English Language and Literature Commons^™

Address Given By Revd. B.A. Ritchie At The Unveiling And Dedication Of A Memorial To George Eliot, B.A. Ritchie

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

There is no difference in kind between our human selves and those particular human beings who we have learnt, throughout our history. to call the artist, the thinker, the hero, the saint . The difference is not one of kind, it is rather one of intensity of experience. At the highest level in our culture the artist. the thinker. the hero. the saint are those who. according to one of the leading theologians of our age, have ventured on our behalf on a journey of intensification. It is. of course. a journey that, to a greater or lesser degree. we …

The 1984 George Eliot Memorial Lecture: Love, Knowledge And Narration: George Eliot On Other Minds, Richard Freadman, D. Phil

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'It was by loving them ... that he knew them; it was not by knowing them that he loved'1 - such was Henry James's legendary conclusion about Balzac and his characters. James's point was simple but important: Balzac was, in his view, able to invest his characters with a special freedom and opaqueness because he loved them as one might love another person. They didn't spring complete and transparent from a fictional blueprint. ²

James makes a similar point about Trollope, a writer in whom he elsewhere finds fault. If Trollope 'was a knowing psychologist, he was so by grace; …

Mill On The Floss: The Author's Tone Of Voice

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is a breathtaking evening at the Fortune Theatre, in the sense that we come to share the actress's evident inhalation of the novel and exhalation of it - all in two hours for us.

It can hardly be described as breathtaking entertainment since "The Mill on the Floss" has, until its tragic end, all the characteristics of its kind least suited, you may think, to theatrical adaptation. So the achievement of Margaret Wolfit in translating George Eliot's supposedly autobiographical novel to the stage (or to the needs of a solitary performer) is the more remarkable.

For it introduces everyone …

George Eliot's Theory Of The Novel, Richard Freadman

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

By the time George Eliot began work on Scenes of Clerical Life late in 1856, she already had in mind a pretty clear idea of what a novel ought to be. Here her work for the Westminster Review and the Leader had been of great assistance, for it had enabled her to assess many contemporary novels as well as numerous works of historical, sociological, philosophical and topical interest. The 'theory' of the novel that resulted was not as comprehensive or integrated as the historic one formalised in Henry James's Prefaces fifty years later, and it clearly underwent alteration as George …

The 1985 George Eliot Memorial Lecture, Michael Bell

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

At the heart of George Eliot's fiction is an abiding concern for truth of feel i ng. The al truism of a Dorothea, as much as the egoism of a Rosamund, can lead to a disastrous failure in self-knowledge and in understanding of the world. Eliot, of course, was concerned with the outer worlds of nature, of society and of history, yet her approach is always through the emotional perceptions of specific individuals. Several of the great mid-Victorian novelists shared this belief that large social questions were to be approached through the issue of right feeling. Most notably Dickens sought …

Book Review: Forms Of Feeling In Victorian Fiction, Kathleen Porter, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The art of representing feeling within a fictional character, and of eliciting response from the reader, was well understood by the great Victorian novelists. Their methods were so successful that the characters they created and the emotional experiences they described affect today's readers as powerfully as the readers of their own time.

In this study, Professor Barbara Hardy examines the forms and languages used by various authors to represent feeling, to analyse it, and to manipulate readers' responses. She begins by considering the techniques of some earlier writers from which developed the more 'realistic' Victorian forms of fiction. She chooses …

Dani El Deronda : George Eliot's "Negro Novel", John Stott

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Daniel Deronda, G.H. Lewes once rather ingenuously explained, was "all about English ladies and gentlemen with the scene laid in Wiltshire" (Letters 6:136)² ... and although the novel is evidently "about" far more than that, Lewes' words are a useful reminder that Deronda gains his entree to the world of the novel as a gentleman, the ward of Sir Hugo Mallinger, and not as a political figure: a believer in a Palestinian homeland for the Jews. I t is necessary for the novel that he believe in something, of course; as R. T. Jones has commented, "In order to …

The Quality Of Humour In 'Brother Jacob', Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'Brother Jacob' was written in 1860. but not published until 1864. some months after Romola had completed its run in the Cornhill Magazine. At first sight it appears to be an undistinguished piece of work. with the omniscient author well in evidence. The opening is heavy-handed, a deliberate and sententious humour being levelled at the reader:

Among the many fatalities attending the bloom of young desire. that of blindly taking to the confectionery line has not. perhaps, been sufficiently considered.

