Comparative Literature Commons^™

Letters To The Editors - 1988

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In the 1987 Review an article was published entitled TO PRAY OR NOT TO PRAY. It was an answer from the Fellowship to those who criticised us for indulging in religious practice from time to time - something they regard as being unacceptable to George Eliot. In response to the article, a letter was received from The Venerable Michael Mansbridge, Chaplain and Archdeacon to The Gulf. Michael was a one-time President of the Fellowship during the years when he was Vicar of Chilvers Coton (‘Shepperton') and Astley (‘Knebley') Churches. Writing from Baghdad, and sending good wishes to the Fellowship, he …

Maggie's Sisters: Feminist Readings Of The Mill On The Floss, Oliver Lovesey

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The view that Eliot presented her female characters with only very limited possibilities for self-realization in either marriage or martyrdom, and that Eliot herself '1ived" but did not "write" the "revolution" is one that has dominated the feminist assessment of George Eliot. This tradition regards Eliot as an author who served unintentionally to bolster a reactionary, phallocentric ethos. Further, Eliot is suspect as she has been, particularly since F. R. Leavis gave her prominence in The Great Tradition a part of the accepted literary canon. Nevertheless, as Elaine Showalter, for example, has pointed out in "The Greening of Sister George," …

Review Of The Leavises On Fiction: An Historic Partnership, Bill Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Trying to follow the polemics of literary criticism is rather like trying to understand the progress of an aerial battle from the ground. One is aware of much noise and the incomprehensible twistings of the vapour trails of argument. However, anyone having the least interest in English literature cannot fail to have heard of the battling Leavises, or indeed, to recognise the spare features and uncompromising expressions of both spouses.

It was this vague layman's interest which led me to open Dr. Robertson's book, with the thought - how can anyone looking as pugnacious as F.R. Leavis have the delicacy …

Silas Marner: George Eliot And Mme Le Prince De Beaumont, Terence Dawson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

At the beginning of chapter 15 of Silas Marner (1861), there is a reference to a well-known fairy tale. The paragraph is as follows:

That famous ring that pricked its owner when he forgot duty and followed desire - - I wonder if it pricked very hard when he set out on the chase, or whether it pricked but lightly then, and only pierced to the quick when the chase had long been ended, and hope, folding her wings, looked backward and became regret? (Penguin ed., p. 191)

Joseph Wiesenfarth has identified the fairy tale as 'Prince Darling.' He quotes …

The George Eliot Fellowship Statement Of According For The Year Ending 31st December 1988

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

1988 P&L Statement and Balance sheet

Review Of The World's Classics Series: Felix Holt, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

If one cannot afford the splendid Clarendon Editions of George Eliot's novels. the World's Classics editions are a very good second best. They are second -best, however, only in their format, since the text of the novels is the same. For the finer quality, hardback of the Clarendon is substituted a well-produced and clear paperback with an attractive cover.

Fred C.Thomson's Introduction to Felix Holt, the Radical tells us that, despite its title, this is not a political novel as the genre is ordinarily understood. George Eliot is not telling us the story of a career politician, nor does she …

George Eliot At Southfields, Pat Bailey

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot (Marian Evans) was quite delighted with Holly Lodge, Wimbledon Park Road (now No. 31) when she and George Henry Lewes took possession of it on a seven year lease on 5th February 1&59. The four storey house with "wide horizons, well ventilated rooms and abundant water" was a welcome change for them after four years in very cramped furnished lodgings at 8 Park Shot, Richmond, where their favourite evenings of songs at the piano had been restricted because a clergy-man happened to live on the floor below. In a letter to Sara Hennell several weeks later she was …

George Eliot And Friendship The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Ina Taylor

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Before going on to my chosen subject I thought you might like to hear a little about this new biography of George Eliot. You could indeed be forgiven for saying, 'Not another biography of George Eliot'. A new study must come out most years, either in this country or in America and I would be the first to admit that the definitive biography by Gordon Haight will not be superseded for some time. So what more is there to say about the great lady?

