Comparative Literature Commons^™

The Clerical Character In George Eliot's Fiction, Oliver Lovesey

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Writing to Blackwood in November 1856 to introduce Scenes of Clerical Life, G.H. Lewes promised,

tales and sketches illustrative of the actual life of our country clergy about a quarter of a century ago; but solely in its 'human' and 'not at all' in its 'theological' aspect; the object being to do what has never yet been done in our Literature, for we have abundant religious stories polemical and doctrinal, but since the Vicar and Miss Austen, no stories representing the clergy like any other class with the humours, sorrows, and troubles of other men.

Oliver Lovesey's new study is …

Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Gardens, Nuneaton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

We are here this morning to remember a great English novelist, and one of the most formidable intellectuals of her day. It is appropriate that we should do so in Nuneaton, close to South Farm, Arbury, where Mary Ann Evans was born, and also close to Griff, where she grew up. It is right, too, that I should say Mary Ann Evans, for this was her birthplace; the birth of 'George Eliot' took place elsewhere.

But why, it might be asked, should we honour a writer at her place of birth when her adult life, and more importantly, her entire …

George Eliot Fellowship Annual General Meeting- Treasurer's Report

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

From a financial point of view 1990 was an uneventful year with no major items of expenditure. Income from subscriptions showed a small increase over 1989 whereas that from donations was considerably less. This is because, you will recall, in 1989 we made a special appeal to Life Members to which they responded magnificently leading to an exceptionally large "Donation" income in that year.

Of our functions, the Gabriel Woolf readings once again showed an increase in profit but unfortunately the Diamond Jubilee Evening showed a loss. Souvenir Sales gave a healthy profit with the mini-statue of George Eliot and …

The George Eliot Fellowship Review 1991 No. 22, Kathleen Adams, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Contributions are invited for the 1992 issue. They may be on any subject relating to George Eliot's work, life, family or friends. They should be up to 1500 words in length and it is preferred that footnotes are used only sparingly. Contributions must be typed (double spacing) and should reach the Editors not later than February 28th 1992. Editor's address for 1992 issue: Dr. Graham Handley, Glasgow Stud Farmhouse, Crews Hill, Enfield, Middlesex.

The Editors do not necessarily agree with the views expressed by contributors, nor does the George Eliot Fellowship accept responsibility for such views. No part of the …

Review Of The Presence Of The Present: Topics Of The Day In The Victorian Novel, Richard D. Altick

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Richard D. Altick, Regents' Professor Emeritus of English at The Ohio State University, is well known for such books as Victorian People and Ideas. His latest work draws from 150 novels to develop connections between people, objects, events, and issues mentioned in fiction and their real life originals in the Victorian period. The generous selection of sources includes not only the best remembered novelists but also such writers as Susan Ferrier, John Galt, Samuel Warren, and Charlotte Yonge. All of Eliot's novels except, of course, Romola, are included.

The material is organized into twenty thematic chapters, ranging from popular entertainments …

The Nineteenth George Eliot Memorial Lecture- 1990, Roemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In July 1990 I finished writing a biography of G.H. Lewes, which will be published by Oxford University Press in September 1991. There could be no better subject to have than Lewes (1817-1878). He is, of course, best remembered as the faithful companion, the husband in fact if not in law, of Marian Evans, the man without whose energy and support she might not have found the courage to become George Eliot. If he had nothing more than this to recommend him, he would still be worthy of our attention. But Lewes has a great deal more than this to …

London Branch Report 1990

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The London Branch held a George Eliot Supper Evening at S1. Philip's, Earls Court Road, W.8. in celebration of her 171st birthday on 22nd November. Sunday 18th was chosen, and the whole occasion was finely organised by Michael and Suzanne Forrest. The principle guest was the actor Robin Bailey. Some 50 or so guests were wined, dined and entertained by two young musicians, the pianist Roger Owens and the harpist Susannah Bale. It was good to see the parent organisation represented by Bill and Kathleen Adams.

