English Language and Literature Commons^™

Review Of The Dog In The Dickensian Imagination, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The nineteenth century saw great changes in the way the English thought about animals. This wasn't only because of Darwinian revelations; it was also the result of increased urbanization and industrialization. Less frequently confined to the farmyard or the hunting kennels the dog, in particular, entered the daily life of humans as never before. It became a domestic pet, a fellow worker, the object of scientific enquiry; in today's accepted phrase, it became a member of 'a companion species', deserving understanding and concern. Dorothea Brooke, we might recall, was 'always attentive to the feelings of dogs, and very polite if …

Silas Marner: George Eliot's Most Coleridgean Work?, Jen Davis

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In 1861 Henry Crabb Robinson compared George Eliot's Silas Mamer with Coleridge's 'The Ancient Mariner'. He noted the novel's 'great affinity' with the poem: 'A little child, its mother having frozen to death at his solitary hovel, is taken in by Silas [ ...]. It is to him what the blessing of the animals is to the Ancient Mariner.' 1 In 1977, U. C. Knoepflmacher argued that: '[b]oth The Mill on the Floss and Silas Mamer hark back to those poems of severance, loss, and expiation that had haunted the imaginations of Coleridge and Wordsworth at the turn of the …

Review Of George Eliot In Context, Margaret Harris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This collection offers a wide range of individual and rigorous criticism, with essays by the most informed specialists: amongst others, Margaret Harris on 'Biographies’, John Rignall on 'Landscape' and 'Metropolitanism’, Melissa Raines on 'Language', Leonee Ormond on 'The Visual Arts', Ruth Livesey on 'Class' and 'Transport', Joanne Shattock on 'Editions ' and 'Publishing and Publishers’, Richard Menke on 'Industry and technology'. Texts in context include journalism as well as fiction and poetry.

I have a few reservations. Most of the essays are remarkably condensed but one or two have more breadth than depth. In 'Travel and Tourism' Judith 10hnston touches …

Review Of Oscar Browing's Life Of George Eliot, Tapan Kumar Mukherjee

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I would like to draw the attention of interested readers and George Eliot scholars to one of the earliest biographies of George Eliot, that written by Oscar Browning. It is a book which, apart from many interesting anecdotes of her life, might still be valuable to them for the exhaustive annotated bibliography, compiled by John Parker Anderson of the British Museum, appended to the end of the volume. The extent and range of the bibliographical details collected there are the result of very thorough, painstaking research which may provide further new insights and give clues to unexplored areas in the …

Review Of The Victorian Diary: Authorship And Emotional Labour, Anne-Marie Millim

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The diary genre has been repeatedly explored both as a confessional, retrospective form of writing and 'as an inherently female genre' (p. 17). Refreshingly, Millim challenges these approaches by stressing not only the genre's multiplicity, but also its ability to shape future, rather than past, experiences. This study is positioned alongside the more recent 'pragmatic, rather than ideological' (p. 23) approaches of Delafield's Women's Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2009) and Steinitz's Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth Century British Diary (2011). Millim's The Victorian Diary is less wide-ranging (unlike Delafield and Steinitz, she does not also …

Romola And Politics, Andrew Sanders

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It could properly be argued that Romola is George Eliot's most overtly political novel. Unlike Felix Holt or Middlemarch it doesn't directly refer to near contemporary political events, or to those of George Eliot's childhood and youth. Unlike Adam Bede it does not deal with the ramifications of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars which cast their long shadow over the Victorian years. Nevertheless, Romola demands that readers respond to a whole range of complex political issues: historical, sexual, feminist, religious and, of course, to a whole range of historical concerns which can be seen as fore-shadowings of the vital …

Romola's Religious Experience, Alain Jumeau

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Romola can be seen as a landmark in George Eliot's career, when we bear in mind her striking confession to her second husband, John Cross: 'I began it a young woman -, I finished it an old woman' (Haight [1968] 362). Many of her readers, indeed, felt it represented a new departure, far from the world of Adam Bede, Mrs Poyser and Silas Mamer. It was a more ambitious novel, with more refined and educated characters, set in a foreign country, in a distant past. Her first works of fiction were also set in the past, but only one or …

Supplementary Annotations To Daniel Deronda, Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The annotations to the first and second Penguin Classics editions of Daniel Deronda, by Barbara Hardy and Terence Cave respectively, and those of the Oxford World's Classics edition, by Graham Handley, weave a web like that attributed by Marvell to Cromwell - 'a net of such a Scope'' that very little has escaped its threefold curtain. Even so, one or two leavings that they missed or deliberately passed over might be worth recording here.

