Comparative Literature Commons^™

Book Review: Forms Of Feeling In Victorian Fiction, Kathleen Porter, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The art of representing feeling within a fictional character, and of eliciting response from the reader, was well understood by the great Victorian novelists. Their methods were so successful that the characters they created and the emotional experiences they described affect today's readers as powerfully as the readers of their own time.

In this study, Professor Barbara Hardy examines the forms and languages used by various authors to represent feeling, to analyse it, and to manipulate readers' responses. She begins by considering the techniques of some earlier writers from which developed the more 'realistic' Victorian forms of fiction. She chooses …

Dani El Deronda : George Eliot's "Negro Novel", John Stott

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Daniel Deronda, G.H. Lewes once rather ingenuously explained, was "all about English ladies and gentlemen with the scene laid in Wiltshire" (Letters 6:136)² ... and although the novel is evidently "about" far more than that, Lewes' words are a useful reminder that Deronda gains his entree to the world of the novel as a gentleman, the ward of Sir Hugo Mallinger, and not as a political figure: a believer in a Palestinian homeland for the Jews. I t is necessary for the novel that he believe in something, of course; as R. T. Jones has commented, "In order to …

The Quality Of Humour In 'Brother Jacob', Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'Brother Jacob' was written in 1860. but not published until 1864. some months after Romola had completed its run in the Cornhill Magazine. At first sight it appears to be an undistinguished piece of work. with the omniscient author well in evidence. The opening is heavy-handed, a deliberate and sententious humour being levelled at the reader:

Among the many fatalities attending the bloom of young desire. that of blindly taking to the confectionery line has not. perhaps, been sufficiently considered.

Fortunately, this is prelude to a fascinating story which has a comparable psychological insight to that shown in 'The Lifted …

On Location With 'Silas Marner', Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

If you have ever regarded the life of an actor to be a glamorous one, it would have been something of an eye-opener to have visited the location of the BBC Television film of 'Silas Marner' on a cold March day. The day had followed one of almost continuous rain, and I have never seen such mud, nor so much of it. The setting was in the Cotswolds, chosen because this area remains one of the last almost totally unspoilt regions in England. The production team, eager to be as authentic as possible, had travelled the length and breadth of …

Ignorance And Power: George Eliot's Attack On Professional Incompetence, Linda K. Robertson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Throughout both her essays and her fiction, George Eliot shows little patience with ignorance. in the epigraph to chapter 21 of Daniel Deronda she states, "It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance?" (bk. 1) The failure of an individual to fulfill his role in society with a reasonable level of competence because of inadequate knowledge or an inability to apply information properly is a matter for concern. Beginning with her earliest fiction, Eliot uses characterisation and plot to demonstrate her contempt for a wide spectrum of …

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

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The first year of my presidency of the George Eliot Fellowship has now safely passed, and how quickly it went! I have much enjoyed it, and though, for reasons of distance and available time, I have missed many of the most interesting functions with which the newsletter has tempted me from time to time, I have attended, with my wife Marjorie, the annual wreath-laying ceremony at Westminster Abbey which was a great pleasure as always, and the Birthday Luncheon in November which we very much enjoyed.

We were particularly sorry to miss performances on behalf of the Fellowship by Margaret …

Book Review: Frederic Harrison: The Vocations Of A Positivist, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This book, the result of more than half a lifetime's research, provides a much-needed insight into the nature of English Positivism and one of its leading disciples, Frederic Harrison. I t opens excitingly with the twenty-three-year-old Harrison meeting the ageing but wonderfully fluent Auguste Comte, and being so mesmerised that the interview changed the course of his life and gave him his major 'vocation', the spreading of the Positivist gospel. It is a fascinating story, not so much for the positivism but because of the sheer variety of the man and his interests and indestructible energy. Martha Vogeler's great merit …

Book Review: Selections From George Eliot's Letters, Leon Drucker

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a most welcome and meticulous distillation of Dr. Haight's The George Eliot Letters in nine volumes, which in this age of the video cassette will be inaccessible even in many good reference libraries. My only reservation about the editing of this very readable book of some 650 letters in 560 pages is that the letters themselves are not numbered. I certainly commend the informative headnotes above each letter, though sometimes the longer the letter, the briefer the note, which proves that Dr. Haight is never one to obtrude between himself and his heroine.

