Comparative Literature Commons^™

'My Own Dear Heart's Ease': George Eliot's Coventry Friend, Caroline (Cara) Bray (1814-1905), Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In September 1842 Mary Ann Evans wrote a short but illuminating letter to her Coventry friend Cara Bray:

My own dear Heart's Ease [it was not unusual for her to give her closest friends the name of a flower as she had done this on several occasions before], ... your looks and words of love are so precious to me. I am together ashamed of myself - do not tell anyone that I am so silly as I appear to her whom I love best ... '

We don't know why Mary Ann was so ashamed but we do see …

Review Of George Eliot And Goethe: An Elective Affinity Sisters In Literature: Female Sexuality In 'Antigone', 'Middlemarch,' 'Howards End' And 'Women In Love', Gerlinde Roder-Bolton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's admiration for Goethe is well known but how exactly it impinges on her own fiction is less clear and hence Gerlinde Roder-Bolton's useful attempt to analyse her creative use of him. As the sub-title of this study is perhaps intended to suggest, however, it either combines, or slips between, two different arguments. It looks closely at three parallel texts: The Mill on the Floss and Elective Affinities; Daniel Deronda and Faust; Daniel Deronda and Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. In the first case, evidence is adduced, along with an interpretative argument, to suggest that Goethe's novel significantly aided the composition …

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon: The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Geoffrey Beevers

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I'm sure you all know more about George Eliot than I do, so I thought I'd talk for a few minutes about the difficulties and joys of adapting her work, and especially Adarn Bede for the stage.

I'd been asked to adapt Adarn Bede for the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond, Surrey, then a tiny room-theatre above a pub. I didn't know much about George Eliot then. I didn't know that just around the corner from the pub theatre was the beautiful house in Park Shot where she had begun to write Adarn Bede and where the sound of George …

Wreath-Laying In Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, Carol A. Martin

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The nineteenth century was an age of travellers, including many famous British women travellers. Lady Hester Stanhope lived for years in the Middle East, Mary Kingsley explored the jungles of Gabon and died while performing medical work in South Africa, Isabella Bird Bishop journeyed around the globe and wrote books on Malaysia, China, Japan, the Hawaiian Islands, the Sinai Peninsula, and the valleys and peaks above 10,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

George Eliot was also a woman interested in travel, though in ways different from those of the women I have just named. Several of the earliest …

Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden Nuneaton, Ruth Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I am deeply grateful for the honour of being invited to lay a wreath in memory of George Eliot, and to lay it in a place that meant so much to her.... Nuneaton. Before the heavens opened, I pictured us all gathered outside surrounded by green grass, trees and flowers, and able to imagine the spirit of George Eliot not in her study surrounded by books but out-of-doors, enjoying the fresh air. Some imagination is needed to visualize a little girl gathering flowers in the sunshine, or running towards a Round Pool after her older brother, or leaping with delight …

The Ideolody Of Imagination: Subject And Society In The Discourse Of Romanticism, Forest Pyle

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A first reaction to the title of this book might be to wonder that it has apparently not been used before: ideology, imagination, subject, society, discourse, Romanticism - a compendium of weighty terms elegantly linked. Another might be to sigh at their familiarity and abstraction: are we in for a strenuously theoretical restatement of some well-worn themes? Readers of George Eliot might have a third reaction: is this a book about Romanticism with a chapter about Eliot tacked on at the end? To answer all these questions simply, let me say that this is a valuable book and recommend it …

Review Of Holt The Radical, A.G. Van Den Broek, Linda Mugglestone

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

With Romola, Felix Halt, the Radical has generally proved to be George Eliot's least appreciated novel. Romola used to be safely categorized as 'smelling of the lamp', while Felix Halt was awkwardly 'political'. Despite a continuing critical unease about both novels, we cannot easily employ such easy categories at the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, the whole idea of what constitutes a 'political novel' has itself radically changed. Where unreconstructed Marxist and Marxisant critics used to see politics exclusively in terms of class struggle, and George Eliot as a muddied conservative whose intellectual grasp on political affairs would have …

