Comparative Literature Commons^™

George Eliot- Bbc2 Night School, Ruth Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is said that Napoleon interviewed his prisoners at three o'clock in the morning when their powers of resistance were at their lowest ebb. My video recorder saved me from testing his theory between the unearthly hours of 2.00 and 4.00 a.m. on Thursday 10th March when BBC2's Night School presented its resource material on the life, work and times of George Eliot. If I had had to stay awake, however, then I think that Professor Rosemary Ashton and her able colleagues would have overcome my powers of resistance with Napoleonic skill. The material was attractively varied, and concentration was …

Front Matter

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"Withoute Words": The Medieval Lady Dreams In The Assembly Of Ladies, Colleen Donnelly

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Two poems, The Assembly of Ladies and The Floure and the Leafe, are unique among Middle English dream visions due to the gender of their narrators; both are narrated by women. In his edition of these two poems, Derek Pearsall argues that whether they were told by women or not is really of little importance. There are many examples of men, such as Lydgate and Deschamps, writing as women. However, while men may speak for women in other types of poems, a woman narrator of Middle English dream vision survives only in these two poems. Moreover, as Alexandra Barratt …

Review Essay: Burke, Peter. The Fortunes Of The Courtier: The European Reception Of Castiglione's Cortegiano, Ronnie H. Terpening

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Burke, Peter. The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione's Cartegiano. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. 210 pp. $40.00.

Review Essay: Field, P. J. C. The Life And Times Of Sir Thomas Malory, W. R. J. Barron

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Field, P. J. C. The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory. Cambridge and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 1993. x + 218 pp. £29.50.

Review Essay: Flint, Valerie I. J. The Imaginative Landscape Of Christopher Columbus, Albrecht Classen

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Flint, Valerie I. J. The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. xx + 233 pp. Illustrations. $27.50.

Review Essay: Hardison, O. B., Jr., And Leon Golden. Horace For Students Of Literature: The "Ars Poetica" And Its Tradition, Albrecht Classen

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Hardison, O. B., Jr., and Leon Golden. Horace for Students of Literature: The "Ars Poetica" and Its Tradition. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1995. xviii + 395 pp. $49.95

Review Essay: Kleiner, John. Mismapping The Underworld: Daring And Error In Dante's 'Comedy', Ronnie H. Terpening

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Kleiner, John. Mismapping the Underword: Daring and Error in Dante's 'Comedy." Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. 182 pp. $32.50.

Review Essay: Lange, Wolf-Dieter, Ed. Diesseits- Und Jenseitsreisen Im Mittelalter. Voyages Dans L'Ici-Bas Et Dans L'Au-Delà Au Moyen Âge, Albrecht Classen

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Lange, Wolf-Dieter, ed. Diesseits- und Jenseitreisen im Mittelalter. Voyages dans l'ici-bas et dans l'au-delà au moyen âge. Studium universale, 14. Bonn: Bouvier, 1992. xii + 247 pp. 20 illustrations. DM75.00.

Review Essay: Rabasa, José. Inventing America: Spanish Historiography And The Formation Of Eurocentrism, Albrecht Classen

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Rabasa, José. Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism. Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory. Norman–London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. xiii + 281 pp. 19 illustrations. $16.95.

Review Essay: Waddington, Raymond B., And Arthur H. Williamson, Eds. The Expulsion Of The Jews: 1492 And After, Paul F. Casey

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Waddington, Raymond B., and Arthur H. Williamson, eds. The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994. 320 pp.

Guinevere's Kidneys, Or The Lancelot–Grail Cycle And The Rise Of Realism, Norris J. Lacy

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One of the most remarkable monuments of medieval literature in any language is the thirteenth-century French Lancelot–Grail Cycle (also called the Prose Lancelot, the Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian Romance, or the Pseudo-Map Cycle—the last because the texts identify the author as Walter Map, who complicated matters, however, by dying well before the cycle was written). Before turning to the subject indicated in my title, I'll situate the cycle and offer a few details about its phenomenal importance.

Review Essay: Rüeg, Walter, Ed. Mittelalter. Vol. I Of Geschichte Der Universität In Europa, Ingrid Baumgärtner

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Ruëgg, Walter, ed. Mittelalter. Vol. I of Geschichte der Universität in Europa. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1993. 435 pp. 7 maps. DM 148. (DM 128 with subscription to all four volumes.)