The first sentence of the …

Toast For The 1985 George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In proposing this toast I thought I would like to look briefly at George Eliot's real children, and before anyone, sensing an even bigger mid-Victorian scandal than she created by Iiving with George Henry Lewes, asks 'Did she have any?', let me define what I mean by 'real'. I do not mean G. H. Lewes's boys, though she was a devoted mother to them in the best sense of the word, writing to them, being caring and concerned at all times, nursing one in his young manhood dedicatedly until his premature death. I do not mean Elma Stuart, whom George …

The George Eliot Fellowship Review, Kathleen Adams, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Cover Design By William Adams M.A.

The Editors do not necessarily agree with the views expressed by contributors, nor does the George Eliot Fellowship accept responsibility for such views.

THE REVIEW is produced photographically by TOPSHOP, a training organization for the young unemployed in Coventry.

No part of the REVIEW may be reproduced without the permission of the Editors.

Contributions are invited for the 1986 issue. They may be on any subject relating to George Eliot’s work, life, family or friends. They should be of up to 1,500 words in length, and it is preferred that footnotes are used only …

Book Review: The Clarendon Edition Of The Novels Of George Eliot (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984), Richard Freadman

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In writing Daniel Deronda George Eliot hoped 'to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs' . Typically, her aspiration was suffused with doubt. She wished the novel to be seen as an integrated work of art but worried about its aesthetic reception; and she feared that the' Jewish element' would elicit an unenthusiastic response. On both counts her apprehensiveness has been proven prophetic. Daniel Deronda remains one of the most controversial of the great English novels, its extraordinary fusion …

George Eliot Country, Amy Clampitt

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

From this Midland scene - glum slag heaps, barge canals, gray sheep, the vivid overlap of wheat field and mustard hillside like out-of-season sunshine, the crabbed silhouette of oak trees (each joint a knot, each knot a principled demurral: tough, arthritic, stubborn as the character of her own father) - fame, the accretion of a Pyrrhic happiness, had exiled her to London, with its carriages and calling cards, its screaming headaches.

Griff House- dear old Griff, she wistfully apostrophized it - in those days still intact, its secrets kept, has now been grafted to a motel-cum-parking-lot beside the trunk road, …

John Letts, The Gifted Warwickshire Re Sculptor., John Letts

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Some four years have elapsed since my first brief encounter with Mary Ann Evans - or 'Ann' as I had called her at that time. I t had been a strange, emotional experience with moments of deep passion and quiet companionship. But, it was not to last. The affair ended as it began, with a suddenness that was, in itself, an awakening. One does not easily get over such an experience except, perhaps, by the passing of time. And time had passed.

It was a surprise, therefore. when I discovered that a few of her close 'friends', knowing of our …

Annual Report - 1984

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

1984 was an exciting year because of the challenge of the George Eliot Statue. Since 1980 the Fellowship Council had felt we were a little in the doldrums. After the interesting years leading up to the centenary of George Eliot's death, and the thrill of finally unveiling the Westminster Abbey Memorial Stone, everything seemed very flat. With no more big anniversaries until 2019, we might be forgiven for feeling that there was nothing much to do. But then, when the centre of Nuneaton was being pedestrianised with its attractive Victorian theme, and the Borough Council suggested making a site available …

Middlemarch : Three Italian Journeys, Henry M. Alley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In Middlemarch, Dorothea’s intense moment of disillusionment in Rome has been generally traced to Eliot’s own Italian journey of 1860, when, as Gordon S. Haight notes (324),¹ the disappointment in many sights of the Eternal City paralleled her heroine’s. The comparisons are very compelling, especially those involving the joined responses of author and heroine to the interior landscape of St. Paul’s (“the lovely marble… was half-covered with hideous red drapery (Life 132: vol. 2, ch. 10);² "the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere (was) like a disease of the retina" (226; ch. 20)). …

The Immortal Memory Of George Eliot, Jonathan Ouvry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Having been aware, for some time, that I was about to undergo what I thought would be an ordeal, but which I realise may even turn out to be an enjoyable experience, I have been looking out for ways and means of getting through my allotted time without too much difficulty. I was delighted, therefore, to observe a distinguished visitor to the Huguenot Society at a recent meeting. Evidently an experienced academic, he knew just what to do. I n the first place his lecture was written out on a great many small sheets of paper. At the end of …

Westminster Abbey Wreath-Laying, Steve Race

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It was George Eliot's Parson Gilfil who "smoked very long pipes, and preached very short sermons". Anyone speaking on this occasion (whether clergyman or layman) should remember Parson Gilfil, and preach a very short sermon!

