Comparative Literature Commons^™

Japanese Branch Report 2007, Maiko Ohtake

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The eleventh annual convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Chuo University on Saturday 24 November 2007.

The morning session began with an opening address by Miwa Ohta (Chuo University). Four papers were presented in the morning; the first two were introduced and commented upon by Michiko Kurisu (Daito Bunka University), and the last two by Shigeko Tomita (Koshien University).

The first paper was titled 'Rethinking Adam Bede - Why Does No One Help Hetty?' by Mayumi Fujita (Kwansei Gakuin University). Starting with a question about the severe treatment of Hetty, Ms. Fujita examined the moral …

Editor's Notes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Middlemarch has been in the public eye since our last issue: Erica Wagner's column in the Times for Saturday 13 October 2007 bore the heading 'How good is Middlemarch if you reread it? Better'; and on 24 May 2008 the Review section of the Saturday Guardian devoted two and- a half broadsheet pages to Zadie Smith's tribute to George Eliot, 'On Middlemarch'. We have recently received Josie Billington's new Reader's Guide to the novel, Eliot's 'Middlemarch' (Continuum, 2008). This will be reviewed in our next issue.

Another work just received - Elizabeth Sabiston's Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen …

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton 17 June 2007, Don Jones

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

As I reflected on 'famous sons and daughters of Nuneaton', I came up with a short list. George EliotlMary Anne Evans, Larry Grayson, Ken Loach.

George Eliot must have cut quite an unconventional figure in her day. Larry Grayson, that rather gentle comedian, was also quite an unconventional character. Then Ken Loach, perhaps not so controversial in his personal life, none the less often espousing unconventional causes through his films. Is it something about Nuneaton that those it throws up into the arms of fame should have something of the unconventional about them? - or at least an eye for …

Review Of Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction And Other Information Systems, Richard Menke

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Richard Menke's study draws illuminating connections between the development of literary realism and the revolutionary changes which the nineteenth century saw in methods of communication and information management. Innovations such as the Penny Post, the telegraph, photography and wireless communication all raise fundamental questions about the representation in media both of the material world and of human subjectivity and social interconnection. Menke's discussion of these provides the context in which he examines how novelists grapple with similar issues, and he thus offers fresh new ways of thinking about realism as a self-conscious representational practice and about how the novel form …

George Eliot's Poetry Of The Soul, Gregory Tate

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The poetic epigraph to Daniel Deranda, written by George Eliot herself, anticipates and encapsulates the novel's interest in the complex processes that make up human psychology:

Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, 'mid the throngs of hurrying desires That trample on the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhalations laden with slow death, And o’r the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence.

The epigraph describes psychological phenomena that will feature prominently throughout Daniel Deranda: the multiple and contradictory elements of individual character; the often self-defeating nature of human thought and …

Address At Celebration For Kathleen And Bill Adams, Jonathan Ouvry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I'm ashamed to say that I didn't know of the existence of the George Eliot Fellowship until 1980, which was of course the great year of the stone-laying in Westminster Abbey. I can't remember how it came to be known that one of George Henry Lewes's great-great-grandsons just happened, conveniently, to have an office next door to the Abbey, but then I suppose that that is one of the many secrets of Kathleen's success in her role as Secretary of the Fellowship - she was very good at finding out useful connections and unlikely information in the highways and byways …

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 25 November 2007- The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Roger Simmonds

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am extremely grateful to you for inviting me here today to give this speech on George Eliot's Birthday. It is a real pleasure and very flattering: I hope I can live up to expectations.

If you had told me a year ago that I would be standing before you all now as Project Officer for the 150th anniversary celebrations of George Eliot's first work of fiction, I would have been surprised to say the least! For somebody who values literature as much as I do, who greatly admires the work of George Eliot, and who loves …

Review Of The Spanish Gypsy By George Eliot, Antonie Gerard Van Den Broek

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This edition complements the two volume edition of The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot, also edited by Antonie Gerard van den Broek and published by Pickering and Chatto in 2005. Like those volumes it presents an edited text and a mass of information, editorial, critical and contextual (the list of textual variants alone occupies about 120 pages). These volumes make an essential reference point for future discussion of the poem. William Baker's Preface describes its conception, progress and reception, and van den Broek's Introduction takes up in more detail the critical and conceptual contexts. There are four appendices. The …

