English Language and Literature Commons^™

Gwendolen's Story From Daniel Deronda, Gabriel Woolf, Rosalind Shanks

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 1902, the essayist, Leslie Stephen, wrote that Daniel Deronda was 'two stories put side by side' and the 'Gwendolen Story' taken by itself was a 'masterly piece of social satire'. In his biography of George Eliot, Gordon Haight makes a general reference to 'Gwendolen's story' as part of the whole narrative of Daniel Deronda including the Jewish portion. He showed some disdain towards 'careless readers' who thought the Jewish elements could be separated from the story of Gwendolen.

George Eliot herself, writing to Barbara Bodichon, seemed displeased with readers who 'cut the book up into scraps and talk of …

American Branch Report 1997, Shoshanan Milgram Knapp

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The eighth annual MLA dinner, a typically informal and festive occasion, was held at the Ristorante Amalfi in Toronto on Sunday, 28 December 1997. Present were Michael Ballin, Margaret Barfield, Nancy Cervetti, Connie Fulmer, Bonnie Gerard, Gabe Gerard, Shoshana Milgram Knapp, and Richard Maxwell. Shoshana conveyed greetings from Linda Robertson, the new coordinator of the American branch, and from Kathleen Adams.

Review Of Sisters In Literature: Female Sexuality In 'Antigone', 'Middlemarch', 'Howard's End' And 'Women In Love', Masako Hirai

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

While the main theme of this book is clear and easily grasped, there is an unevenness about the treatment which at times is disconcerting. Biography and critical argument sit uneasily together, some of the statements are outside the frame of current criticism, and there are some subjective and questionable assertions. Take this about the relationship between George Henry Lewes and George Eliot: 'Yet even Lewes, I think, was more superficial (sometimes even disloyal) than her nature demanded, having a journalistic rather than an academic mind, and taking a broad interest in everything. Understandably, he could not share her deepest struggle, …

The Stereotyped Edition's Title-Page Vignettes, Beryle Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On 2 November 1866, George Eliot wrote to John Blackwood approving of his proposal to publish an illustrated edition of her books. The project, she saw, was

a wise one, as likely to assist in [the books'] circulation. In the abstract I object to illustrated literature, but abstract theories of publishing can no more be carried out than abstract theories of politics.'

B1ackwood's idea developed into a plan 'to try the cheap illustrated edition of your Novels in six penny numbers of which Adam, The Mill, Scenes, Silas, and Felix would make 30, ultimately to form four volumes selling at …

'Hardy And Eliot': A Response, Toru Sasaki

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In the last issue of the Review, Nicola Harris, in her Fellowship Prize Essay, discussed the different attitudes of Hardy and George Eliot to 'moral perception'.' In the course of her argument she refers to an article of mine, published several years ago, where I dealt with the same passages that she considers. Having read her piece with great interest, I should like to make the following observations.

The reference to what I said occurs where Harris is comparing the description of Boldwood looking fixedly at the Valentine that Bathsheba has sent him (,Here the bachelor's gaze was continually fastening …

Annual Report 1988

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The year began, as always. with the Annual General Meeting on March 25th. The four officers were re-elected and Daphne Paton was welcomed to the Fellowship Council. Joan Bunn was re-elected and both ladies have proved very supportive throughout the year. The business meeting was followed by a showing of slides of North Warwickshire then and now - a fascinating collection by John Burton, Chairman of the Bedworth Society, and to show our appreciation we made a donation to the Society's appeal fund to save the Pump House at the Nicholas Chamberlaine Almshouses in Bedworth.

The second event was almost …

Review Of From Author To Text: Re-Reading George Eliot's Romola; George Eliot And Italy: Literary, Cultural And Politcal Influences From Dante To The Risorgimento, Caroline Levine, Mark W. Turner, Andrew Thomspon

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Each of these books took me by surprise. There is a curious tension between the incorporativeness of Andrew Thompson's title, George Eliot and Italy, and his compendiously specific sub-title, Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento, which somehow led me to expect something like a descriptive catalogue of alleged influences. Instead, I found a book which indeed has awkwardnesses, but which pursues an argument and offers valuable illumination of George Eliot's whole career (and not just Romola, as might easily be assumed). Barbara Hardy memorably observed in 1959 that 'Romola is undoubtedly a book which it is …

"Grand And Vague" Why Is Daniel Deronda About The Jews?, David Malcolm

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'I am sure you are right to leave everything grand and vague', George Eliot's publisher wrote bemusedly to her about Daniel Deronda's Zionism (Letters VI: 272). In his 'Conversation' on Daniel Deronda, Henry James too, like many contemporary and later readers, expresses his doubt and unease about the novel's Zionist subject matter.