Having The Whip-Hand In Middlemarch, Daniel Karlin

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In one of the first reviews of Proust's Du cote de chez Swann, appropriately published in the journal Le Temps, in 1913, the critic Paul Souday takes Proust to task for writing too much like an Englishman. 'His copious narratives have something of Ruskin and Dickens in them,' Souday remarks; and he might easily have added George Eliot, whom we know Proust to have read and admired. Souday goes on:

This superabundance of trivial events, this insistence on suggesting explanations of them, is frequently met with in English novels, where the sense of life is produced by a kind of …

The Twenty-Fifth George Eliot Memorial Lecture: The Larger Meaning Of Your Voice: Varieties Of Speech In George Eliot, Raymond Chapman

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

When Ladislaw has watched and listened to Dorothea in the Vatican Museum, he says to the painter Naumann that language is superior to painting and 'gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being vague.[ ... ] This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice, pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her.' The novelist does in a way paint the voice, using the visual signs of written language to convey an auditory experience.

Written dialogue may be naturalistic and idiomatic in its choice of …

Review Of Middlemarch's Three New Editions, Margaret Harris, Judith Johnston, David Carroll, Felicia Bonaparte, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Readers of Middlemarch, it is a pleasure to report, are now spoil for choice. Joining an already saturated market are three new paperback editions, attractively produced at a very reasonable price with full critical apparatus, including textual notes, explanatory notes, introductions, chronologies, recommendations for further reading and even, in the case of the Everyman Paperbacks edition, a synopsis of the plot chapter by chapter (although the editors are quick to point out that this is 'intended to serve as an index, not as analysis', nor presumably as a substitute for reading the novel itself). The Everyman edition claims on its …

'Heard But Not Seen': An Anthology Of Victorian Childhood Devised And Presented, Gabriel Woolf, Rosalind Shanks

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This year's performance of readings was subtitled A Victorian Edition of Children's Hour, and was intended for adults. The programme was constructed round the framework of the childhood of Tom and Maggie from The Mill on the Floss and included insights into the lives of other children in both fact and fiction.

Actors are usually advised that it is unwise to act with children, but to play the part of a child is another matter, and certainly not child's play. We suspended disbelief, however, and enjoyed the guilelessness of Ruthless Rhymes by Harry Graham as well as Tom and Maggie's …

Review Of The Power Of Knowledge: George Eliot And Education, Linda K. Roberston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This book, volume 61 of the University of Kansas Humanistic Studies series, purports to do one thing but delivers another. According to the blurb on the back cover, Robertson demonstrates that George Eliot had much to say on a number of educational issues that plagued her contemporaries. In fiction, essays, and letters, we are told, she commented on various Victorian educational debates about illiteracy, the desirability of a classical education and higher education for women. In her introduction, Robertson briefly reminds us of some nineteenth- century writers on education: Newman, Mill, Huxley, Ruskin, Arnold, Spencer and Whewell, the Master of …

A Forgotten Critic: Abba Goold Woolson's George Eliot And Her Heroines: A Study, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I feel that one should draw attention to the fact that in 1886 an American woman established certain emphases which succeeding critics followed, developed and extended in the twentieth century. This small book (published by Harper Brothers, New York) is a serious investigation of George Eliot's art, even employing the kind of language (Data Necessary for an Estimate of her Mind and Works') which links the scientific and the literary as a kind of consonance with George Eliot's own practice. As early as the second page there is an unequivocal assertion of the nature of her greatness - 'the name …

Review Of George Eliot And Europe, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot and Europe arrives at a timely moment, when the nature of the relationship between Britain and the Continent is at best ambiguous, and when the parameters of 'Europe' are anxiously contested. In some ways, things have not altered much since the middle and late nineteenth century: nationalism, immigration, militancy, cultural isolationism - all of these were as important to nineteenth-century ways of thinking as they are today. This collection of essays, based on a conference and part of a series which seeks to understand Europe in relation to the rest of the world, insists that in order to …

Review Of The Mill On The Floss

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In this lamentably impoverished adaptation by Hugh Stoddart (directed by Graham Theakston), a character identified as Sophy Deane (played by Joanna David) masqueraded as one of three Dodson sisters. That George Eliot created a unit of four sisters is of minor consequence, since their individuality apparently merited so little concern that it was deemed fitting to amalgamate the lachrymose Sophy Pullet with Lucy Deane's mother, Susan - an expedient that, instead of giving us two for the price of one, merely effaced them both. In effect, every opportunity to avoid the danger of distinguishing one sister from another appeared to …

