Comparative Literature Commons^™

Review Of Imperialism At Home: Race And Victorian Women's Fiction, Susan Meyer

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My favourite exam 'howler' came from a first year student who wrote lyrically of the episode in Wuthering Heights in which Cathy opened the window, 'and the Moors came pounding in' - as though a hundred dark-skinned men on horseback came trampling over Cathy's prostrate body. Susan Meyer's book, Imperialism at Home, while in no way suggesting anything so ludicrous as a north African invasion of a lonely house on the Yorkshire moors, does, nevertheless, lend a certain logic to the idea. Meyer's point is that we should read the abundant oriental imagery and allusions in Victorian fiction by women …

American Branch Report 1996, Linda K. Roberston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The seventh annual dinner of the American branch was held at the I Matti restaurant in Washington, D.C. on 29 December 1996. There was no formal programme, but the traditional toast was offered and greetings were delivered from members who could not attend. Those present particularly appreciated the messages from Kathleen and Bill Adams and from Harriet Williams. While we enjoyed excellent Italian food, there was lively conversation about recent works on George Eliot, film versions of various nineteenth-century novels, and our own projects and recent reading. Those in attendance were Marjorie Goss, Shoshana Knapp, Lee Pierson, Meri-Jane Rochelson, Ed …

The Twenty-Fourth George Eliot Memorial Lecture: George Eliot And The Furniture Of The House Of Fiction, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In a letter to Martha Jackson of March 1841 the young Marian Evans, at the age of twenty- one, reflects on the way that a person's immediate surroundings help determine the impression that he or she makes on others:

I suppose we are all loved (or despised) a little for the sake of our circumstances as well as for our qualities .... What extrinsic charm have /, to make people care for me a little more then my qualities might deserve? Certainly none from the landscape about me, and as little from the carpets and curtains and other recommendations of …

George Eliot: A Biography, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a massive study, what the author calls 'a topic for a biography' (x). It occupied four years of his time, during which he obviously saturated himself in his subject, her period, her circle, her letters and all the contiguous material requisite for a full investigation. The result in the mass is curiously unsatisfactory. To adapt Henry James's celebrated dictum on Middlemarch, this is not a treasure house of detail but it is an indifferent whole. Undigested and indigestible, it reminds me of the Empress Messalina's infamous innuendo (according to Juvenal) that after a night spent in the brothels …

'Dear Cara': A Newly Discovered Letter, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

At the beginning of the year a donation was made to Coventry's Herbert Art Gallery and Museum of a box of papers relating to the Fridlanders, a nineteenth-century Coventry watch-making family. Annie Fridlander was a friend of Charles and Caroline (known as Cara) Bray and of Cara's sister, Sara Hennell.1t was not surprising, therefore, to find that some of the letters in the box were written by them to Annie. What was quite unexpected was to discover a tiny envelope containing a short letter from Marian Evans (George Eliot) to Cara Bray, her beloved Coventry friend.

The envelope and letter …

The Dead Hand In Middlemarch, David Clifford

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Edward Casaubon dies early in Book V of Middlemarch. Occurring where it does, it effectively bisects the novel; and indeed, it is a pivotal event in Dorothea's history. His will erects her central dilemma. She faces a choice, forced upon her by her deceased husband, between his money and his cousin. The significant detail is that even in death, Mr. Casaubon continues to exert control over the options open to Dorothea, and the locus of that control is her property.

The title of Book V, 'The Dead Hand', is taken as referring explicitly to this immortal control by Mr. Casaubon …

University Of Adelaide, Seventeenth Australasian Victorlian Studies Conference Report, Rosalind De Sailly

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The seventeenth conference of the Australasian Victorian Studies Association was held at the University of Adelaide in February 1996. The conference theme 'The Victorians and Science' inspired several papers on George Eliot's relation to matters scientific.