Obituary: Edith Lenton- Vice President Of The George Eliot Fellowship

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Edith Lenton, who has died at the age of 81, was a Vice President of the Fellowship, a former treasurer and a very active and loyal member for nearly thirty years. Born in Nuneaton, the only child of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Starkey, she had an early contact with George Eliot the novelist as she took part as a child in the centenary celebrations in 1919 of Nuneaton's famous daughter. These celebrations were organised by Nuneaton Borough Council and the principal participants were the schoolchildren of the town who gave their performances, consisting of dancing, singing, tableaux vivant and sketches, …

Review Of Approaches To Teaching Eliot's 'Midddlemarch', Kathleen Blake

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The editor quotes Gilbert Highet, who wrote 'Bad teaching wastes a great deal of effort, and spoils many lives which might have been full of energy and happiness'. Salutary words indeed, but what about those people who seem to have thought too much about it (Highet suggests that bad teaching results from not thinking enough about it) and too self-consciously at that? This book is a curious mixture of interesting and practical ideas on the one hand and inflated intellectual selfindulgence on the other. Kathleen Blake's introduction summarises the main concerns of the book and its trends. Here is an …

Phonetic Key To The Non-Standard Othography In The Novels Of George Eliot, Maira F. Garcia-Bermejo Giner

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Any writer attempting to represent graphically variant pronunciations is faced with the double problem of being accurate as regards the pronunciation he has in mind and of choosing a spelling easily identifiable with the standard word. As a rule, he will keep most of the normal spelling and alter only the orthography of the syllable pronounced in a different way. The results of this operation should enable the reader to interpret the variant spelling quickly and, at the same time, give him a good idea about how that word sounds in dialect speech. It is not always easy to interpret …

The Twentieth George Eliot Memorial Lecture: George Eliot And Elizabeth Gaskell, Jenny Uglow

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The title suggested for this talk was 'two literary ladies' - they were certainly literary, but at various times their contemporaries would have denied that either of them were ladies. George Eliot was 'the strong minded woman' in Carlyle's words, who ran off with G.H. Lewes. Mrs. Gaskell was the author of Ruth, burned by two members of her husband's Unitarian congregation at Cross Street Chapel, Manchester because its heroine was a fallen woman. And if George Eliot was strong minded, so was Mrs. G. Her stubbornness drove Dickens, for example, to distraction: 'Oh, Mrs. Gaskell, fearful, fearful! If I …

The Painful Challenge Of George Eliot's Epigraph, Mary Carroll

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Through her altruistic epigraph to a painful story, George Eliot suggests that the journey to greater human fellowship often requires a passage through suffering. In The Lifted Veil, Eliot explores the form of pain that shackles sado-masochistic relationships, and the roots of that pain - buried in the misperception that punishment is deserved. This paper will explore Latimer' s attempt to change by moving through his masochistic stance into the sadism which has bound him.

The masochistic need for the sadist is captured by Eliot when she has Latimer moan:

While the heart beats, bruise it - it is your …

Songs Of The Spanish Gypsy, Bill Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

One day in May 1873 a curious letter was delivered to the Lewes's London home. Couched in the most formal terms, it read:

Mr. C.V. Stanford presents his compliments to "George Eliot" and hopes he may be excused for troubling him (sic) with the following request. He has lately finished writing music to three songs from "The Spanish Gypsy", namely "Bright Fedalma", "Spring comes hither", and "Came a pretty maid", and hopes eventually to complete the music to the whole subject. He trusts that it may not be thought too much if he asks for permission to publish the songs …

Review Of George Eliot, Ian Sutton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is the first of a series which will 'take full account of contemporary literary theory, providing collections of key modern readings of major authors.... Among the critical positions represented are British poststructuralism, deconstruction, feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism and new historicism'.

Do not despair, however. Things are not quite as bad as they sound. Most of the essays here can be understood with a bit of effort and most of those are worth the effort. They have been carefully chosen not only to include the main schools of criticism but also to cover the whole range of George Eliot's work, and …

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

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This year I write my annual greeting to the Fellowship between two very special occasions. Last June we celebrated in Westminster Abbey the Tenth Anniversary of the unveiling of the Memorial Stone. The occasion was made particularly memorable by the participation of Dean Edward Carpenter (now retired) who had taken such an active and positive part in the original installation of the stone. As on past occasions he gave a fascinating, scholarly and apparently quite spontaneous gem of a talk, for which we were and are most grateful.