The Quest Of Anonymity: The Novels Of George Eliot, Henry Alley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This book derives from half a lifetime's teaching and the author's obvious affinity for George Eliot. It is earnest, sometimes engaging, often off centre. It also exists in a kind of time-warp, somewhere in the 1960s in terms of tone and stance, though there is an impressive range of criticism and background reading cited and occasionally milked. In fact, this back-up seems to be an attempt to establish critical credentials, and the constant references in which Alley says 'And I would add ... " or merely summarizes arguments reflect this. At his best he has no need of this, since …

Review Of Perspectives On Self And Comunity In George Eliot: Dorothea's Window, Patricia Gately, Dennis Leavens, D. Cole Woodcox

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a modest book, edited by three people who are so modest that they reveal nothing at all about their identities. It is possible to discover from a footnote on p.159 that it is a product of a conference on George Eliot although further details of that event remain undisclosed. Two of its contributors, however, are well known in George Eliot circles: Barbara Hardy and Felicia Bonaparte. Their essays are certainly worth reading while all the other contributions have something new to say about Eliot's work even if they are by today's standards under-theorized. One looks in vain in …

Review Of Realism, Representation, And The Arts In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Alison Byerly

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Dr. Alison Byerly's concern is with the use in their fiction by four Victorian novelists of art works, performative as well as representational, experienced by the characters as well as metaphors within the larger narrative frame, works both real and invented - the Vatican's antique Cleopatra/Ariadne in Middlemarch, for example, as well as the Agamemnon charade of Vanity Fair. Byerly sees this process as intimately bound up with 'realism' (the term is commonly offered to us in inverted commas) and with the self-consciousness of her chosen novelists: Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. This process, in turn, points …

Review Of George Eliot, Josephine Mcdonagh

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

While the old 'Writers and their Work' pamphlets were very useful in their staid, often belles-lettristic, way, since the series was relaunched in 1994 under the General Editorship of Isobel Armstrong it has made its mark in a more forthright and compelling manner. These monographs are longer than their predecessors, at around 40,000 words, and while they are uniform in format, in a livery of nationalist red, white and blue, they respond distinctively to their brief: 'Drawing upon the most recent thinking in English studies, each book considers biographical material, examines modem criticism, includes a detailed bibliography, and offers a …

'Tied To My Heart By A Cord Which Can Never Be Broken': George Eliot And Her Sister Chrissey, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Christiana Evans, always known as Chrissey, was the first child of Robert Evans's marriage to Christiana Pearson of Astley, near Nuneaton, and she was born, as were Isaac and Mary Ann, at Arbury (now South) Farm on the Arbury estate in 1814. When the family moved to Griff House in 1820 Chrissey was old enough to go to boarding school and she went in advance of her small sister to Miss Lathom's School in nearby Attleborough. This removed her from Griff to the closer vicinity of her Aunt Evarard, later to appear as one of the Dodson sisters in The …

Annual Report 1997, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

1997 was, as always, a busy year for the Fellowship, beginning with the Annual General Meeting on 14 March. Mrs. Kathleen Porter retired from the Fellowship Council and was thanked for many supportive years. The Chairman had just completed twenty-five years in office and was presented with a gift token to show the Fellowship's appreciation for all those years in office. Mr. David Adams was elected to take the place of Mrs. Porter and Mrs. Vivienne Wood of King Edward Sixth Form College, Nuneaton was co-opted for one year. A George Eliot version of 'Call my Bluff' concluded the meeting. …

Address At The Unveiling Of John Letts's Statue Of George Eliot At The George Eliot Hospital, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is, of course, the second time many of us have attended the unveiling of a statue of George Eliot. The last time was in 1986 and John, I know, will remember what an exciting time that was. Even before the unveiling we had met in Newdegate Square to await her arrival from the foundry. She arrived on the back of a lorry, almost as though she had thumbed a lift up from High Wycombe. When she was unveiled by our President she shone like a new penny.