Barbara Garlick (Senior Tutor, University of Queensland) examined passages from Daniel Deronda in her paper 'George Eliot's Optics and the "Solidity of Objects'“. Dr. Garlick premissed her account of Eliot's optics on Lewes's theory of vision as a psychological act which interiorizes the external world according to intuitions and ideas. Vision was used to demonstrate how ways of seeing structure the narrative as they …

Review Of George Eliot: A Life, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Fifty years after John Cross's hagiographic George Eliot's Life as Related in her Letters and Journals (1885), Gordon Haight planned a more forthright biography but first found that it would be necessary to re-edit those letters and journals expurgated by Cross and search out material unavailable or unmentioned by Cross. The results was first the seven volumes of The George Eliot Letters in 1954-55 and, in 1968, George Eliot: A Biography, the then definitive life. More material has been coming to light since, notably (but not only) the two supplemental volumes of the Letters Haight added in 1978, and there …

Annual Report 1995, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I would like to begin this report with something exciting to say but Annual General Meetings, with which our year inevitably begins, are never exciting events. In 1995 it all went smoothly - the only change being the retirement of Kathleen Porter as Vice Chairman and the appointment of Joan Bunn in her place. After the business meeting John Smith, Curator of Stamford Museum, who had closely followed the filming of the TV Middlemarch in the town, showed us his collection of slides and entertained us with an interesting commentary. Middlemarchmania had not quite died.

In March we heard of …

American Branch Report, Linda K. Robertson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The American branch of the George Eliot Fellowship met for dinner at Stetson's Restaurant in Chicago on December 28, 1995. There was no formal programme but the evening included the traditional toast, the delivery of greetings from members who were unable to attend, and lively conversation. Those in attendance were Harriet Williams, Shoshana Knapp, Gail Elizabeth Korn, Jean Armold, and Linda K. Robertson. Gail Korn and Jean Arnold volunteered to prepare Special Session proposals for the 1996 Modem Language Association meeting in Washington, D.C. 19

Late-Victorian Plans For A George Eliot Memorial Library, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On 5 March 1896 a paragraph appeared in the Daily News from a correspondent who wrote:

Will you allow me through your columns to appeal to the countless admirers of one of England's greatest teachers and of the world's most perfect artists? That portion of 'Leafy Warwickshire' in the midst of which little Marian Evans drew her first inspiration, literally beneath some of the very oaks which formed part of the classic Forest of Arden, has of late years proved to be a teeming storehouse of mineral wealth, and a large and vastly increasing industrial population at the present moment …

Hardy And Eliot: The Eye Of Narcissus' Looking-Glass, Nicola Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Hardy was both surprised and offended by the comparisons made between Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and the novels of George Eliot; indeed, several critics went so far as to ascribe this new work to the acknowledged master in a complimentary manner but this failed to placate the aspiring newcomer. But most galling of all was the response it elicited from Henry James. From the very beginning, James took exception to the formal technique adopted by the writer who would become his greatest rival. He offered the most acerbic and derogatory commentary when he defined Hardy's first major success …

Report Of A Lecture On "George Eliot At The National Portrait Gallery", Elizabeth Gundrey

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In an excellent lecture John Cooper of the National Portrait Gallery showed all the authenticated portraits of George Eliot, contrasting them with those of other women writers of the time such as Charlotte Bronte and Agnes Strickland and quoting contemporaries' views on how good a likeness each was.

The portraits included an early silhouette given to the Gallery by a niece of John Cross; an 1842 watercolour given by Caroline Bray, too delicate to be put on public display; D'Albert Durade's Geneva portrait, painted when she was still mourning her father and struggling with religious doubts; the celebrated Samuel Lawrence …

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon: The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A friendly neighbor, who knew I was fond of “old things”, recently offered to let me look at a yellowing, crisply fragile newspaper that was in her possession. Unfolded, the crimbling broadsheet proved to be a copy of the Daily Mail for Wednesday, 23 June 1897- the issue commemorating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. I gingerly perused it, enjoying it as a period curiosity without really expecting to see anything of specific interest- until I got to page seven, which presented an article headed “Women in the Queen’s Reign. Some Who Have Made Victorian History”.

The piece- which is about thirty …

Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

For those of you who don't know who I am, I am currently the Managing Agent on the Arbury Estate, where I am lucky enough to live in South Farm, which will be familiar to you all as the birthplace of Mary Ann Evans.