Traditional interpretations of the Zionist subject matter in Daniel Deronda are not wholly satisfactory. It is often dismissed as vague and lacking in concreteness (Fisher 227; Bamber 421; Hochman 113-33; LiddellI82), or explained purely in biographical terms, which, while fascinating, do not reveal much about the function of …

Japanese Branch Report 1998, Yuriko Kani

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The second annual convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Toyo University in Tokyo on Saturday, 31 October 1998. After a year of careful preparation, the convention was successful. The morning session began with a welcome speech by Yuzo Uzuhashi, Chair of the English Literature Department at Toyo University. After that, three papers were presented. The first paper, 'Representations of Mobs and Riots: Felix Halt as an Industrial Novel', was presented by Tadashi Wada, a graduate student at Tokyo University. He discussed how the author's ambivalent view of mobs and riots was reflected in the representations …

Review Of A Monument To The Memory Of George Eliot. Edith J. Simcox's Autobiography Of A Shirtmaker, Constance M. Fulmer, Margaret E. Barfield

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The intensity of Edith Jemima Simcox's passion for George Eliot has been known to a twentieth- century reading public since the publication of K. A. McKenzie's Edith Simcox and George Eliot in 1961. McKenzie's book is a combination of summary and quotation of a manuscript acquired by the Bodleian Library in 1958, This manuscript, entitled The Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, is a journal kept by Simcox from 10 May 1876 until 29 January 1900. Gordon Haight wrote the introduction to McKenzie's book, relied on the Simcox manuscript in his 1968 biography of Eliot, and printed lengthy passages from it in …

Review Silas Marner, Geoffrey Beevers

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Following on from his extremely successful stage adaptation of Adam Bede, which won a Time Out award in 1991, Geoffrey Beevers chose to bring another George Eliot masterpiece, Silas Mamer, to the stage at the Orange Tree theatre.

With four stage exit and entry points, this theatre-in-the-round offered a perfect opportunity to create the pace required to move through a tale spanning thirty years in the confines of a two and- a-half-hour play. The cast took full advantage, with actors narrating from all corners while the scene developed centre stage, giving the audience no time to lose the thread.

Narration …

Mathilde Blind, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The first titles in the Eminent Women Series published in 1883 by W. H. Allen included studies of Emily Bronte and George Sand (Margaret Fuller, Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Fry, and Harriet Martineau would be in the next wave) as well as Mathilde Blind's pioneering, sensitive, uneven and sympathetically feminist exposition of George Eliot's life and art. Blind herself deserves a full-length study, and at particular points her own life and works touch those of George Eliot. Born Mathilde Cohen in Mannheim in 1841, she took her stepfather's name when her mother remarried. Dr. Karl Blind was an ardent republican in …

The Twenty-Sixth George Eliot Memorial Lecture: A Troubled Friendship, Gillian Beer

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Edith Simcox is now usually remembered, if at all, as the woman who recorded in a secret journal ('Autobiography of a Shirt Maker') her passionate and physically unrequited love for George Eliot. Yet to her contemporaries Simcox was well known as a philosopher, a distinguished translator of intellectual works from German, an incisive journalist reviewing important works written in French and German as well as English, an ethnographer, and a political activist. She was, under the pen-name 'H. Lawrenny' one of the founding contributors to the Academy in 1869 and appeared for the first time in her own person there …

'My Own Dear Heart's Ease': George Eliot's Coventry Friend, Caroline (Cara) Bray (1814-1905), Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In September 1842 Mary Ann Evans wrote a short but illuminating letter to her Coventry friend Cara Bray:

