is clear and easily grasped, there is an unevenness about the treatment which at times is disconcerting. Biography and critical argument sit uneasily together, some of the statements are outside the frame of current criticism, and there are some subjective and questionable assertions. Take this about the relationship between George Henry Lewes and George Eliot: 'Yet even Lewes, I think, was more superficial (sometimes even disloyal) than her nature demanded, having a journalistic rather than an academic mind, and taking a broad interest in everything. Understandably, he could not share her deepest struggle, …

The Stereotyped Edition's Title-Page Vignettes, Beryle Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On 2 November 1866, George Eliot wrote to John Blackwood approving of his proposal to publish an illustrated edition of her books. The project, she saw, was

a wise one, as likely to assist in [the books'] circulation. In the abstract I object to illustrated literature, but abstract theories of publishing can no more be carried out than abstract theories of politics.'

B1ackwood's idea developed into a plan 'to try the cheap illustrated edition of your Novels in six penny numbers of which Adam, The Mill, Scenes, Silas, and Felix would make 30, ultimately to form four volumes selling at …

'Hardy And Eliot': A Response, Toru Sasaki

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In the last issue of the Review, Nicola Harris, in her Fellowship Prize Essay, discussed the different attitudes of Hardy and George Eliot to 'moral perception'.' In the course of her argument she refers to an article of mine, published several years ago, where I dealt with the same passages that she considers. Having read her piece with great interest, I should like to make the following observations.

The reference to what I said occurs where Harris is comparing the description of Boldwood looking fixedly at the Valentine that Bathsheba has sent him (,Here the bachelor's gaze was continually fastening …

Annual Report 1988

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The year began, as always. with the Annual General Meeting on March 25th. The four officers were re-elected and Daphne Paton was welcomed to the Fellowship Council. Joan Bunn was re-elected and both ladies have proved very supportive throughout the year. The business meeting was followed by a showing of slides of North Warwickshire then and now - a fascinating collection by John Burton, Chairman of the Bedworth Society, and to show our appreciation we made a donation to the Society's appeal fund to save the Pump House at the Nicholas Chamberlaine Almshouses in Bedworth.

The second event was almost …

Review Of From Author To Text: Re-Reading George Eliot's Romola; George Eliot And Italy: Literary, Cultural And Politcal Influences From Dante To The Risorgimento, Caroline Levine, Mark W. Turner, Andrew Thomspon

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Each of these books took me by surprise. There is a curious tension between the incorporativeness of Andrew Thompson's title, George Eliot and Italy, and his compendiously specific sub-title, Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento, which somehow led me to expect something like a descriptive catalogue of alleged influences. Instead, I found a book which indeed has awkwardnesses, but which pursues an argument and offers valuable illumination of George Eliot's whole career (and not just Romola, as might easily be assumed). Barbara Hardy memorably observed in 1959 that 'Romola is undoubtedly a book which it is …

"Grand And Vague" Why Is Daniel Deronda About The Jews?, David Malcolm

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'I am sure you are right to leave everything grand and vague', George Eliot's publisher wrote bemusedly to her about Daniel Deronda's Zionism (Letters VI: 272). In his 'Conversation' on Daniel Deronda, Henry James too, like many contemporary and later readers, expresses his doubt and unease about the novel's Zionist subject matter.

Traditional interpretations of the Zionist subject matter in Daniel Deronda are not wholly satisfactory. It is often dismissed as vague and lacking in concreteness (Fisher 227; Bamber 421; Hochman 113-33; LiddellI82), or explained purely in biographical terms, which, while fascinating, do not reveal much about the function of …

Japanese Branch Report 1998, Yuriko Kani

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The second annual convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Toyo University in Tokyo on Saturday, 31 October 1998. After a year of careful preparation, the convention was successful. The morning session began with a welcome speech by Yuzo Uzuhashi, Chair of the English Literature Department at Toyo University. After that, three papers were presented. The first paper, 'Representations of Mobs and Riots: Felix Halt as an Industrial Novel', was presented by Tadashi Wada, a graduate student at Tokyo University. He discussed how the author's ambivalent view of mobs and riots was reflected in the representations …

Review Of A Monument To The Memory Of George Eliot. Edith J. Simcox's Autobiography Of A Shirtmaker, Constance M. Fulmer, Margaret E. Barfield

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The intensity of Edith Jemima Simcox's passion for George Eliot has been known to a twentieth- century reading public since the publication of K. A. McKenzie's Edith Simcox and George Eliot in 1961. McKenzie's book is a combination of summary and quotation of a manuscript acquired by the Bodleian Library in 1958, This manuscript, entitled The Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, is a journal kept by Simcox from 10 May 1876 until 29 January 1900. Gordon Haight wrote the introduction to McKenzie's book, relied on the Simcox manuscript in his 1968 biography of Eliot, and printed lengthy passages from it in …

Review Silas Marner, Geoffrey Beevers

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Following on from his extremely successful stage adaptation of Adam Bede, which won a Time Out award in 1991, Geoffrey Beevers chose to bring another George Eliot masterpiece, Silas Mamer, to the stage at the Orange Tree theatre.

With four stage exit and entry points, this theatre-in-the-round offered a perfect opportunity to create the pace required to move through a tale spanning thirty years in the confines of a two and- a-half-hour play. The cast took full advantage, with actors narrating from all corners while the scene developed centre stage, giving the audience no time to lose the thread.

Narration …

Mathilde Blind, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The first titles in the Eminent Women Series published in 1883 by W. H. Allen included studies of Emily Bronte and George Sand (Margaret Fuller, Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Fry, and Harriet Martineau would be in the next wave) as well as Mathilde Blind's pioneering, sensitive, uneven and sympathetically feminist exposition of George Eliot's life and art. Blind herself deserves a full-length study, and at particular points her own life and works touch those of George Eliot. Born Mathilde Cohen in Mannheim in 1841, she took her stepfather's name when her mother remarried. Dr. Karl Blind was an ardent republican in …

The Twenty-Sixth George Eliot Memorial Lecture: A Troubled Friendship, Gillian Beer

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Edith Simcox is now usually remembered, if at all, as the woman who recorded in a secret journal ('Autobiography of a Shirt Maker') her passionate and physically unrequited love for George Eliot. Yet to her contemporaries Simcox was well known as a philosopher, a distinguished translator of intellectual works from German, an incisive journalist reviewing important works written in French and German as well as English, an ethnographer, and a political activist. She was, under the pen-name 'H. Lawrenny' one of the founding contributors to the Academy in 1869 and appeared for the first time in her own person there …