Comparative Literature Commons^™

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 …

'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 …

Crossing Boundaries: Land And Sea In Jane Austen's 'Persuasion', Laura Vorachek

English Faculty Publications

Jane Austen suggests in Persuasion the pressures that the increased mobility of the middle class placed on the established aristocratic society in her time. Anne Elliot especially brings to light the inherited assumptions of her society. She can marry within her social rank (Mr. Elliot or Charles Musgrove) or marry below her (Wentworth at age 23), but either is a choice within the limits established by her society. One owns land or one does not. But when Wentworth returns a man of name and wealth, he is not a member of the landed gentry nor is he below Anne in …

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 …