Fortunately, this is prelude to a fascinating story which has a comparable psychological insight to that shown in 'The Lifted …

On Location With 'Silas Marner', Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

If you have ever regarded the life of an actor to be a glamorous one, it would have been something of an eye-opener to have visited the location of the BBC Television film of 'Silas Marner' on a cold March day. The day had followed one of almost continuous rain, and I have never seen such mud, nor so much of it. The setting was in the Cotswolds, chosen because this area remains one of the last almost totally unspoilt regions in England. The production team, eager to be as authentic as possible, had travelled the length and breadth of …

Ignorance And Power: George Eliot's Attack On Professional Incompetence, Linda K. Robertson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Throughout both her essays and her fiction, George Eliot shows little patience with ignorance. in the epigraph to chapter 21 of Daniel Deronda she states, "It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance?" (bk. 1) The failure of an individual to fulfill his role in society with a reasonable level of competence because of inadequate knowledge or an inability to apply information properly is a matter for concern. Beginning with her earliest fiction, Eliot uses characterisation and plot to demonstrate her contempt for a wide spectrum of …

Message Of Greeting From The Fellowship President Mr. ]Onathan G. Ouvry, Jonathan G. Ouvry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The first year of my presidency of the George Eliot Fellowship has now safely passed, and how quickly it went! I have much enjoyed it, and though, for reasons of distance and available time, I have missed many of the most interesting functions with which the newsletter has tempted me from time to time, I have attended, with my wife Marjorie, the annual wreath-laying ceremony at Westminster Abbey which was a great pleasure as always, and the Birthday Luncheon in November which we very much enjoyed.

We were particularly sorry to miss performances on behalf of the Fellowship by Margaret …

Book Review: Frederic Harrison: The Vocations Of A Positivist, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This book, the result of more than half a lifetime's research, provides a much-needed insight into the nature of English Positivism and one of its leading disciples, Frederic Harrison. I t opens excitingly with the twenty-three-year-old Harrison meeting the ageing but wonderfully fluent Auguste Comte, and being so mesmerised that the interview changed the course of his life and gave him his major 'vocation', the spreading of the Positivist gospel. It is a fascinating story, not so much for the positivism but because of the sheer variety of the man and his interests and indestructible energy. Martha Vogeler's great merit …

Book Review: Selections From George Eliot's Letters, Leon Drucker

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a most welcome and meticulous distillation of Dr. Haight's The George Eliot Letters in nine volumes, which in this age of the video cassette will be inaccessible even in many good reference libraries. My only reservation about the editing of this very readable book of some 650 letters in 560 pages is that the letters themselves are not numbered. I certainly commend the informative headnotes above each letter, though sometimes the longer the letter, the briefer the note, which proves that Dr. Haight is never one to obtrude between himself and his heroine.

The first sentence of the …

Toast For The 1985 George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In proposing this toast I thought I would like to look briefly at George Eliot's real children, and before anyone, sensing an even bigger mid-Victorian scandal than she created by Iiving with George Henry Lewes, asks 'Did she have any?', let me define what I mean by 'real'. I do not mean G. H. Lewes's boys, though she was a devoted mother to them in the best sense of the word, writing to them, being caring and concerned at all times, nursing one in his young manhood dedicatedly until his premature death. I do not mean Elma Stuart, whom George …

The George Eliot Fellowship Review, Kathleen Adams, Graham Handley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Cover Design By William Adams M.A.

The Editors do not necessarily agree with the views expressed by contributors, nor does the George Eliot Fellowship accept responsibility for such views.