Review Essay: Staten, Henry. Eros In Mourning: Homer To Lacan, Joseph D. Parry

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Staten, Henry. Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. xvi + 224 pp. Index. $34.95.

Annual Report 1994, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The year got off to an unusual start. The hyperbole associated with the BBC Television production of Middlemarch suddenly shot George Eliot into the forefront of many people's minds. The beginning of the year is always a very busy time but from January onwards I was inundated with letters and phone calls. For three weeks the Fellowship became a full-time occupation. The BBC in London and in Coventry were in regular contact, admirers of George Eliot had their interest newly aroused, students aimed enquiries at us, local clubs and societies wanted talks and tours of the George Eliot Country, newspapers …

Women And Jews In Daniel Deronda, Pam Hirsch

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

When Daniel Deronda was first published in 1876 George Eliot was disappointed that readers tended to 'cut the book into scraps and talk of nothing in it but Gwendolen. I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there'.1 Her contemporary readers had failed to see the connections she had forged between the condition of Jews in British society and the condition of women in British society at a specific moment in history. By 1876 Jews in England had, like Dissenters and Catholics, been allowed to hold most public offices since 1828. In 1858 Rothschild had become …

Metafiction And Metaphor: Daniel Deronda As Golem, Saleel Nurbhai

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A criticism of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, from Henry James onwards, is that it is a novel of two halves: the realist Gwendolen half, and the visionary Mordecai half. These two are regarded as unable to mesh, and thus weaken the novel in structure and purpose. When examining the novel and a contextual interpretation of the Jewish myth of the golem, however, this bifurcation seems intentional; more than that, it is a metafictional rendering of the theme in the novel's structure.

The term golem is central to mythical creation in Judaism. It means an unformed mass. Before he is given …

American Branch Report, Linda Roberston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Several members of the Fellowship in America attended the 1992 MLA Convention in New York in December. On the 28th they gathered together for a Dinner Meeting at Warwick Hotel, New York City.

Harriet Williams, Vice-President of the Fellowship, presided; Linda K. Robertson was moderator of the Special Session discussion; Marjorie Goss was Recorder. Others present were William Baker, Catalina Hannan, Conrad Harper, Shoshana Milgram Knapp, Michael Wolff, and Joanna Yin.

The Fellowship gave a toast to the immortal memory of George Eliot.

The discussion began with the matter of continuing to try to get Allied Organisation status. This requires …

Notes On Contributors

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Jonathan Ouvry is the great-great grandson of George Henry Lewes, and has been President of the Fellowship since 1984.

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.

Beryl Gray lectures in literature for the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies, Birkbeck College. She has recently completed an edition of Adam Bede for Everyman Paperbacks and is preparing The Mill on the Floss for the same series.

Graham Handley has published widely on George Eliot, his latest contribution …

George Eliot And The Politics Of National Inheritance, Bernard Semmel

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a study of George Eliot's political imagination which traces the theme of inheritance through her fiction, taking it both in its ordinary sense of property bequeathed from one generation to another and in the extended sense of the transmission of a nation's culture and traditions. The theme is important in that it shows George Eliot's response to the alienating conditions of modem society and defines her - with 'her deep sense of dependence on the past, her commitment to the English political tradition, and her vision of English nationality' - as an essentially conservative thinker in the tradition …

The Bbc Middlemarch, Ian Mackillop

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

From 12th January to 16th February 1994 the BBC screened its six-part Middlemarch, produced by Louis Marks, scripted by Andrew Davies and directed by Anthony Page, six safe hands (too safe?). It has been issued as a two-cassette videogram (BBCV 5253, 1994) in two parts, the original episode-breaks removed; references here are to hour-minute-second of these tapes. The production is like a grand Folio Society edition.

The BBC Middlemarch is a browns-and-greens 'painterly' production, much of the extravagance of the original bled away. The two principals are given a dignity which Eliot did not make them suffer. Ladislaw (Rufus Sewell) …

George Eliot's Weimar, Gerlinde Roder-Bolton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

When George Eliot and G. H. Lewes arrived in Weimar on 2 August 1854, their expectation were high. They had come to Germany primarily to collect material for Lewes's biography of Goethe on which he had been working for some time, but the journey also represented the start of their life together. They had left London on 20 July and travelled via Antwerp, Brussels, Cologne and Frankfurt. At last they would walk through the streets where Goethe, 'the stately Jupiter', I had not so long ago walked himself. But the glimpses George Eliot caught of Weimar on their early morning …