Well, after reading Haight and others, I was struck by the fact that of George Eliot's …

Westminster Abbey Wreather Abbey Wreath-Laying, John Kane

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

We are here today to pay our respects and do homage to the memory of a great artist and an astonishing woman. Although she died over a hundred years ago, I know that to many members of the George Eliot Fellowship and to readers around the world, she is still our contemporary and to some, she is more vibrant and alive than many living authors. But what if she really were alive today? What if we were actually here not to lay a wreath but to meet the woman herself. I for one would approach the event with some ambivalence. …

A Newly Purchased Letter, T. Clifford Allbutt

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The following letter has recently been purchased by Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery and its pubIication here (as far as we are aware, for the first time) is with the Curator's kind permission. Unfortunately, no year is shown with the date, neither is the correspondent addressed in any other way than by 'My dear Sir', so it has been impossible to discover to whom it was written. All one can say is that it was penned sometime between 1890 (the date of publication of Oscar Browning's Life of George Eliot) and 1925 when Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt, the writer of …

Tea And Sprouts, Gabriel Woolf

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Does the Englishman eat and drink only to stay alive? Using evidence provided by George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Jerome K. Jerome, Lewis Carroll and the poetic ponderings of mighty and minor poets, Gabriel Woolf took a Iighthearted look into the English cornucopia, trying to determine whether it contained any more than our national beverage TEA and a vegetable he clearly does not savour himself - SPROUTS! Are the English the only people daft enough to eat sprouts, he clearly wondered - and we still don't know, for no evidence has appeared which proves them to be …

Shakespearean Allusions In 'Janet's Repentance', A.G. Van Den Broek

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This paper is part of a comprehensive survey of Shakespeare's influence on George Eliot's writing, an influence widely recognised by critics but rarely given the detailed analysis it deserves. It seems to me that, a study of this sort is needed because Shakespeare belongs to that enormous "choir" of philosophers, theologians, writers, poets, dramatists and scientists on whom Eliot drew when shaping her philosophy of life and art; a "choir" which with "mild persistence urge man's search/ To vaster issues. I offer this critique of "Janet's Repentance", therefore, as something to be compared with studies that show other influences from …

Mrs. Transome And 'Desecrated Sanctities', H.S. Kakar

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

As George Eliot's Introduction to Felix Holt would lead one to expect, the crux of the tragedy which this novel embodies is the "pity and terror" evoked by the "downfall of blindly-climbing hopes", rather than mere peripatetic - the 'discovery' of Mrs. Transome's guilty past. As always in her novels, the tragic reversal that really matters is not an external incident: it is internalised and is closely linked with moral 'recognition'. Mrs. Transome's agonised consciousness of her violated conscience, which the reader shares all through, is a prominent element in her suffering. The scene in the White Hart (Chapter 47) …

To Pray Or Not To Pray, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

No-one who has read George Eliot's novels can be unaware of her interest in the clergy as characters for her fiction - Amos Barton, Mr. Gilfil, Mr. Tryan, Mr. Irwine, Rufus Lyon - or of her knowledge of various expressions of faith - Evangelical, Methodist, Independent, through to ..Judaism in her final novel, Daniel Deronda. She writes of the clergy with a minimum of caricature, some criticism, but she is never without compassion.

Reading her letters confirms this interest as well as her Iife-Iong search for knowledge of the subject and, because her quest is so well documented, her views …

Book Review: George Eliot And Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe Of A Beginning, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a sustained investigation of the novels (Scenes of Clerical Life is virtually omitted) and the scientific climate and knowledge which inform them. It is a necessary and stimulating book, firmly anchored in 19th century scientific: theory. It underpins what we have always known but never perhaps spelled out fully, and that is the depth and width of George Eliot's scientific interests and how she integrated them into her work. Dr. Shuttleworth notes that George Eliot's knowledge of science was 'unmatched by any of her peers' and at the same time indicates the centre of her own study - …

The George Elliot Fellowship Review 1987 No.18, Kathleen Adams, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

