Comparative Literature Commons^™

Engaging With Shakespeare: Responses Of George Eliot And Other Women Novelists, Marianne Novy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Virginia Woolf's comment, 'Literature is no one's private ground; literature is common ground', is a reminder in this age of intertextuality that writers have always lived off one another. Shakespeare himself was no exception. Marianne Novy's interest begins, however, with response rather than replication, and especially with the reasons why women novelists are drawn to Shakespeare. Unlike Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), who portray male writers as essentially alienating to women, Novy shows how women who feel marginalized respond to Shakespeare the outsider, mourning his 'outcast state'; how women's need to …

George Eliot In South Africa, Margaret Wolfit

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 1992 I made my first visit to South Africa. I had always wanted to see for myself what life Was like there and come to my own conclusions. It was an extraordinary time to visit. Mandela had been released from goal and a referendum of the whites was announced while we were there. The scene was changing - everywhere people seemed aware of the evils of apartheid, and that things must and would change. My invitation to give readings and speak about George Eliot came directly from that first visit, I was asked to give a course at the …

Message Of Greeting From The Fellowship President, Jonathan G. Ouvry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

If every dog has its day, perhaps every novel has its year and if so this is the year of Middlemarch.

I looked forward to the television production with some misgivings, feeling that it would be impossible for the immense depth and scope of the novel to be adequately conveyed in a few hours of viewing. Adam Bede had been, I thought, entirely unsuccessful, except on a superficial level as a pretty costumed story. The profundity of Middlemarch would not benefit from such treatment. In the end, however, I felt that justice had to a large extent been done, due …

The Gladness Of The World: A Celebration Of George Eliot In Words And Music, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The Gladness of the World (the title is a quotation of the concluding words of George Eliot's religiously humanistic poem, 'O May I Join the Choir Invisible') was a wide-ranging, often moving, programme of readings of passages from George Eliot, and of music for mezzo-soprano, choir (and choir soloists), and solo instrumentalists.

The rich variety of Gabriel Woolf’s programme of readings in which he was joined by Canon Michael Sadgrove represented the extraordinary scope of the author's achievements, and succeeded both in conveying a sense of the development of her own life, and in bringing before the audience some of …

Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Gardens Nuneaton, June 27th 1993, John Tounsend

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Mr. Chainman, Mr. Mayor, Madam Mayoress, Ladies and Gentlemen, I feel particularly honoured by the invitation to address this distinguished annual gathering, not least because, nowadays at any rate, I have no pretensions to literary scholarship.

Twenty-five years ago I spent a lot of time studying 19th-century novelists. On just such an afternoon as today I sat with my contemporaries arguing the relative merits of these novelists. I have to say that even then George Eliot was not my favourite lady novelist: like any good Yorkshireman I was vociferous in my support of Emily and Charlotte Bronte. But soon after …

Review Of George Eliot: Ihr Leben, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In the epilogue to her life of George Eliot Elsemarie Maletzke pays tribute to the work of Gordon S. Haight and states that biographers who have come after him have found nothing really new to add beyond a more critical assessment of Eliot's person. The statement is true at least of this biography, which makes no claims to new findings and which follows Haight closely, often to the point of citing the same passages from letters or journals, while at the same time adopting an altogether less respectful and more critical attitude towards its subject. Where Haight reports without comment …

George Eliot To William Blackwood Iii: Two Unpublished Letters, David Finkelstein

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's business and personal relations with John Blackwood, head of the Edinburgh publishing firm William Blackwood & Sons from 1852-1879, have been well documented in Gordon Haight's detailed biographical study and his edition of her letters. On John's death in 1879, his nephew William Blackwood III took over the running of the firm, and continued maintaining close business and personal contact with George Eliot until her death on 22 December 1880. Two unpublished letters relating to the death of William' s brother George Frederick Blackwood, found in MS. 30,039 of the Blackwood files in the National Library of Scotland, …

Metaphor, Truth And The Mobile Imagination In The Mill On The Floss, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The relationship, and conflict, between brother and sister that lies at the heart of The Mill on the Floss involves not only important differences of character and gender, but also radically different modes of thought and expression. The contrast between narrow- minded Tom and large-souled Maggie is, among other things, a contrast between different forms of knowledge and different ways of using language. For Tom, with his 'conscious rectitude of purpose' and 'narrowness of imagination and intellect', 1 knowledge is unquestioning, unhesitating, and immune to doubt. No shadow of epistemological uncertainty dims the harsh light by which he sees and …

