Comparative Literature Commons^™

Comic George Eliot, George Scott Christian

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's famous digression on the nature of literary realism in chapter 17 of Adam Bede has long been understood as a kind of aesthetic manifesto for the Victorian novel. Much has been written on Eliot's insistence that a faithful narrative representation of reality must take account of low and middle life, much as Dutch genre painting seeks to imitate quotidian life in all its prosaic detail. What has attracted virtually no attention in discussions of Eliot's ideas on realism, however, is the central importance of comic theory to her realist aesthetic.' Indeed, Eliot's comic theory deeply informs and shapes …

Behind The Veil? Catharine Sedgwick And Anonymous Publication, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The idea that women in past centuries withheld their names because they experienced their own authorship as shameful or scandalous has achieved the character of received wisdom. Ask a typical lower-level undergraduate what she knows about women's authorship in the United States during the years of Sedgwick's greatest productivity (the 1820s through the 1840s), and she will tell you: "It wasn't considered respectable for women to write back then, so they didn't give their names, or they took male pseudonyms." I argue instead that Sedgwick's anonymity was a market strategy for constructing an authorial persona rather than an absence of …

Review Of Theology In The Fiction Of George Eliot; The Silent Revolution And The Making Of Victorian England, Peter C. Hodgson, Hebert Schlossberg

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The first paragraph of Peter Hodgson's opening chapter on 'George Eliot's Religious Pilgrimage' outlines the conventional wisdom about George Eliot, that 'exposure to higher criticism' caused her to abandon 'the fervent evangelical faith of her youth and become a disciple of the "religion of humanity'" (the lower case letters of this last phrase indicating the problems she had with the dogmatism and sheer rigidity of Auguste Comte's official new religion). So far, so good. It is with the second sentence that he starts to go wrong: 'Thereafter, it is thought, she lost interest in religion and turned to the exploration …

George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, And Dogs, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

[I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Michael Slater for his invaluable comments on a draft of this paper, a version of which was presented at the George Eliot: Life and Letters conference held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, in January this year.)

In Gore Vidal's Two Sisters: A Menwir in the Form of a Novel, the obnoxious Hiram Backhouse boasts to his unreceptive peers of the admiration that his PhD thesis - How The Spaniel Figures in the Novels of George Eliot - had attracted. It was he, he claims, 'who made the discovery …

Notes On Contributors 2002

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Kathleen Adams has been Secretary of the Fellowship since 1968. She initiated the Review in 1970, was editor until 1981 and co-editor 1982-91. She published Those of Us Who Loved Her in 1980 and A Community of Interest: The Story of the George Eliot Fellowship 1930-2000 in 2000.

Lynda Carnes is Chairman of the Bedworth Society.

Mary Wilson Carpenter is Associate Professor of English at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, and has published widely on Victorian literature, including George Eliot and the Landscape of Time (1986).

Stephen Gill is Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. His publications include Wordsworth and …

Review Of George Eliot And The British Empire, Nancy Henry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In this fascinating and forcefully argued study, Nancy Henry addresses the kind of subject that has become the preserve of post-colonial criticism but does so in a way that challenges commonly held assumptions about the relations between empire and fiction in the Victorian period. Where post-colonial criticism tends to emphasize the determining power of the ideological and cultural forces to which individual writers were subordinate - in some cases seeing the novel as an inherently imperialist form, in others assuming the pervasive presence of an imperialist ideology - Henry puts the author and her own distinct experience firmly at the …

Review Of George Eliot, Judaism And The Novels, Saleel Nurbhai, K.M. Newton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Saleel Nurbhai and K. M. Newton break new ground with this consideration of George Eliot's exploitation of Jewish mysticism and mythology in fiction written before the novel that obviously promotes that tradition, Daniel Deronda. In their introductory chapter, Nurbhai and Newton posit the radical theory that the figure of the 'golem', or unformed mass, which is central to Jewish mythology is also a significant presence in all of Eliot's work, beginning with Adam Bede. But they venture even further than this large hypothesis concerning Eliot's work, suggesting that much of the 'golemish' character of her novels is based …

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Gardens, Nuneaton 10 June 2001, Lynda Carnes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Wherefore we come to lay this laurel wreath –

Humbly, in reparation for the past,

Proudly, in honour of thy worth,

With Reverence, as believing still

In beauty, truth and love.