Alfred Austin And George Eliot: Two Unpublished Letters, Kathleen Adams, William Baker

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Today, Alfred Lord Tennyson's successor as the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin (1835- 1913), is a largely forgotten literary name from the late Victorian and Edwardian worlds of yesteryear. Austin's connection with George Eliot and G. H. Lewes will not be found documented in G. S. Haight's nine volume edition of The George Eliot Letters (New Haven, 1954-78) and his name does not appear in its index. The Autobiography of Alfred Austin Poet Laureate 1835-1910 (2 vols., 1911: reprinted AMS Press, New York, 1973) does refer to meetings between George Eliot, George Henry Lewes and Alfred Austin. G. H. Lewes the …

George Eliot And The British Museum Reading Room, Christopher Date

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I have recently undertaken a search of the Central Archives of the British Museum in an attempt to ascertain the date that George Eliot first used the facilities of the Reading Room of, what was then, the British Museum Library. It occurred to me that the George Eliot Fellowship might be interested in the result of my search.

It had been assumed that Eliot had been a reader here from the time of her move to London in 1851 when she became John Chapman's assistant editor on the Westminster Review. However, nothing had been found so far to verify this …

Fallen Women In The Nineteenth-Century Novel, Tom Winnifrith

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Focusing on the figure of the 'fallen woman' in nineteenth-century fiction, Tom Winnifred’s Fallen Women in the Nineteenth-Century Novel examines the sexual mores of fictional characters in the context of nineteenth-century sexual values generally, as well as in light of the personal conduct and reputations of authors who span the century. Winnifred looks sweepingly at the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. A chapter is devoted to each of these authors, while Mrs. Henry Wood, the focus of the Introduction, serves throughout as a whipping girl and emblem of stereotypical …

Editor's Notes, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

After twelve years as its co-editor, Dr. Graham Handley has decided to resign from the Review. He has many exciting literary projects - George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope - which are going to occupy him full time, though I know that his continued interest and support are to be counted on.

Dr. Handley's commitment to, and work for, the Journal have been tremendous. We are very grateful to him. I was delighted to be asked to join him two years ago when Kathleen Adams's ever-increasing burden of work made it necessary for her to relinquish her role as …

The Real Life Of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters And Fiction, Rosemarie Bodenheimer

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is an important biographical and critical study which takes for its starting point George Eliot's view in 1879 that 'The best history of a writer is contained in his writings - these are his chief actions' (The George Eliot Letters, VII, 230). Rosemarie Bodenheimer - who courageously ignores the current equalization stance of referring to Eliot and Evans - begins with an exemplary chapter, 'On Reading Letters'. She observes 'Letters and novels are both acts of self-representation in writing and, as such, may both be taken, to begin with, as fictions.' This is a neat and persuasive way in, …

The Sickroom In Victorian Fiction: The Art Of Being Ill, Miriam Bailin

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In this densely-argued and fascinating study Miriam Bailin begins by noting the frequency with which the sickroom figures in Victorian fiction as 'a haven of comfort, order and natural affection' in which an alternative, and more congenial, society is created around the invalid and the tormenting moral complexities of life outside, the difficulties of reconciling past and present selves, are simplified. In 'Janet's Repentance', a key text for Bailin, George Eliot writes: 'Within the four walls where the stir and glare of the world are shut out, where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender mercies of his …

American Branch Report, Linda K. Roberston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Linda Robertson has worked hard at getting a George Eliot session at the annual MLA Convention, so far without success. But she sends her usual report of a friendly gathering during the Conference which brings together members in the USA.

On December 29 several members of the Fellowship who were attending the Modem Language Association convention in Toronto met for dinner at Butterfield's Restaurant. Linda K. Robertson presided, and others in attendance were Shoshana M. Knapp, Joanna Yin, Nancy Henry, and Paul Lorenz.

George Eliot's Serial Fiction, Carol A. Martin

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In the past few years, there has been considerable renewed interest in serial literature in the form of single author and general studies. Martin's book on Eliot takes its place alongside works such as Mary Hamer's book on Trollope, Writing by Numbers (1987), Hughes's and Lund's The Victorian Serial (1991), and Harris's and Myers's (eds.) Serials and Their Readers (1993). Martin's study focuses on Eliot's four full-length serializations of Scenes of Clerical Life in Blackwood's Magazine, Romola in Cornhill Magazine, and Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda in part-issue, and provides a publishing and writing history of each. Her analysis uses Eliot's …