CONTENTS 1987

President’s Message 6

Annual Report- 1986 7

Accounts- 1986 15

Treasurer’s Report- 1986 16

George Eliot Memorial Lecture- 1986: Silas Marner: Filming the Novel by Louis Marks 16

Nuneanton Wreath-laying- June 1986 24

Westminster Abbey Wreath-laying- 1986 25

Shakespearean Allusionsin ‘Janet’s Repentance by A.G. van den Broek 27

Book Reviews:

The Clarendon Edition of Middlemerch edited by David Carroll 40

George Eliot and 19^th Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning by Sally Shuttleworh 42

George Eliot by Gillian Beer 43

Poem: At the Grave of George Eliot by Amy Clampitt 46

A Hard Moral Core by …

The Manuscript Of Daniel Deronda: A Change In Sequence?, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The examination of a great writer's manuscript carries its own fascinations and frustrations, for eyes and mind are intent on discovery, with might-have-been replacing is at the blink of an eyelid. Deletions hide something of significance, single-word alterations are evidence of a change of mind (or of heart), and commonplaces are elevated by a single deft stroke or slant into transcendent maxims or inscrutable morality. Re-shaped sentences take on a greater profundity of thought, while paragraphs collated with the first printing or a later corrected one, show either the wisdom of reflection or the author's obstinacy, depending on the reader's …

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

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Having very much enjoyed my three year spell as President of the Fellowship I was delighted and honoured to hear from Kathleen Adams that I had been re-elected. She allayed my suspicion that this was simply to avoid the expense of reprinting the letterheading, pointing out that Ann Reader had retired from the Treasurership so that change. was, in any event, inevitable. I would like to add my personal thanks to Ann for all her tireless work in keeping the Fellowship on a sound financial basis over a very long period, and at the same time wish her successor a …

Book Review: The Clarendon Edition Of Middlemarch, Kathleen Porter

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

We welcome the Clarendon edition of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which is generally considered to be her greatest novel. It took her about three years to write, and it seems to have caused a good deal of trouble to all concerned.

David Carroll's splendid Introduction, although not intended to be biographical, offers the reader a glimpse of the working life of the Leweses. As the Editor tells us, George Eliot left no detailed account of the 'germ' of Middlemarch, but her letters to John Blackwood gave hints that an 'English novel' was in her mind as early as 1867. Then, after …

"Listening" A Poem Inspired By Middlemarch, M.A. Valk

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

LISTENING

Listening to silence

on its other side

hearing the grass grow

the beat of a bird's heart

the fall of a star

Shall 1 die of the roar

waiting for silence

to break - like glass?

Book Review: George Eliot, Kathleen Adams, Jennifer Uglow

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

When I first heard that Virago were to pubIish a book about George Eliot (the author sought my help in locating certain photographs) I was a Iittle apprehensive. I feared that this might be a militant feminist view of a lady who concerned herself deeply about the 'Woman Question' but who did not align herself with the growing Victorian feminist movement. But a first reading allayed my fears, for Jennifer Uglow treats her subject with sympathy and understanding and does not try to prove that George Eliot was an active feminist when she was not.

The book opens with a …

The Sixteenth George Eliot Memorial Lecture- 1987, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Although from its first chapter the novel evolves towards the crises of Maggie's brief maturity, my focus here is on the two final Books of The Mill on the Floss. Book VI is called "The Great Temptation"; Book VII is called ''The Final Rescue". Taken together, these two Books can be read as an allegory of moral struggle and redemption.

The temptation itself is located in Paradise. Indeed, the first chapter of Book VI - ''The Great Temptation" - is entitled" A Duet in Paradise". In conjunction, the key titular words - "Temptation" and "Paradise" - conjure the Temptation in …

George Eliot's Wesleyan Madonna, Elsie B. Homes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's "favorite painting in all the world" was Raphael's "Sistine Madonna”, which she and George Henry Lewes first viewed at Dresden when she was writing Adam Bede. In her journal, she recorded that on her first sight of the painting she sat down briefly, but then "a sort of awe, as if I were suddenly in the presence of some glorious being, made my heart swell too much for me to remain comfortably, and we hurried out of the room" (Haight 264). Each day as they came to the gallery, they would return last to what Lewes termed “this …

Annual Report 1987

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Before I began this, my 20th. annual Report, 1 looked back to my first and found, to my amusement, that it was a mere half quarto page! During that year we had visited the Amold Bennett Country, seen the play of 'Wutherlng Heights', and our Guest of Honour at the Dinner was the writer, Richard Church, a kinsman of George Eliot. Our total membership was 60.