A Note On Hermione In Daniel Deronda, Derek Miller

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

After a paragraph in which the narrator sympathetically examines Rex's love for his cousin Gwendolen, the young people plan a tableau vivant at Offendene. Gwendolen rejects Rex's suggestion of himself as Achilles, with Gwendolen as Briseis, then agrees with his next idea that she should be Hermione as the statue, and he Leontes, from The Winter's Tale. During the playing of this scene, and provoked. perhaps. by the 'thunderous chord' (91)1 struck by Herr Klesmer on the piano. the panel on the wall opens to disclose what the family saw on the day of their moving in, 'the picture of …

The George Eliot Review: Journal Of The George Eliot Fellowship 1993 No. 24, Graham Handley, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Contents

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

Jonathan Ouvry: Message of Greeting from the Fellowship President............ 7

Kathleen Adams: Annual Report 1992................... 9

Graham Handley and Beryl Gray: London Branch Report 1992..................... 14

Linda Robertson: Wreath-laying at Westminster Abbey, June 20th 1992........... 16

Canon Michael Sadgrove: Wreath-laying in the George Eliot Memorial Gardens, Nuneaton, June 28th 1992.............. 20

Bernard Bergonzi: Oration for Kathleen Adams on the occasion of her Honorary Master of Arts degree award from the University of Warwick, July 16th 1992.............. 23

Ruth Harris: The Twenty-First George Eliot Memorial Lecture, October 17th 1992............. 25

The Twenty-Second George Eliot Memorial Lecture: George Eliot In The Letters Of George Henry Lewes, William Baker

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I am preparing an edition of the letters of G. H. Lewes.1 The edition is selective. It does not include those 722 G. H. Lewes items (letters, extracts from his journals and diaries) included in Gordon S. Haight's monumental The George Eliot Letters published in nine volumes by Yale University Press between 1954-55 and in 1978.2 My edition includes nearly 500 letters of which less than 50 have been previously published, making a just over 1,200 total of G. H. Lewes letters in print: a figure contrasting with upwards of 3,500 George Eliot letters in Haight's edition, less than 2,000 …

London Report 1993, Graham Handley, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is our farewell note as officers of the London Branch. We resigned in April, Michael Forrest our Secretary in March. We understand that the Fellowship Council has approved Elizabeth Gundrey's ideas for a number of events to be held in the future in the London area, and we hope that these will be well supported.

Martha Barclay To Issac Evans, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Martha Barclay (nee Jackson) was a school-fellow of George Eliot's in Coventry in the 1830's. It was Martha who initiated the choice of flower names for herself and her friend - Ivy (constancy) for herself and Clematis (mental beauty) for George Eliot. Letters from George Eliot to Martha have been published in Volume 1 of The George Eliot Letters edited by Gordon S. Haight (1954), but Martha had been pressed by John Cross to allow him to publish them in his biography. This she refused because she felt she could not trust George Eliot's widower to select satisfactorily. She planned …

Message Of Greeting From The Fellowship President, Jonathan G. Ouvry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I write my annual greeting to members of the George Eliot Fellowship surrounded by inspiring objects. To my right not one, but two bronzes, John Letts's bust of George Eliot and his statue miniature, the latter next to a beautifully bound 1863 Tauchnitz copy of Romola Vol I (what happened to Vol 11 I wonder?) inscribed 'Blanche Southwood Lewes from her mother Florence, April 1892'. I first read Romola when on holiday, but unfortunately not in Florence, and found it hard to understand why it has acquired the reputation of being George Eliot's most difficult novel.

Some Notes On George Eliot And Greek Myth, Lesley Gordon

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

These notes comment first of all upon some points in Joseph Wiesenfarth's article 'Mythic Perspectives in George Eliot's Fiction' in The George Eliot Review, 24, 1993.