But standing here, and looking around this little group of memorials. George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Tennyson, Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, John Masefield ... one can't help thinking how happily they must have greeted one another's arrival in this poetic Pantheon. ("Have you heard, Tom? George Eliot's joining us! "). One also reflects on how long all these now-silent literary lions …

The George Eliot Fellowship- 19, D.E. Beamish, A. Reader, Graham Handley, Edith Lenton, Margaret Wolfit, Gabreil Woolf

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

When I wrote the last newsletter we had not then had Gabriel Woolf’s prgramme of readings entitled “The Warwichshire Pen”. It was, as always, immensely successful- in its ccontent, its performance (see the Review, p. 50) and also financially. That we make a profit at all is entirely due to the great generosity of those members who sponsor the two performance each year. Without these good friends we would certainly not be able to play at the University of Warwick Arts Centre and we are so grateful for their help and support. “The Warwichshire Pen” is to be repeated in …

The Female Image In The Caldecott Medal Award Books, Patricia Lee Brighton Roberts

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

PROBLEM: Millions of children read and view the Caldecott Winners each year There are no published studies regarding the possible stereo-typing of the role of the human, animal and inanimate female image in the texts and illustrations of these 37 books.

Purpose: The. investigation ·was conducted to determine the extent the total population of the Caldecott books did stereo-type the role of the human, animal and inanimate female image.

Procedures: The investigation was completed in four steps: (1) First, a panel of sociologists determined the content validity of the definitions used in the hypothesis; (2) Second, a Content Analysis Form …

Nuneaton Wreath-Laying, F.H.M. Fitzory Newdegate

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I am delighted to be here this afternoon to lay the annual wreath at this ceremony, which was for so long and so happily associated with my mother. As a child I was not over-encouraged to reason the works of George Eliot, but I did, so to speak, grow up with her as part of the story of Arbury and the surrounding countryside, which she loved so much and which so greatly influenced her earlier works. It is not always easy to see someone who is part of one’s own background as a world figure, a universal spirit whose works …

Sixty Literary Years: The Foundation Of The George Eliot Fellowship, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

When the George Eliot Fellowship was born sixty years ago, the infant had emerged after a labour of some 25 years. A.F. Cross, its founder, had been editor of Nuneaton newspapers since 1895. For much of that time he had been campaigning for a memorial to George Eliot in her native town, but had met with apathy at every turn. For two weeks during the summer of 1930, Mr. Cross handed over the Editorial chair of the Nuneaton Chronicle to a Cambridge undergraduate, to give the young man an opportunity to gain an inside knowledge of newspaper production. His young …

"George Eliot" Highgate Cemetery, Edwin J. Milliken

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

LARGE woman soul, sure of unfading bays,

It little boots o'er thy too early tomb

To puff our little breaths of passing praise -

Dead in the deepest of Midwinter's gloom,

Ere thine own Autumn's mellow fruitage failed!

We mourn a Larger Light, eclipsed too soon

By the all-darkening Shadow; we who hailed

Its rise, its rounding to the plenilune

Of finished force and chastened grace, lament

The passing of a Power.Thou perchance

Bearest it all unstained, as still unspent,

To spheres unclogged by earthy circumstance.

So be it! Not among the tricksy mimes

Who glitter out a glowworm's hour …

The Diary Of Lady Lindsay

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Priory, my first since the death of Mr. Lewes. I found everything but little changed; the hostess, looking paler and more worn, perhaps, and wearing a black and white cap, received me in her accustomed corner; the room was the same, a few visitors sat in the old places; I missed George Lewes and his cheery voice. Mr. Tennyson came in; I had never made his acquaintance before; I had a long talk with him, which pleased me much. He was full of the fact that Ruskin abused him for saying that a crushed daisy blushes red, i.e. that it …