From that day on I have wished that the George Eliot Hospital …

Wreath-Laying In Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It has always seemed to me, and doubtless to many others, that some of the most moving and evocative words ever written by George Eliot occur near the beginning of the third chapter of her last novel, Daniel Deronda:

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge; …

Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton, Marjorie Bruce

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Yesterday evening Pat Williams and I much enjoyed performing our recital based on George Eliot's words and on her concert-going and home musical entertainment experiences. Usually a recital programme of this kind is given once and never heard again (as is the case with most concerts). Performers in opera, and even more in musicals, will have the pleasure, which may eventually turn into the pain, of reproducing the same performance over and over again. Can they, like Browning's wise thrush, repeat their first fine careless rapture? The cry of encore at the end of a recital often elicits one other …

The George Eliot Review: Journal Of The George Eliot Fellowship- 1996 No.27, Beryl Gray, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

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

REPORTS Kathleen Adams: Annual Report 1995 .................................... 7

Ruth Barris: University of Warwick, Second George Eliot Conference Report: 'George Eliot and Europe' ............................................................... 12

Rosalind De Sailly: University of Adelaide, Australian Victorian Studies Association Seventeenth Conference Report: 'The Victorians and Science'..................... 16

Elizabeth Gundrey: Report on the lecture delivered by John Cooper at the National Portrait Gallery, December 1995: 'George Eliot at the National Portrait Gallery'................... 18

Linda K. Robertson: American Branch Report 1995 ..............................19

ADDRESSES Richard Thompson: Wreath-laying in the George Eliot Memorial Garden, 11 June 1995 .....................................................................20

John Rignall: The Twenty-Fourth George Eliot …

Music As A Sign In Daniel Deronda, Phyllis Weliver

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The language of music communicates and contributes to spiritual transformation in Daniel Deronda. It expresses non-verbal truths about humanity's connection to the world, and unifies the novel with a continuous vocabulary since sound and silence are frequently described in musical terms. George Eliot specifies meaning in non-verbal mediums. For instance, since the narrator says that Gwendolen blushes as a result of surprise, the reader can decipher an encoded meaning in situations where she blushes, although the characters must still interpret via deduction: 'A blush is no language: only a dubious flag-signal which may mean either of two contradictories. In order …

A Lifted Veil, Suzanne Tatin

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Last summer, while compiling a checklist of art objects owned by the Clark Library, Renee Chin, a UCLA undergraduate and a Getty intern, discovered a portrait of George Eliot in the art storage room. Senior Library staff had not seen this portrait before and an internal inventory conducted in 1936 appears to have been the last documentation of its existence.

The painting was executed early in 1850 during Eliot's stay abroad. The previous summer, Eliot had travelled to the Continent with her friends Charles and Cara Bray. When the Brays returned to England, Eliot remained in Geneva and in October …

The Two Georges And The Gunner, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Edward Bruce Hamley (1824-93) was a dedicated professional soldier, a military historian and theorist and a man of varied literary interests. He was a member of a distinguished Cornish family, and was educated at Bodmin Grammar School and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, being commissioned in the Royal Artillery in 1843, thereafter serving in Ireland and Canada (1844-8), and devoting himself to field sports, reading, and indulging his love of cats. His earliest papers appeared in Fraser's (1849-50), and in 1853 his superbly ironic novel Lady Lee's Widowhood made him a pas singly famous writer. But the Crimean War clipped …

Review Of The Letters Of George Henry Lewes, Terence R. Wright

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This edition of Lewes's letters, collected from a range of libraries across the world and presented with clear introductions and notes, is a welcome resource to all readers of Lewes and Eliot. It is not a complete collection, deliberately setting out to supplement the Lewes items included in Gordon Haight's George Eliot Letters so that the two of them now provide a complete record of all Lewes's letters, or at least all the letters that Baker's widely cast net has been able to trace. Some of these (fifty-seven to be precise) are summarized rather than transcribed but the others (442 …

Buried Treasure, A.F. Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Most commentors agree that George Eliot furnished her early stories from memories of actual places, events and people encountered in her childhood and youth in Warwickshire. In making this (perhaps involuntary) choice so soon after her liaison with G. H. Lewes began she was probably already aware that the estrangement from her family, and consequent exile away from her roots in the Midlands, was inevitable. So, perhaps with a strong nostalgic sense of isolation, she began writing about Nuneaton, thinly disguised as 'Milby' which those familiar with the place were quickly able to recognize. Later on, the source of her …