THE REVIEW is produced photographically by TOPSHOP, a training organization for the young unemployed in Coventry.

No part of the REVIEW may be reproduced without the permission of the Editors.

Contributions are invited for the 1986 issue. They may be on any subject relating to George Eliot’s work, life, family or friends. They should be of up to 1,500 words in length, and it is preferred that footnotes are used only …

Book Review: The Clarendon Edition Of The Novels Of George Eliot (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984), Richard Freadman

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In writing Daniel Deronda George Eliot hoped 'to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs' . Typically, her aspiration was suffused with doubt. She wished the novel to be seen as an integrated work of art but worried about its aesthetic reception; and she feared that the' Jewish element' would elicit an unenthusiastic response. On both counts her apprehensiveness has been proven prophetic. Daniel Deronda remains one of the most controversial of the great English novels, its extraordinary fusion …

George Eliot Country, Amy Clampitt

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

From this Midland scene - glum slag heaps, barge canals, gray sheep, the vivid overlap of wheat field and mustard hillside like out-of-season sunshine, the crabbed silhouette of oak trees (each joint a knot, each knot a principled demurral: tough, arthritic, stubborn as the character of her own father) - fame, the accretion of a Pyrrhic happiness, had exiled her to London, with its carriages and calling cards, its screaming headaches.

Griff House- dear old Griff, she wistfully apostrophized it - in those days still intact, its secrets kept, has now been grafted to a motel-cum-parking-lot beside the trunk road, …

John Letts, The Gifted Warwickshire Re Sculptor., John Letts

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Some four years have elapsed since my first brief encounter with Mary Ann Evans - or 'Ann' as I had called her at that time. I t had been a strange, emotional experience with moments of deep passion and quiet companionship. But, it was not to last. The affair ended as it began, with a suddenness that was, in itself, an awakening. One does not easily get over such an experience except, perhaps, by the passing of time. And time had passed.

It was a surprise, therefore. when I discovered that a few of her close 'friends', knowing of our …

Annual Report - 1984

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

1984 was an exciting year because of the challenge of the George Eliot Statue. Since 1980 the Fellowship Council had felt we were a little in the doldrums. After the interesting years leading up to the centenary of George Eliot's death, and the thrill of finally unveiling the Westminster Abbey Memorial Stone, everything seemed very flat. With no more big anniversaries until 2019, we might be forgiven for feeling that there was nothing much to do. But then, when the centre of Nuneaton was being pedestrianised with its attractive Victorian theme, and the Borough Council suggested making a site available …

Middlemarch : Three Italian Journeys, Henry M. Alley

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In Middlemarch, Dorothea’s intense moment of disillusionment in Rome has been generally traced to Eliot’s own Italian journey of 1860, when, as Gordon S. Haight notes (324),¹ the disappointment in many sights of the Eternal City paralleled her heroine’s. The comparisons are very compelling, especially those involving the joined responses of author and heroine to the interior landscape of St. Paul’s (“the lovely marble… was half-covered with hideous red drapery (Life 132: vol. 2, ch. 10);² "the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere (was) like a disease of the retina" (226; ch. 20)). …

The Evolution Of Doris Lessing's Art From A Mystical Moment To Space Fiction, Nancy Topping Bazin

English Faculty Publications

After publishing ten major novels, Doris Lessing has begun writing what she calls '·space fiction'· for her new series entitled Canopus in Argos: Archives. In a review of the first two novels published in this series, namely, Shikasta ( 1979) and the Marriages Between Zones Three. Four, and Five (1980)¹. Jean Pickering stresses that many of Doris Lessing's most avid readers were initially attracted to her because of her insights about the female experience and because of her allegiance to nineteenth-century realism." Pickering suggests that Lessing's growing interest in space fiction and Sufism (Islamic mysticism) has …

Wordsworth's The Prelude: Critical Tradition And Beyond, Manuela Mourao

Masters Theses

The argument presented in this thesis explores the traditional readings of The Prelude as an autobiography, as an epic, and as a poetics, and proposes that they be considered the starting point to a whole new reading of the poem in the light of Gerard Genette's theory of textuality.