The second special occasion, to which I am looking forward with what …

Technology And Development: Opposition To The Railway In Middlemarch, Paul H. Lorenz

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In Book 6 (chapter 56) of Middlemarch, George Eliot presents a scene in which the citizens of the hamlet of Frick set upon a group of railway surveyors, "the enemies of mankind”, with hayforks. The surveyors escape with their lives only through the intervention of Caleb Garth and Fred Vincy. This incident allows Eliot to discuss the attitudes of the working classes towards the technological developments of the Industrial Revolution and to contrast these attitudes with those of the middle class. While middle class women "regarded travelling by steam as presumptuous and dangerous", the local landowners, who had the vote …

Westminster Abbey Wreath-Laying, Bill Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It seems incredible that it is now eleven years since the very exciting and moving day in June 1980 when a great congregation of some seven hundred people witnessed the consecration of this memorial to George Eliot. In the years before, the Fellowship Council had to make some momentous decisions. Among the most important was the choice of an inscription for the stone - words which would be on view here in the Abbey to millions of visitors for perhaps hundreds of years into the future. We needed to find a phrase which came as close as possible to an …

Obituary: Ann Robson- Curator Of Nuneaton Museum And Art Gallery, Ann Robson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Ann Robson had just passed her 32nd birthday when she died a few days before Christmas 1990. She was born in South Shields in October 1958. She learned to play the piano and was particularly fond of the Christmas carol' Away in a Manager'. The singing of this carol at her memorial service at the end of December was, therefore, particularly poignant. She had a passion for horses, as did so many girls of her generation, and this interest remained with her into her adult life. She was educated at Doncaster Grammar School and in 1977 went to Durham University …

Review Of George Eliot's Selected Essays, Poems And Other Writings, Graham Handley, A.S. Byatt

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 1963 Thomas Pinney published his edition of The Essays of George Eliot, a meticulous, scholarly and conservative selection. It was a major contribution to George Eliot studies, coming as it did in the wake of her rediscovery, more properly re-evaluation, through F.R. Leavis, Joan Bennett, Barbara Hardy, W.J. Harvey and others. Gordon Haight had discovered her for himself in the 1930' s, and devoted the rest of his life to editing her letters, writing her biography, encouraging scholars and critics and initiating the Clarendon edition of her works. Pinney is in the immediate Haight tradition, clear, concise, admirably relevant: …

George Eliot And Greek Tragedy, P.E. Easterling

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A quotation from Romola in S. H. Butcher's essay on Sophoc1es (1891) first led me to George Eliot as a reader of Greek tragedy:

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our will: nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never; they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness. (Ch. 16)

The intensity of the language used here matches that of the Aeschylean contexts that must have been Eliot's ultimate model;2 it implies a close imaginative contact which can perhaps help to enrich our own reading of …

Annual Report, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

An uneventful Annual General Meeting in March began our year and was followed by a much more stimulating AGM of the Alliance of Literary Societies in Birmingham on April 20th, when a party from the Fellowship attended and had the pleasure of meeting members of other literary societies with whom we could exchange ideas. The Alliance President, Gabriel Woolf, addressed the meeting and spoke with feeling about the need to educate our young people in the literature of the past - a sentiment echoed a few days later by the Prince of Wales.

On April 26th we attended the official …

Review Of George Eliot's Midlands: Passion In Exile, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Various biographies and critical studies argue that Mary Ann or Marian Evans's formative years in the Midlands influenced George Eliot's art. They do so by explaining that memories of Robert Evans contributed to George Eliot's conceptions of Adam Bede and Caleb Garth, that Cheverel Manor is Arbury Hall, that Amos Barton is largely based on the Rev. John Gwyther, the curate of Chilvers Coton whom Mary Ann knew as a child, that a good deal of autobiographical material went into the creation of Maggie Tulliver, and so on.