My own dear Heart's Ease [it was not unusual for her to give her closest friends the name of a flower as she had done this on several occasions before], ... your looks and words of love are so precious to me. I am together ashamed of myself - do not tell anyone that I am so silly as I appear to her whom I love best ... '

We don't know why Mary Ann was so ashamed but we do see …

Review Of George Eliot And Goethe: An Elective Affinity Sisters In Literature: Female Sexuality In 'Antigone', 'Middlemarch,' 'Howards End' And 'Women In Love', Gerlinde Roder-Bolton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's admiration for Goethe is well known but how exactly it impinges on her own fiction is less clear and hence Gerlinde Roder-Bolton's useful attempt to analyse her creative use of him. As the sub-title of this study is perhaps intended to suggest, however, it either combines, or slips between, two different arguments. It looks closely at three parallel texts: The Mill on the Floss and Elective Affinities; Daniel Deronda and Faust; Daniel Deronda and Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. In the first case, evidence is adduced, along with an interpretative argument, to suggest that Goethe's novel significantly aided the composition …

Speaking Of The Raj: Kipling, Forster, And Scott On The English Language In British India, Victoria K. Tatko

Masters Theses

In my thesis I examine how language, particularly the English language, participated in the Raj, as depicted thematically in Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901), E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), and Paul Scott'sThe Raj Quartet (1966-1975): The Jewel in the Crown (1966), The Day of the Scorpion (1968), The Towers of Silence (1971), and A Division of the Spoils (1975). I show that all three authors portray language as central to British colonialism in India; the connection between the English language and the Empire grows increasingly problematic as the linguistic situation becomes a metaphor for the state of …

Abandonment, Neglect, And Poverty As Reflected In The Novels Of Charles Dickens, Melissa K. Smith

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Biographers have written numerous accounts of the events of Charles Dickens's life, and critics have made some interesting observations about Dickens's novels and the characters he depicts in those novels. For example, these critics discuss characters who represent different people Dickens encountered in his life, familial relationships as presented in the novels, and Dickens's attack on various institutions and ideas, such as the Poor Laws, the legal system, and the industrial revolution. There are few references, however, to the influence on his writing of two major experiences in Dickens's childhood, neglect and abandonment by his family, and poverty. I have …

Beryl Gilroy: A Bio-Literary Overview, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

In 1992 when I joined the faculty at the University of Richmond, I taught a class in black women's literature to a group of mainly white students who had previously read little or nothing in this body of literature. One young senior--a white male--did a paper comparing the sympathetic portrayal of the white male character in Beryl Gilroy's Stedman and Joanna and Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine. His enthusiasm for the rich body of literature to which I had introduced him continued after he graduated, and he often wrote to me about books he was reading …

A Rhetorical Comparison Of Spurgeon, Newman, And Macdonald, Robert Ellison

English Faculty Research

This is the first book to employ the methods of orality-literacy scholarship in the study of nineteenth-century preaching. The debate over whether sermons should be read from the manuscript or delivered extempore is analyzed, and the Victorian practices of attending preaching services on Sunday and reading and writing about sermons throughout the week is discussed. The second part of the book analyses the rhetoric of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, John Henry Newman, and George MacDonald, and ends with a comparison of these three preachers' sermons on the death and resurrection of Lazarus.

Fear Of Diminishing Fortunes In Middlemarch, Mirella Scarvaci

Theses : Honours

This thesis offers an interpretation of George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch, which focuses on the historical qualities of Eliot's writing. The thesis invites the need to challenge earlier interpretations of the novel and to develop new theories about the text. The main focus of this research is to show Eliot's presentation of the fear of diminishing fortunes within Middlemarch society. Historical materials are used to verify Eliot's portrayal of the past in Middlemarch. To supplement this, secondary historical sources with a traditional approach will be challenged by recent historical material to ascertain whether Eliot's Middlemarch is a true portrayal of the …

William Butler Yeats And The Cuchulain Cycle, Zhibo Wang

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

"That Gentil Text Kan I Wel Understonde": Textual Authority In Chaucer’S The Wife Of Bath’S Prologue, Emilie Roy