George Eliot, or Mary Ann Evans as she was known when she lived here in Nuneaton, died on 22 December 1880. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery, on 29 December, in unconsecrated ground in a grave adjoining that of George Henry Lewes. The coffin was loaded with loving tributes in the shape of lilies, camellias, and other beautiful white flowers with here and there a small bouquet of violets. …

Conference Report: George Eliot: Life And Letters. Institute Of English Studies, University Of London, January 17 And 18 2002, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I'm grateful for the editors' invitation to report on this conference. I was asked to organize it by Warwick Gould, Director of the University of London Institute of English Studies, in response to the auction and sale in 2001, of letters (published and unpublished) from George Eliot to Jane Senior, apparently the first woman to hold a salaried English government appointment. The 'stayed' export of these letters, eventually bought by the British Library, was in the news. The letters seemed too restricted a subject for a work-in-progress conference, and its theme became 'George Eliot: Life and Letters'. Scholars invited were …

Henry James On Digression In The Fiction Of George Eliot, Christine Richards

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Stemming from a genuine desire to grapple with the complex theoretical issues underlying nineteenth-century attitudes to the novel and its aesthetic, Henry James was one of the leading critics of the mid-Victorian period. Yet his conclusion in his early criticism that George Eliot's digressions detracted from her style, was one of his less astute judgements. We know from his correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton in 1866 that James had for some time been looking for a novelist on whom to write a long general essay concerning quality, originally considering and then rejecting Harriet Beecher Stowe,' and a glance across his …

Review Of Felix Holt, The Radical, William Baker, Kenneth Womack

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

William Baker and Kenneth Womack's Felix Holt is part of the relatively recent Broadview Literary Texts series, a Canadian-based series that seeks to publish recognized canonical texts alongside less well known texts from literary history. With that in mind, coverage in the Victorian period means we have editions of often taught novels by Dickens (David Copperfield, Hard Times, and Great Expectations) and Charlotte Bronte (lane Eyre) alongside texts that hitherto have almost never been read or taught widely - Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography, Browning's The Ring and the Book and an edition of poems by Augusta …

Review Of The Cambridge Companion To George Eliot, George Levine

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Dictionary definitions of ‘companion’ stress notions of fellowship and support as in ‘one who associates with or accompanies another’. The question prompted by the use of ‘companion’ in a book title is, for whom is company being provided? I take it that the proliferating series of critical support texts of which the Cambridge Companions are in general fine examples are unabashedly aimed at an undergraduate market, while maintaining significant concern for an academic readership and some for an informed or persistent general readership. It must be admitted that George Eliot is not popular in the way that Dickens and the …

Review Of Women And Literature In Britain 1800-1900, Joanne Shattock

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This book of thirteen essays by leading scholars in the field is an impressive and valuable contribution to the study of nineteenth-century women writers. Canonical figures such as Austen, the Bronte sisters, Gaskell and Eliot are examined in the wider context of the social, cultural and economic conditions which influenced the production and dissemination of their work and reputations. In addition, the very nature and construction of the canon of nineteenth-century woman writers is interrogated.

These essays reveal the tremendous extent and variety of women's contribution to the expanding range of discourses that helped to form the culture of the …

Address At Wreath-Laying In Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey 10 June 2001, A.G. Van Den Broek

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In June 1990, the Revd Dr Edward Carpenter gave this address, exactly ten years after he, as Dean of Westminster, conducted the service when the stone memorializing George Eliot was unveiled. In his address Dr Carpenter reminded his audience that permission for an Abbey burial had been denied Eliot on religious grounds, but that it gave him 'great satisfaction and a unique pleasure' to help memorialize her a hundred years later. She was, he said, 'a person whom, in "character; manner and style", it is almost impossible to praise over much' .1.

It gives me great satisfaction and pleasure, as …

Dorothea And The 'Key To All Mythologies', Daniel Tyler

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In Middlemarch, the 'dead hand' of Edward Casaubon, which seeks to take hold of his wife's future, is applied by two documents. The first is the codicil to his will which endeavours to prohibit Dorothea marrying Will Ladislaw by imposing the condition that to do so she must relinquish her inheritance. The second is the 'Synoptical Tabulation' in which he expresses the intention to have her continue his work on the 'Key to all Mythologies'. As early as 1873, it was observed by Henry James that the subsequent narrative is dominated by the repercussions of the codicil: 'Mr Casaubon's death …

Annual Report 2001, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Looking back thirty years to my report for 1971 I found that I had written 'It is most rewarding to be able to report a successful and stimulating year'. Thirty years later I can say the same - despite having drawn in our horns after the less than successful Millennium year.