Is there a need, then, for Graham Handley's George Eliot's Midlands when …

Review Of G.H. Lewes: A Life, Beryl Gray, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

For a very long time, George Henry Lewes's reputation has centred on the fact that, for the last 25 years of his life, he was George Eliot's partner. Not a vast number of people have cared to know very much about him beyond an idea, perhaps, that he was a rather freewheeling journalist who produced a Life of Goethe, and that he was free-thinking and - at least until he took up with George Eliot - somewhat free-living. It is gratifying, therefore, that this highly intelligent, quick and versatile, immensely fair-minded man who loved science as much as he loved …

Audio Cassette Review, Ruth Harris, Gabriel Woolf

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Gabriel WooIf' s second cassette of readings from George Eliot begins and ends with her poetry. However we assess the value of her poems, there can be no doubt that they raise issues that were fundamental to her. Nor can there be any doubt that the poetry is illuminated for us by the voice of the reader. His tenderly nostalgic interpretation of the Brother and Sister sequence is enlivened by glints of humour as George Eliot describes her devoted dependence on her "little man / Of forty inches", or reveals her excitement when she catches the' 'silver perch" - her …

Review Of George Eliot (Marian Evans): A Literary Life, Kerry Mcsweeney

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Many publishers run series of 'introductions' to English literature - handy roll-calls of the canon, beginning with Chaucer and ending with Virginia Woolf or thereabouts - and inevitably George Eliot has to be there. One is, of course, glad for the small army of academics for whom gainful employment is thus provided, but the question naturally arises whether so many books covering the same ground serve any useful purpose.

In Professor McSweeney's case the answer is yes. His book is rewarding because he is sufficiently master of his subject to make it his own. He forms his own judgements, chooses …

Review Of The Mill On The Floss, Michelene Wandor

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In the radio dramatization of a novel, it is left to the actors to persuade us that they are the individuals whose roles they undertake, but it remains the responsibility of the scriptwriter to select and organize those roles with respect for the overall vision of the originating artist. How well, then, did Radio Four's recent five-episode dramatization of The Mill on the Floss serve George Eliot?

It is axiomatic that, without Maggie Tulliver, there would be no Mill on the Floss; but, in this most autobiographical of George Eliot's novels, it is not Maggie who is omnipresent, but the …

Annual Report 1990

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The year opened, as it always does, with the least exciting event - the Annual General Meeting. All four officers were re-elected and we also re-elected for a further three year term our supportive and generous President Jonathan Ouvry.

The next event was much more exciting. In April Gabriel Woolf made his 21st annual visit to Warwickshire to present the ever popular programme of Readings from the novels. 'Enter the Aunts' proved to be one of the most popular he has ever done, and his own sense of humour and sensitivity of selection made the most of those wonderful aunts, …

Review Of Meriden: Its People And Houses Part 1, Doreen M.K. Agutter

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This publication, said to be 'the first book ever written about Meriden', has come to our attention because of 'The George Eliot Connection' and because it was researched and written by a member of the George Eliot Fellowship. The historical research, dating back to the Middle Ages, is very thorough, and there are numerous photographs, plans and maps. The prose is somewhat breathless, as if copious notes have been written up with great rapidity, and this impairs its clarity. There are some errors in proof: the Clarkes, not the Evanses, must have been living at The Cottage in 1850. The …

Sonnet For George Eliot, Ralph E. Avery

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Great George, when she was youthful Mary Ann,

Strove faithfully to read the mind of God.

At length she sought Him in the soul of Man,

As Trinity’s sweet garden path she trod.

And so with strong, diffusive, voice she sings

The need for each to love his fellow man.

To us her caring soul great comfort brings,

And urges us to do the best we can

To buoy the sinking heart, assuage the wound.

Her passionate art transcends the written word;

True, lasting immortality she’s found;

Sweet echoes of her love can still be heard.

So has she joined …

George Eliot Birthday Lucheon: The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Ted Veasey

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

As a local historian I have been thinking to what extent did George Eliot portray Nuneaton - more especially in her most local book Scenes o/Clerical Life - and how good a historian was she in this work.

Essential dates, first of all. George Eliot was born in 1819 and wrote Scenes in 1857- 58. She sets the events of Amos Barton and J and s Repentance some 25 years before the date of writing; that is roughly 1830 when she was a young girl of some eleven years of age. Mr. Gilfil' s Love Story starts in 1820 but …