Review Of The Cambridge Introduction To George Eliot, Nancy Henry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This lively book is part of a new Cambridge University Press series already more than thirty titles strong, for 'readers who want to broaden their understanding of the books and authors they enjoy' - a mission statement which is quickly decoded: 'Ideal for students, teachers and lecturers'. The range of authors and topics included is canonical yet catholic, and not exclusively Anglophone: American authors are well represented along with English and Irish ones, there is a clutch of drama and theatre titles, Francophone literature and Derrida, postcolonial literatures and Modernism. The books are relatively short at about 60,000 words, and …

'Acting Out' In Daniel Deronda, Toni Griffiths

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This short paper illustrates the way in which psychoanalytic perspectives can help us to understand the effect which a complex literary text like Daniel Deronda has on the reader. The two psychoanalytic perspectives used are Freud's insights into the way dreams work, and Melanie Klein's exploration of the nature and importance of the unconscious phantasies of very early childhood and her discovery of the early developmental 'positions'. 1 These insights help to explain how what may appear puzzling and difficult in a novel nevertheless holds and moves its readers.

Freud's insights into the meaning and form of dreams2 suggest that …

Review Of Jeanie, An 'Army Of One': Mrs Nassau Senior, 1828-1877, The First Woman In Whitehall, Sybil Oldfield

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Sybil Oldfield is well-known for her work on humanitarian women, creative philanthropists and pacifists, and her new book is an important contribution to Victorian studies, a life-story told with admiration, sympathy and style, as cram-full of character and emotion as a novel, and of great interest to George Eliot scholars.

The neglect of Jeanie Senior, called Jeanie, pronounced Janie - her enthusiastic biographer puts 'sic' after deviations, eccentrically rather than pedantically since Jeanie was christened Jane Elizabeth and named Jane on her tomb and even in this book's index - is at first sight puzzling, because her ideals and zeal …

Review Of George Eliot, Jan Jedrzejewski

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The physical format of this important overview is unattractive, the print small, with some forty-eight lines to the page giving the impression of over packing to keep the cost down. This companion to George Eliot studies - it is in fact more than a guide - has a number of blemishes. Jedrzejewski has not been well served by his editor(s): he has been allowed some loosely inappropriate phrasing on occasions, as with Mary Ann's reaction to her father's death which 'made his departure obviously painful for her in emotional terms' (9). This hardly conveys the anguished outcry or poignant self-searchings …

Reflections On Scence Revisited: A Festival Celebrating The 150th Anniversary Of Scenes Of Clerical Life, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Members might be interested to read some reflections, several months on, of the Fellowship's involvement in the Nuneaton-based Scenes Revisited Festival which took place mostly during September 2007. One reason for this overview is that the Fellowship spent some £10,000 of its funds on the events throughout the year; another reason is that our involvement in a partnership helped to secure £50,000 from Heritage Lottery Fund to pay for a Project Officer and the many free events he was to coordinate.

There had been talk for two years among the group of history/museum/arts enthusiasts in Nuneaton and Bedworth, both local …

The Thirty-Sixth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2007: Scenes And After, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The Folio Society's cosmetic edition of George Eliot's fiction, which was published in 1999, has no place on any spine of its seven-volume set for Scenes of Clerical Life. A search of the actual texts, however, reveals George Eliot's first published fiction bedded together with Silas Marner, the pair sharing a neat introduction by Jill Paton-Walsh. I pondered at the time if spine exclusion meant that Scenes was just too minor for remark, or whether, as is the way with publishers, getting things wrong can be ignored once the books are on the shelves or, as with the Folio edition, …

Daniel Deronda: The Cultural Imperative Of Religion, Annemarie Frank

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's last novel Daniel Deronda differs strikingly from her earlier works in the presentation of its protagonists and her innovative use of the literary genres of realism and romanticism. In her earlier novels Eliot had espoused an idea of humanism that transcended social class by fictionalizing the small but significant contributions ordinary men and women make towards England's social and cultural progress. Eliot had created realistic heroes with human frailties on the principle that 'human deeds are made up of the most subtly intermixed good and evil'.1 Furthermore, she had attacked the ideal hero type, who was the favourite …