One of his interpretations of an allusion to Greek myth relates to Farebrother's remark to Lydgate that:

I am not a mighty man - I shall never be a man of renown. The choice of Hercules is a pretty fable; but Prodicus makes it easy to work for the hero, as if the first resolves were enough. Another story says that he came to hold the distaff, and at least wore the Nessus shirt. …

Mythic Perspectives In George Eliot's Fiction, Joseph Wiesenfarth

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot developed a systematic sense of myth and mythmaking when she read and translated D.F. Strauss's Das Leben Jesu kritish bearbeitet into The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1846). Strauss carries on his monumental work of demythologizing the gospels by affirming that myth represents the truth of human feelings and aspirations and that these themselves are an expression of the Idea that divinity and humanity are to be united. This Hegelian theory of the place of primitive Christianity in the evolution of man's historical destiny depends for its elaboration on the conception of myth that Strauss derived from Karl …

Outside The Pale: Cultural Exclusion. Gender Difference And The Victorian Woman Writer, Elsie B. Michie

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Why does Dorothea fall apart at the sight of Rome? Elsie B. Michie's answer to this question is that the Rome scenes in Middlemarch stage a drama of female cultural exclusion. Dorothea's distressed response to the ruined 'city of visible history' represents the female spectator's confrontation with a concept of cultural 'wholeness' that implicitly excludes her. To explore this drama, and place it historically, Michie makes a series of imaginative and illuminating connections which are characteristic of her method in this book. She examines Freud's account of a parallel dream, in which he desperately wanted to go to Rome, but …

Review Of George Eliot And The Conventions Of Popular Women's Fiction: A Serious Literary Response To The "Silly Novels By Lady Novelists", Susan Rowland Tush

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

As Susan Rowland Tush notes, recent critics have given considerable attention (often rather harshly) to George Eliot's essay 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists', which was published in the Westminster Review in October 1856. Among these critics are some who argue that Eliot undermines the position of women by calling a certain class of novels 'silly'. Tush points out, quite rightly, that Eliot does not apply the term casually or universally; she is very specific about the qualities she considers silliness, and she praises Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell, and Mrs. Gaskell in the same essay. Tush reminds her readers, as does …

Oration Of Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

If William Shakespeare is the most famous writer to have come out of Warwickshire, the runner-up is undoubtedly George Eliot. Her greatest novel, Middlemarch, reflects the life of the city of Coventry in the early nineteenth century. Mrs. Kathleen Adams is herself a native of Coventry and has completed 25 years as the secretary of the George Eliot Fellowship. She attended Barr's Hill Grammar School; after leaving school she worked in the local Inland Revenue office where she met her future husband. After the birth of her two children she worked for 23 years as a school secretary at Coundon …

Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Gardens, Nuneaton, Michael Sadgrove

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I am honoured to have been asked to lay a wreath in memory of George Eliot this afternoon. And, I can truly say, I do it in grateful memory. Not many years ago I would have to have confessed that I had not yet read any of her novels. On coming to Coventry, I decided to remedy this situation. For me, whatever town or city I have lived in, its sense of place has been defined very much by its literary associations, the part it has played in the imaginations of its writers and poets. As far as Coventry is …

Westminster Abbey Wreath-Laying June 20th 1992, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot and religion is a vast subject and one that can only be lightly touched on today. But it is relevant to our being here because of the memorial stone in front of us. It took 100 years to get here and, because of the years of fund-raising by the George Eliot Fellowship as well as the many visits to the Abbey to negotiate the placing of the memorial stone in Poets' Corner in June 1980, is perhaps even more significant to us than a tomb or memorial would be that bad been erected in 1880 instead of 1980. …

George Eliot's First Family: The Bartons Of Shepperton, Michael Wolff

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

There are a lot of 'firsts' in the few months between September 1856 when Marian Evans Lewes began 'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton' and February 1857 when she adopted George Eliot as a pseudonym. The Bartons were the first of her many families. The words of the title were, according to her own recollection, the first words of her new career. She was at the time in the process of making a new, it could be argued, a 'first family', in the new life she was sharing with George Henry Lewes and his young sons. And George …

The George Eliot Review: Journal Of The George Eliot Fellowship: 1992 No. 23, Graham Handley, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Contents

Notes on Contributors.............. 4

Jonathan Ouvry: Message of Greeting from the Fellowship President................. 5

Editorial Notes........................ 6

Kathleen Adams: Annual Report 1991...................... 7

Graham Handley & Beryl Gray: London Branch Report 1991....................... 11

Joanne Shattock: Wreath-laying in the George Eliot Memorial Gardens, Nuneaton, June 16th 1991........................ 14