To provide the basis for the proposed new reading I discuss (in Part I, II, and III) the traditional readings of the poem and provide textual evidence of their legitimacy.

I then introduce Roland Barthes' notion of "poietics" and demonstrate how The Prelude fits it, since it is a text that …

0405: Curtis F. Baxter Papers, 1860-1980, Marshall University Special Collections

Guides to Manuscript Collections

Educator and cultural leader. Papers consist of lecture notes for British literature classes at Marshall University, as well as some correspondence. Also includes scrapbook of tributes upon his retirement from the university. The bulk of the collection consists of photographic slides of his extensive travel in Europe and the Caribbean.

To view materials from this collection that are digitized and available online, search the Curtis F. Baxter Papers, 1860-1980 here.

The Immortal Memory Of George Eliot, Jonathan Ouvry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Having been aware, for some time, that I was about to undergo what I thought would be an ordeal, but which I realise may even turn out to be an enjoyable experience, I have been looking out for ways and means of getting through my allotted time without too much difficulty. I was delighted, therefore, to observe a distinguished visitor to the Huguenot Society at a recent meeting. Evidently an experienced academic, he knew just what to do. I n the first place his lecture was written out on a great many small sheets of paper. At the end of …

Biographical Themes In T. S. Eliot's Early Poetry, Jeo-Yong Noh

English Theses & Dissertations

Throughout his career, T. S. Eliot developed his central poetic doctrine, the theory of poetic impersonality. Because of the importance of this theory to Eliot, a question is raised about its importance to his own poetry. Some recent critics, examining Eliot's poetry in the light of his memoirs and biographies, have found that Eliot was not governed by his theory. My thesis is designed to continue this investigation which so far has been done incompletely and randomly.

This investigation finds that Eliot suffered from a congenital double hernia, from his disastrous first marriage, and from general poor health. Furthermore, in …

Westminster Abbey Wreath-Laying, Steve Race

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It was George Eliot's Parson Gilfil who "smoked very long pipes, and preached very short sermons". Anyone speaking on this occasion (whether clergyman or layman) should remember Parson Gilfil, and preach a very short sermon!

But standing here, and looking around this little group of memorials. George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Tennyson, Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, John Masefield ... one can't help thinking how happily they must have greeted one another's arrival in this poetic Pantheon. ("Have you heard, Tom? George Eliot's joining us! "). One also reflects on how long all these now-silent literary lions …

In Search Of Individual Freedom: Ford Madox Ford, Phenomenology & Reader-Response Criticism, Edgar Shields Jr.

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Ford Madox Ford has often been seen by critics as an author of pure style, writing without philosophic underpinnings for his impressionistic techniques. However, philosophy plays a large role in Ford's work—as a foundation for both his themes and literary theory. This philosophy, phenomenology--the metaphysics of individual experience as opposed to universal determinism—came into existence during Ford's lifetime. Though Ford may never have read in phenomenology, his works reflect the movement both in what he writes, by emphasizing the individual over the communal experience, and how he writes, using the idea of the neutral author to present objective narration.

The …

The Development Of The Gyre In The Poetry Of William Butler Yeats, Rebecca D. Miller

Theses & Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

A Study Of John Henry Newman's Influence On Stephen Dedalus In James Joyce's A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, Robert J. Mceleney

Theses & Honors Papers

An analysis of what has been overlooked previously in the relationship between James Joyce, Stephen Dedalus, and John Henry Newman that is seen in the novel A Portrait. James Joyce’s use of Newman’s writings in the novel indicates that he had knowledge of the author’s major works. Additionally, Stephan Dedalus uses quotations from his works. He uses the thoughts and words of Newman’s sermons in his prayer life. Stephen’s intellectual and spiritual growth cannot be properly evaluated apart from Newman’s place in the novel.

A Study Of The Rhythmic Loss And Gain Of Good Fortune In Victorian Fiction, Melinda A. Rash

Theses & Honors Papers

No abstract provided.