Masters Theses

It has become a critical commonplace to note that Chaucer created the character of the Wife of Bath out of an anti-feminist textual tradition that condemns just the kind of strong-voiced proto-feminist woman that she is. The anti-feminist tradition is deeply embedded in the western cultural framework. Established and perpetuated by a male clergy, it was an integral part of the institutionalized religious structure that controlled education, literacy, and thus access to texts of all kinds. The tradition assumed that woman—viewed as a collective entity—was portrayed as either a moral ideal or a wicked sinner, with little possibility for nuances …

The Representation Of Samson's Eyes In Samson Agonistes, Timothy J. Burbery

English Faculty Research

Everyone knows that in Samson Agonistes Milton altered many details in the judges narrative of Samson, changing Dalila from a concubine to a wife, for instance, and inventing the characters of Harapha and the Public Officer. Yet one alteration that has gone unnoticed is the fact that Samson's eyeballs remain intact and his face looks normal and uninjured even after his being violently blinded by the Philistines.

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon: The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Geoffrey Beevers

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I'm sure you all know more about George Eliot than I do, so I thought I'd talk for a few minutes about the difficulties and joys of adapting her work, and especially Adarn Bede for the stage.

I'd been asked to adapt Adarn Bede for the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond, Surrey, then a tiny room-theatre above a pub. I didn't know much about George Eliot then. I didn't know that just around the corner from the pub theatre was the beautiful house in Park Shot where she had begun to write Adarn Bede and where the sound of George …

Hamish Henderson: The Desert War, Italy, And Scottish Poetry, Patrick G. Scott

Faculty Publications

Catalogue of library exhibition about the Scottish poet and folk musicologist Hamish Henderson (1919-2002), covering Henderson's career during World War II, with the 51st Highland Division in the Western Desert and with the Italian resistance, and after the war as prize-winning poet, as political theorist and translator of Gramsci, as a champion and collector of Scottish traditional song, and as folk performer and composer. Includes information on the Henderson manuscripts in the G. Ross Roy Collection at the University of South Carolina, including drafts of his poem Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (1948).

Wreath-Laying In Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, Carol A. Martin

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The nineteenth century was an age of travellers, including many famous British women travellers. Lady Hester Stanhope lived for years in the Middle East, Mary Kingsley explored the jungles of Gabon and died while performing medical work in South Africa, Isabella Bird Bishop journeyed around the globe and wrote books on Malaysia, China, Japan, the Hawaiian Islands, the Sinai Peninsula, and the valleys and peaks above 10,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

George Eliot was also a woman interested in travel, though in ways different from those of the women I have just named. Several of the earliest …

Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden Nuneaton, Ruth Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I am deeply grateful for the honour of being invited to lay a wreath in memory of George Eliot, and to lay it in a place that meant so much to her.... Nuneaton. Before the heavens opened, I pictured us all gathered outside surrounded by green grass, trees and flowers, and able to imagine the spirit of George Eliot not in her study surrounded by books but out-of-doors, enjoying the fresh air. Some imagination is needed to visualize a little girl gathering flowers in the sunshine, or running towards a Round Pool after her older brother, or leaping with delight …

"The Holy Grail": An Epic Spiritual Quest For Modern Times By Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Rodney Llyn Shetler

Theses & Honors Papers

This thesis will explore the characters and situations presented by Tennyson in "The Holy Grail" to reveal their human qualities and frailties for the purposes of examination and reflection in order to gain a greater understanding of spirituality . For Tennyson himself said that, "My meaning in the Idyll s of the King was spiritual. I took the legendary stories of the Round Table as illustrations. I intended Arthur to represent the Ideal Soul of Man coming into contact with the warring elements of the flesh" (qtd. in Ricks 671). Hallam Tennyson, as well, observes that "Throughout the …

Ivanhoe, Chivalry, And The Murder Of Mary Ashford, Gary Dyer

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Nautical Quest, Bradford S. Warner

English Theses & Dissertations

Despite crossing genres and continents, strong literary connections exist between Coleridge's poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Poe's novella The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and Melville's novel Moby Dick or the Whale. The works are similar in terms of plot, symbolism, and other artistic devices. Ties between any two of the works have been mentioned in literary scholarship over the last century, yet I have located none involving all three.

None of the present criticism has revealed that each work utilizes several important literary devices, such as a quality of incorporation of source material (including travel …