At the Annual General Meeting in March we thought we were to lose our new treasurer, Sophie Pavier, but she found she was able to continue for a further year, much to our relief. Ted Bates retired from the Council after many years' service owing to ill health. I …

Review Of Such Silver Currents: The Story Of William And Lucy Clifford, M. Chisholm

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is the first biography to record the shared and separate lives of an unusual couple, a mathematical genius called William Clifford and his literary wife, Lucy. Their biographer, M. Chisholm, has had to confront the problem of different lives and interests since the Cliffords shared only four years of marriage, but she has arranged a considerable amount of research sensibly, showing where their concerns diverged and coincided. During their time in London (1875-9) the Cliffords were at the centre of a fascinating group of celebrities, literary and scientific, who were drawn to their Sunday afternoon salons. We are likely …

Review Of Rereading Victorian Fiction; Rethinking Victorian Culture, Alice Jenkins, Juliet John

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

These two fine volumes have their roots in a Victorian literature conference at the University of Liverpool in 1996, which I had the good fortune to attend. At the time, I remember being struck in particular by the erudition of a number of the papers presented and by the impressive range of material covered in eclectic ways. It is extremely pleasing to see many of the best papers from the conference expanded in these two volumes, pleasing not least because these two collections offer an extremely good snapshot representing the diverse richness and buoyant state of Victorian Studies at the …

Review Of Adam Bede, Carol A. Martin

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In a letter to G. H. Lewes of October 1858 John Blackwood contrasted his own discriminating language of praise with the 'abandon of expression' indulged in by what he terms 'the large hearted school of Critics,' and of course one sees his point, as Lewes did with feeling concurrence: 'largehearted critics - an awful Race’. But I do not see how one can avoid joining the scorned 'large hearted'. I am at a loss to know how to write anything that could be called a 'review' of so fine a piece of work as this latest volume in the Clarendon …

George Eliot Birthday Lucheon, 25 November 2001 The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Canon Edward Pogmore

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I would like to thank you for inviting Jane and me to the wreath-laying and to this luncheon and the opportunity to propose the toast to the immortal memory of George Eliot.

It is over a year ago that I was walking through the corridors of Leeds University School of Healthcare Studies when I saw an advertisement for a lecture by Dr Jane Wood of the School of English - and the title of the lecture was "'Webs, Tissues and Predisposing Causes": George Eliot and Medical Science' (Yorkshire Medicine, Volume 12, No. 4, 105-109).

It is not the catchiest …

George Eliot's Debt To Hardy?, David Mcintosh

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In his biography of Thomas Hardy, Michael Millgate makes the following assertion:

The irritating association of Hardy's work with George Eliot's was kept alive in the summer of 1876 by the appearance of Daniel Deronda and the comment in the Westminster Review that it was fortunate that The Hand of Ethelberta had been published first, 'or else ill-natured critics would have declared that his principal character was only a copy'. To such a criticism, had it in fact been made, Hardy might justifiably have pointed out that George Eliot had, in that same novel, borrowed from Far From the Madding …

Mines Of Misinformation: George Eliot And Old Master Paintings: Berlin, Munich, Vienna And Dresden, 1854-5 And 1858, Leonee Ormond

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This article is a 'footnote' to two classic works on George Eliot: Hugh Witemeyer's George Eliot and the Visual Arts and The Journals of George Eliot, edited by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston. When I began to follow the progress of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes round the major art galleries of Western Europe, I soon discovered that many of the paintings which George Eliot mentions in her journal were not what she believed them to be. Some have been reattributed since her lifetime, and others, while still bearing the name of the artist she gave them, were …

The Thirtieth George Eliot Annual Memorial Lecture, 2001; George Eliot- The Woman And The Writer, Rosalind Miles

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is a great honour to be invited to deliver this civic address today in the presence of the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress of Nuneaton, and I am delighted to be here among you in George Eliot's home town. My chosen theme on this special anniversary is George Eliot, the Woman and the Writer, and I intend to address a number of questions related to George Eliot's life and art, including what I hope may be some of the less familiar aspects of her early days. But before I do, I hope you will forgive a personal note.