Bill Adams: Wreath-laying at Westminster Abbey, June 22nd 1992..................... 18

Gina Quant: The Toast to the Immortal Memory. George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 24th November 1991...................... 21

Jenny Uglow: George Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell. The Twentieth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 26th October 1991...................25

Review Of Greatness Engendered: George Eliot And Virginia Woolf, Alison Booth

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This detailed study is in the series Reading Women Writing, and it presupposes not only a familiarity with everything that George Eliot and Virginia Woolf wrote but also a comprehensive knowledge of scholarship and criticism about them. Miss Booth writes with verve and, at times, directness and wit. She tells us that 'In effect Eliot and Woolf are palace spies, consorting with patriarchal traditions to expose their flaws.' The ensuing examination is a searching one which moves from acknowledged subjectivity to informed (and consistent) perspectives. The weight of running scholarship and cross reference sometimes threatens to sink the narrative, but …

Review Of George Eliot And The Conflict Of Interpretations: A Reading Of The Novels, David Carroll

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Towards the climax of Felix Holt Esther Lyon moves centre stage. Mist around her own history and that of Transome Court dissolves to reveal a vista of possibilities. The narrator comments: 'Esther found it impossible to read in these days; her life was a book which she seemed to be constructing - trying to make character clear before her, and looking into the ways of destiny'. This lovely sentence might serve as the epigraph to David Carroll's study. A character in a novel, who is well-versed in romance narrative, finds herself an author, 'constructing' the book of her own life, …

Review Of George Eliot, Kristin Brady

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The general editors of this series, Eva Figes and Adele King, explain that there is a need for their series of feminist readings because much of the criticism on selected women writers by male critics is usually unfair, false or simplistic (vii). Kristin Brady very quickly and effectively proves their point in the first chapter of George Eliot by referring to many influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century male critics who were often more preoccupied with Eliot's appearance or what they judged to be her suspect femininity than with a straightforward consideration of her artistic achievements. Among such critics, says Brady, Gordon …

Adam Bede: Author, Narrator And Narrative, Cynthia Huggins

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Readers of novels seem to have a natural, almost instinctive, tendency to perceive the voices of the author and the omniscient narrator as being one and the same. This tendency is even stronger when the narrator is blatantly intrusive, frequently inserting his own opinions into the objective narrative material of the novel. And although there are certainly some novelists who truly intend their narrative voices to be perceived as their own, this is not the case with George Eliot in Adam Bede.

In analyzing the narrative voice in this particular novel, I was struck by the almost total agreement, on …

Bbc Television's Film Of Adam Bede, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This adaption was not for the academic, the scholar or the purist. As none of these, I admit that, with reservations, I enjoyed the film.

There were some very good things about it. The setting was very attractive (Stanway in the Cotswolds for much of the action because it is one of the least changed parts of England) and the photography superb, particularly in the Chase when the sunlight filtering through the trees made an extremely pretty picture. The fight between Arthur and Adam was well staged. lain Glen as Adam portrayed the strength and integrity of the character convincingly; …

New George Eliot Letters, William Baker

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My hunt through the archives of the world for unpublished George Henry Lewes letters for a forthcoming edition of his letters has so far thrown up over 450 unpublished letters in his hand. It would hardly be surprising if the search sometimes produced unpublished George Eliot letters and related documents. A February 1991 letter to Charles W. Mann, Chief Rare Books and Special Collections at the Pattee Library, the Pennsylvania State University Library, resulted in a rich harvest of materials. The Allison-Shelley Collection of over 10,000 books and many thousands of letters, manuscripts and drawings was bequeathed to the Pennsylvania …

Versatile Victorian; Selected Critical Writings Of George Henry Lewes, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This admirable collection, its succinct introduction indicating the range and quality of Lewes's criticism, is a feast This is the place to taste Lewes selectively. I like to think: that it is true that the best part of an author's life lies in his/her own writing, and these occasional pieces and essays reflect Lewes's vibrant and vital personality, with his unashamed expressions of delight in what he likes and the unequivocal evaluations of what he doesn't. Even when he is subjective we are aware of the play of intellect. He can be provocative, as the title of his first piece …