Review Of The Marriage Of Minds: Reading Sympathy In The Victorian Marriage Plot & Victorian Fiction And The Insights Of Sympathy: An Alternative To The Hermeneutics Of Suspicion, Rachel Ablow, Brigid Lowe

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

These two studies show that the ideological tug-of-war over the Victorian novel is far from over, and that George Eliot stands in the middle of it. Brigid Lowe's Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy is a bold and provocative attack on critics who have trawled nineteenth century novels for evidence that these works were concerned above all with exercizing ideological control. D. A. Miller, Terry Eagleton, Stephen Greenblatt, Catherine Gallagher, Deirdre David and Mary Poovey are all amongst Lowe's targets, and she draws on a wide range of sources to dismantle their conjectures. Rachel Ablow's The Marriage of Minds …

Annual Report 2007, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This has not been the easiest report to write, possibly being my last one. My first report forty years ago was so short - a mere half page - but, in those days the tiny Fellowship was doing very little so it was not difficult to write it. Little did I know I would still be doing it forty years later and with an extremely busy Fellowship involved.

Our year began, as always, with the Annual General Meeting. Susan Healey succeeded Bill Adams as Vice Chairman and Bill took her place on the Council for one year. After the business …

Notes On Contributors 2008

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Kathleen Adams was Secretary of the Fellowship from 1968 until her retirement in the spring of this year. 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.

Juliette Atkinson is a teaching assistant at University College London, where she recently completed her PhD thesis on Victorian Biography and the Representation of 'Obscure' Lives, which is partly concerned with the manner in which Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot influenced nineteenth-century life-writing.

Michael …

Awakening The 'Mere Pulsation Of Desire' In Silas Marner, Melissa Raines

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In George Eliot's Middlemarch, the narrator reflects on those crucial events which shape pathways in our lives. For Tertius Lydgate, this occurs with the chance opening of a book to a particular page:

[T]he first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were folding doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human frame.'

For Lydgate, this seminal instant is the one which inspires him to …

Review Of George Eliot, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Oxford's publication of 'Bite-sized biographies of Britain's most fascinating historical figures' brings to mind Pascal's famous apology for the length of his letter: 'I have not had time to make it shorter'. Would Rosemary Ashton, who has written both long and short biographies, agree that it is more taxing to produce a 'bite-sized' account that a long one? Brevity demands clear aims, selection of salient points, stringent compression. These tests Rosemary Ashton passes with enviable ease, combining compression with elegance. She begins by summarizing her aims: 'In this study, originally written for the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, I …

Review Of George Eliot And Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring The Unmapped Country, Michael Davis

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Michael Davis packs a dense yet deft discussion of George Eliot's relationship with the scientific theories of mind of her contemporaries into this short book. Revisiting the novels and essays, and to a lesser extent the letters, he adds to our understanding of her place as a thinking novelist by his careful negotiation of intellectual positions, his weaving of the discussion among such Eliot contemporaries as Darwin, Spencer, Lewes, Huxley, Alexander Bain, W. B. Carpenter, and E. S. Dallas, and his engagement with recent studies in the field by Gillian Beer, Sally Shuttleworth, K. K. Collins, Tess Cosslett, David Carroll, …

Review Of 142 Strand: A Radical Address In Victorian London & George Eliot In Germany,1854-55: 'Cherished Memories', Rosemary Ashton, Gerlinde Roder-Bolton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The outlines of Marian Evans's life in the years immediately preceding her emergence as George Eliot are well-known-her work for the Westminster Review, her relationships with Chapman, Spencer and Lewes, and then her departure with the latter to Germany in July 1854. What these two studies do in their different ways is fill in the picture with fascinating detail. In focusing on the house that John Chapman rented from 1847 to 1854 and from which he ran the Westminster Review and his publishing business, Rosemary Ashton recreates the circle of radical intellectuals that the future novelist came into contact with …