As …

A George Eliot Quatation On A Public Occasion, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

At the funeral of the Queen Mother in Westminster Abbey on 9 April 2002 the Archbishop of Canterbury delivered the sermon and, in describing her life, used these words - 'There was about her, in George Eliot's lovely phrase, "the sweet presence of a good diffused"‘.

These words are taken from the last part of George Eliot's poem, 'O May I Join the Choir Invisible', in which she describes her own feelings on immortality:

Japanese Branch Report 2001, Fumiko Nishiyama

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The fifth annual convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Tokai University in Kanagawa on Saturday, I December 2001. The morning session began with a welcome speech by Kyoichi Ono, Chief of the Foreign Language Center of Tokai University. He said that George Eliot and Shigeyoshi Matsumae, the founder of Tokai University, had some similarities: both of them lived through a turbulent age; both sustained an interest in religion and humanity; both had insight into the significance of modem civilization.

The first paper was presented by Tomoko Kanda, an assistant at Nihon University. She analysed 'The …

Editor's Notes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

We wish to correct the following typographical errors that occurred in June Skye Szirotny's 'Edward Casaubon and Herbert Spencer' (George Eliot Review No. 32 [2001], pp. 29-43):

We wish to correct the following typographical errors that occurred in June Skye Szirotny's'Edward Casaubon and Herbert Spencer' (George Eliot Review No. 32 [2001], pp. 29-43):p. 31 , I. 31 after ). insert [sic 1p. 34, I. 11 for our read ourp. 35, I. 6 after 223). insert note 39a. See also n. 33 above.p. 36, I. 8 for L read GELI. 20 for L read GELp. 38, I. 5 for University read …

Developing Pedagogies: Learning The Teaching Of English, Shari J. Stenberg, Amy Lee

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Consider the following scenario: You arrive at graduate school in time for the three-day orientation, which consists of a series of workshop "training" to be a scholar. One half-day session covers the conference proposal and presentation; another trains new students to write seminar papers; a third focuses on the prospectus and dissertation; yet another teaches the composition articles for refereed journals. At the end of three days, you are ostensibly "trained" in the basics required to contribute to your profession as a scholar and researcher. While you might continue to develop these "skills" as you advance through exams, dissertations, and …

A Trove Of New Works By Thomas Pynchon? Bomarc Service News Rediscovered, Adrian S. Wisnicki

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Early in 1960, after having graduated from Cornell and while writing V., Thomas Pynchon moved to Seattle and began working for the Boeing Airplane Company. What Pynchon did while working at Boeing has puzzled scholars almost from the moment of the very private author's literary debut. When we try to delve into his stint at Boeing first mentioned by Lewis Nichols and Dick Schaap--we reach dead ends or find conflicting information. Yet Pynchon's time at Boeing is perhaps the most documented period of his life, and over the years a number of interesting (though not always accurate) bits of information …

Review Of Oxford Reader's Companion To George Eliot, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

For a reader of George Eliot, opening this Companion may be a bit like opening a box of chocolates. There is a pause as one wonders where to begin, but once begun, it is difficult to stop tasting and savouring the contents. The articles are written in a fluid and concise, easily readable style, and present such an abundance and particularity of detail that the most dedicated student of George Eliot's life and work will find new information and insights. And even where the facts are more or less familiar, details we may have forgotten remind us again of the …

Priest And Nun?: Daniel Deronda, Anti-Catholicism And The Confessional, Kirstie Blair

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In Chapter 32 of Daniel Deronda, Sir Hugo Mallinger jocularly remarks to Deronda, 'You are always looking tenderly at the women, and talking to them in a Jesuitical way. You are a dangerous young fellow'.' Deronda responds with undue irritation, drawing the narrative observation that, 'Sir Hugo's notion of flirting, it was to be hoped, was rather peculiar'. Both Deronda's defensive reaction and Eliot's sly comment hint at the potential dangers of 'peculiar' flirtation with Gwendolen, a peculiarity linked to the term 'Jesuitical'. In the pervasive late Victorian discourse of anti-Catholicism, Jesuit priests are associated with insinuation, deception, persuasion, and …