1987 was inevitably a quieter year than 1986 - can it really be more than two years since we unveiled the Statue? At the AGM in March it seemed almost inevitable that we should …

A Hard Moral Core, Vic Hopkins

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The novelist C. P. Snow, reviewing a book on George Eliot by Robert Speaight (1954), seeking an answer to his own question: “Which of the Victorian novelists means much to the younger writers today?", after rejecting most of them, finally selected George Eliot, who, in her time, he explained

"received a complete esteem not given to any other English novelist, and who afterwards became regarded as a faintly comic monument.”

I paused over the statement, puzzled and fearing worse might follow, but mercifully the writer of it, buoyed perhaps by the thought II serious art needs a hard moral core", …

The George Eliot Fellowship Treasurer's Report- 1986

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

You will see from the Statement, which I hope is straightforward, that the finances of the Fellowship are in a satisfactory condition. In 1986 one of our High Income Bonds matured and was reinvested, together with £250 from the Snare Account, in a Capital Share 90 Account. This gives us a better rate of interest on our investment.

Profits on meetings, outing and sales are very encouraging. We prefer to raise money by our efforts rather than have to increase subscriptions and 1986 was a good year, with the result that subscriptions for this year remain the same as in …

George Eliot And Theatre: The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 1838, at the age of 18, Mary Ann Evans was deep in her evangelical period, taking everything very, very seriously. On a visit to London with her brother Isaac she refused to accompany him to the theatre, preferring instead to stay home and read History of the Jews. Not quite theatre, but she went to S1. Michaelis Church in Coventry with Miss Rebecca Franklin, her teacher at the Coventry school, to hear Haydn's Creat'ion, Handel's Jephtha and a new oratorio by Mendelssohn entitled Paul (all in one concert) and she wrote to her old school-friend, Martha Jackson, "nothing can …

Address At Westminster Abbey Wreath-Laying

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

ROSEMARY MARTIN was our Guest of Honour. She had been invited because of her very sympathetic portrayal of Dolly Winthrop in the BBC Television film of 'Silas Marner' - a much loved character with a special place in George Eliot's novel.

After she had placed the Fellowship chaplet of laurel and white carnations on the Memorial Stone which had been unveiled exactly six years earlier by Gordon S. Haight, Miss Martin admitted that, prior to the invitation to play Dolly Winthrop in the film, she had read no George Eliot. She was interested in the part and then read 'Silas …

Speech At The Nuneaton Wreath-Laying, Len Struebig

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Almost twenty years ago, for the first time, I joined the small group of admirers who annually pay tribute to the memory of Nuneaton's famous daughter.

It is perhaps fitting that my last public duty, albeit as ex-Curator, should be connected with George Eliot. Over the years I have listened with interest to the various speakers, each with their own particular reason for being honoured with the responsibility for laying the Fellowship tribute.

I have heard Lewes and Evans descendants recount family memories handed down with pride. Last year we heard John Letts tell us of the close bond which …

Treasurer's Report 1985

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

You wiII see from the Statement that our finances are healthy despite high expenses last year. The loss of almost £94 on the Annual Readings was both unexpected and disappointing. For years we have benefited financially from Gabriel Woolf's Readings and we welcome his wiIIingness to come again this year, when we hope to be able to show our appreciation of his continued support. We are fortunate to have many generous members, whose help has been invaluable. We had a bequest of £ 100 from the late Mrs. Reeve and donations of £260. 67p.

Dr. Ezell continues, at his own …