I arrived at Arbury approximately 183 years after Robert Evans, Mary Ann's father, who was also the Agent on the Estate and on whom it is my intention to reflect today. Robert was born in 1773, the son of a carpenter. He had a limited early education in the local school which was run by Bartle …

Review Of The Mysteries: Creation, A New Adaptation, Robert S. Haller

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Review of Nicholas Rudall and Bernard Sahlins, editors. The Mysteries: Creation, A New Adaptation by Bernard Sahlins of the Medieval Mystery Play Series: Plays for Performance. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1992. $7.95. Elephant Paperbacks EL 412.

"Dismal Loneliness": George Eliot, Auguste Comte And "The Lifted Veil", Judith Siford

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'The Lifted Veil' is a curious novella from an author who made the organic form so much her own, focusing as it does upon actions which continually interrupt and fragment the narrative; with its emphasis on the supernatural, on bizarre pseudo-scientific experiments, attempted murder and gothic horror it seems out of place in the canon of a maker of 'realist' fictions. Yet bizarre though this tale undoubtedly is, it is not merely the mental aberration from an author under stress that Blackwood supposed it to be.'

In 1859, the year she first offered it for publication, Eliot had been diffident …

Thou Shalt Not Read: Maggie's Arrested Development In The Mills On The Floss, Karen E. Hottle

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The Mill on the Floss opens and closes with visions of a girl out of place - initially in a dream and finally in a grave. In between, this lost soul tries to find her way in the world, and she often uses books as her guides. While books give the young Maggie a certain freedom, her status as a woman in the society into which she is born forces her to read in certain ways which constrain and eventually destroy her.

The opening scenes of the novel establish Maggie's place in the hierarchy of learning. Mr. Tulliver's first words …

The Transformation Of Rage: Mourning And Creating In George Eliot's Fiction, Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The thesis of this book is as follows. In her early life George Eliot experienced a number of bereavements: the deaths of her baby twin siblings in 1821, after which her mother withdrew emotionally from her life; her mother's own death in 1836, when she was sixteen, and her father's death in 1849. Failing to complete 'the mourning process' adequately, and experiencing unconscious 'rage' as a consequence, Eliot had to work through these and other traumatic experiences as an adult, using her novel-writing as a therapy. Her own unconscious aggression comes out in the aggression of her heroines, of which …

Charles Christian Hennell And George Eliot: Human And Narrative Affinities, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On 13 November 1841 the twenty-two year old Marian Evans wrote to her then mentor Maria Lewis 'My whole soul has been engrossed in the most interesting of all inquiries for the last few days, and to what results my thoughts may lead, I know not - possibly to one that will startle you'.1 On 16 September 1847 ,just over a year after the publication of her translation of Strauss's Life of Jesus Marian wrote to her close friend Sarah Hennell, whose brother's An Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity (2nd edition, 1841) she had just re-read 'with delight and …

The Twenty-Third George Eliot Memorial Lecture- 1994, Canon Michael Sadgrove

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Sunday, 2 January 1842, Mary Ann Evans's father wrote in his diary: 'Went to Trinity Church in the forenoon" Miss Lewis went with me. Mary Ann did not go. I stopd the sacrament (sic) and Miss Lewis stopd also.' Two weeks later, again: 'Went to church in the forenoon. Mary Ann did not go to church'.

Robert Evans was perhaps principally interested in making sure that his daughter behaved as was proper for a middle class young woman with eligible prospects. Her scruples may have concerned him less. But there is no disguising the genuine grief he felt at …

New George Eliot Letters At The British Library, William Baker, Donald Hawes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The British Library Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts New Series 1981-1985 (2 vols., London: The British Library, 1994), records the acquisition of new George Eliot letters to its holdings.' Its Index lists under 'Cross nee Evans ... "George Eliot''' three items: 'Letter to J. T. Delane from George Eliot, 1859.61891, f.88'; 'Letter to E. L. Stanley from George Eliot, 1869.61891, f.90'; 'Letters to Florence Hill from George Eliot, [1869-?]- 1873.61891, ff.92-101' (p. 410).