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton 11 June 2006, Tim Over

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

May I begin by thanking the Fellowship for the invitation to be the principal guest at the annual wreath-laying ceremony. My association with today's event goes back over a number of years bringing students to lay a floral tribute at the obelisk. Indeed, when I first came more schools were involved. It is fitting that the secondary school named after many would say the greatest Victorian woman novelist, still comes along faithfully to the Memorial Garden. Kathleen and Bill Adams have visited the school, talked to groups of students and presented the school with a portrait of George Eliot and …

Review Of George Eliot: A Critic's Biography, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Barbara Hardy has been thinking and writing about George Eliot for about fifty years, always in ways that push against reigning orthodoxies, and that immerse us in particular patterns of imagery, affect, or narrative organization that make the substance and texture of George Eliot's work come alive. Her new book is no exception. This 'anti-biography', as she calls it, is an attempt 'to redress the balance' of conventional biography by focusing on the effect of George Eliot's life on her writing, rather than on retelling the story of her life (xi). In fact, it redresses more balances than that. Hardy …

Review Of Identifying The Remains: George Eliot's Death In The London Religious Press, K.K. Collins

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a detailed examination of the various religious-based obituaries which followed George Eliot's death in December 1880. It exposes misinformation, largely biographical, examines bias, confusion, open and concealed concerns, direct, responsible and weighted theological arguments, dubious and inconclusive conclusions, the forms and themes of the debate about the beliefs of a major writer. Collins's dissertation-like topic is informed with foreground and background research: his footnotes read as tellingly as his text and provide wide-ranging and perceptive quotation.

He considers the idea, derived from Richard Simpson, that the appearance of George Eliot's name on the title-pages of Scenes of Clerical …

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 19 November 2006- The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Adrian Litvinoff

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I was surprised, honoured and delighted by the invitation to join you today and propose the toast to the immortal memory of George Eliot. I am no George Eliot expert, or indeed scholar, although I am an enthusiast. She is, after all, Warwickshire's other world-class writer, and it is tempting to think how much better known she might have been in her home county had Shakespeare been born in Stoke-on-Trent, say, rather than Stratford-upon-Avon.

My first encounter with George Eliot was while taking' A' level English at school. I still recall my dawning surprise and admiration as I, an inexperienced …

The George Eliot Centenary Of 1919, Margaret Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The centenary of George Eliot's birth in 1919 was recognized as an opportunity to commemorate her connection with the parts of Warwickshire where she was born and spent her early life. While her association with Coventry and Nuneaton had been noted during her lifetime and in obituaries, and emphasized again when George Eliot's Life as related in her letters and journals, arranged and edited by her husband J. W. Cross was published in 1885, there were some inhibitions about too enthusiastically claiming an agnostic libertine as a local celebrity. Both Nuneaton and Coventry chose to celebrate the centenary, and reconstruction …

Review Of Middlemarch In The Twenty-First Century, Karen Chase

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This set of eight original essays engages afresh with a novel that many readers might claim to know well, in such a way as to make 'the lights and shadows ... fall with a certain difference' (chap. xxi). Karen Chase is well-known for her own studies of George Eliot, not least George Eliot: 'Middlemarch' (1991). Here, she confines herself to an introductory essay, which cogently states the brief given to her contributors, to reflect on how Middlemarch can be read in the twenty-first century. 'Who besides Eliot has been better aware of the alteration of objects given a change in …

Review Of George Eliot And The Discourses Of Medievalism, Judith Johnston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism argues that Eliot abandons realism in her last two novels in favour of medievalism, and that recognizing the presence and function of medieval discourses in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda enables subversive political readings. Johnston positions these readings against criticism of the novels that identifies a collapse of narrative coherence and characterization in Eliot's 'failure' to sustain their apparent realism. In contrast, Johnston proposes that Eliot's manipulation of medievalism signals neither the failure of realism nor realism's antithesis. Johnston argues that the discourses of medievalism that Eliot manipulates share a facility for transformation: hagiography …

Notes On Contributors- 2007

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.

Rosemary Ashton is Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London. She is the author of acclaimed critical biographies of George Eliot (1996) and G. H. Lewes (1991). Her many publications on George Eliot include The Mill on the Floss: A Natural History (1990), and editions of Middlemarch (Penguin, …