The text of George Eliot's [30 November 1859] letter of protest to Delane, Editor of the London Times, about Newby, the publisher's 'issuing a work under …

Race And Myth: The Spanish Gypsy, Brenda Mckay

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Although it cannot be claimed that George Eliot's poetry ranks with her prose fiction, it is nevertheless unjustifiably marginalized in discussion of her work. Among the more distinguished pieces - which include the important blank-verse drama 'Armgart' - is George Eliot's longest excursus into poetry, The Spanish Gypsy. Set in Spain, this drama is the spiritual background of themes later developed in Daniel Deronda, on the nature of racial inter-relationships. In Romola too, Eliot had shown an interest in exploring a culture different from that of England, but also sharing many points of resemblance with that country. The medium of …

Impressions Of Theophrastus Such, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's last published work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), has hitherto not been much read or attended to by readers, critics, or even scholars. Now two editions have appeared almost simultaneously, both annotated and furnished with readable introductions. While welcoming the revival of the book in this form, I have to confess to not having had my mind much changed about its merits by the skillful introductions of Nancy Henry and DJ. Enright.

The work still seems to me to be chiefly interesting for the extra light it occasionally throws on George Eliot's character representation in the novels, on …

American Branch Report, Linda K. Robertson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The annual American dinner of the Fellowship was held on 28 December 1994 at The Harbor House restaurant in San Diego, California, site of the Modem Language Association convention. Arrangements for the dinner were made by Harriet Williams, and Linda Robertson hosted the dinner and served as recorder for the evening. Those who attended included William Baker, Margaret Carter, Catherine Civello, Connie Fulmer, Shoshana Knapp, Carol Martin, Solveig Robinson, and Jeanette Shumaker.

Horses And Hounds: The Importance Of Animals In The Mills On The Floss, Linda K. Roberston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is not surprising that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, set in rural Warwickshire in the early 1800s, should contain references to domestic animals and livestock. What is remarkable is the variety, including dogs, kittens, sheep, cattle, horses, rabbits, ferrets, rats, snakes, toads, spiders, wasps, snails, bears, wolves, boars, a beaver, a chimpanzee, a lion, and an assortment of fish and fowl. From the barking cur in the opening chapter to Bob Jakin's dog Mumps, who comforts Maggie Tulliver after her disastrous trip down the river with Stephen Guest, Eliot uses animals to develop the setting and to …

Obituary Dorothy Edmands 1911-1995

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Dorothy Edmands had been a member of the George Eliot Fellowship for well over 30 years and during that time had been a most supportive member... She served on the Fellowship Council for very many of those years and, although a quiet and very modest lady, had been extremely generous. Whenever money was needed for whatever project, Dorothy was there with her ever open purse.

Dorothy trained to be a teacher at Furzedown College in London and began her teaching career at Stratford upon Avon. A few years later she moved to George Street School in Bedworth, her home town, …

University Of London, Centre For English Studies: Conference Report, Caroline Levine, Mark Turner

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot claimed that Romla was written with her 'best blood', and her contemporaries certainly knew and appreciated the novel. Until late in the century Romla was even being regularly employed as a guidebook to Florence. But despite contemporary uses and accolades, the text has been largely overlooked by scholars, who have typically relegated the novel to footnotes and fleeting allusions. In response to this neglect, admirers of Romla have begurr to ask why it has attracted so little scholarly attention, given its thematic and theoretical abundance, its cultural and critical complexity.

In the spirit of what we perceive as …

Loyola College, Baltimore, Nineteenth-Century Studies Association: Conference Report, Rosealind De Sailly

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The 14th conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association was held at Loyola College, Baltimore, Maryland at the end of March. The conference theme, 'Conflict and Resolution’, allowed examination of the period from the French Revolution to the end of the Victorian era in terms of artistic, literary, philosophical, political, economic, religious, scientific and social change. This rich theme attracted papers on many of the issues that now interest George Eliot scholars and other Victorianists.

Christine Morris (University of South Carolina at Chapel Hill) examined Victorian keepsake annuals in her paper, 'Marketing Femininity in the 1830s: The Case of Heath's …

Placing The Places In Wordsworth's 1802 Sonnets, Stephen C. Behrendt

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Wordsworth's political sonnets of summer and fall 1802 recount the sights and sounds the poet encountered during the brief respite provided by the Peace of Amiens, which enabled him to return to France and to the woman and child who were the physical reminders of the time he had spent there ten years earlier in the spirited days following the French Revolution. Published together in 1807 in Poems, in Two Volumes, they juxtapose the dispirited and pathetic state of France in 1802 with the ebullience Wordsworth recalled from that earlier time. More important, the sequence documents his "return" to England, …