Chapter 1, p. 42:2 Do you mean that old Adonis in the George the Fourth wig?

Terence Cave passes over this entirely, but Barbara Hardy …

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 24 November 2013- The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Sheila Woolf

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

First of all, may I say what an enormous honour it is to be asked to speak on this very special occasion. When John asked me in January what I was doing on 24 November, I was obviously not quick enough to think of a reason to duck out of the responsibility! In fact, I wondered he had asked several others more agile with their excuses before he got round to me.

John asked me to speak about 'What George Eliot means to me'. In consequence, my speech will not be an academic one - those who went to the …

A Response- 2014, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Against Marianne Burton's carefully argued case for the consummation of the Casaubon marriage are images and hints which I mentioned in The Appropriate Form: an Essay on the Novel' and Particularities: Readings in George Eliot,' especially: the Cadwallader and Chettam opinions: 'A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in, and 'no good red blood'; the onanistic echo of 'the seeds of joy are forever wasted', (Middlemarch, Ch. 42); Casaubon's lack of bliss; post-marital absence of expectations of issue; 'the way' in which 'years to come' ... might be filled with joyful devotedness' became less clear …

Chairman's Annual Report For 2013, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

We can be pleased with the Fellowship's year in 2013. For some time now we have tried to add extra events to the well-established series of meetings built up over the years. In 2013 we looked towards Coventry to provide a theme for the year, and were delighted with the results, much helped, it has to be said, by the enthusiasm and new ideas brought to the Fellowship by Vanessa Oakes, whose writing skills have much enhanced our programme. The other major event for the year was our emergence, blinking and floundering, into the world of websites and Facebook (Twitter …

Casaubon's Impotence: A Literary Libel?, Marianne Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

There are some literary hypotheses which so suit readers' impressions of a text that they become accepted almost as literary fact, as if they were stated in the text itself or had been confirmed by the author in an interview, letter or notebook. This seems to have become the case with Edward Casaubon's sexual impotence in Middlemarch. Gordon Haight complained that undergraduates 'despite a generation of sex-education' never failed to describe Casaubon as impotent simply by virtue of his age. Casaubon was around forty-eight. Haight was seventy-three when he wrote this essay, and indignantly listed the famous men who had …

George Eliot And Psychosomatic Illness: A Footnote To The Biographies, Brenda Mckay

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A reader of George Eliot's novels, with their luminous intelligence and authoritative command of a fictional world, might be surprised to learn that this author was actually frequently tormented by crises of confidence, exhaustion and bodily pain. Her illnesses were often exacerbated by her novel-writing; but certainly not always. '[M]y life’, as she wrote, 'has always been much broken by physical malaise'.' She later commented that, despite extensive medical tests, the doctors could find nothing wrong with her. The word 'malaise' suggests extreme somatic discomfort, not necessarily associated with disease, but also depression. Eliot herself was aware, as she acknowledged …

'In Isolation Human Power Is Limited, In Combination It Is Infinite': Tracing Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence Of Christianity Through Daniel Deronda, Milena Schwab-Graham

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Written between January 1873 and June 1876, Daniel Deronda was George Eliot's final and most ambitious novel. The Jewish-born, later excommunicated Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose Ethics Eliot translated in 1856, would perhaps seem the more obvious choice of philosophical context for our analysis of Deronda, owing to his religious affinity with the eponymous protagonist. However, Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, translated by Eliot in 1854, provides a more thorough basis for drawing out the ethical complexities of her final novel. Feuerbach's philosophy, the influence of which is integral to all her novels, hinges upon 'the moral [ ...] qualitative, …

In Memoriam Of Andrew Brown, Joanne Shattock

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Andrew Missak: Cleverley Brown died peacefully at home on 21 January 2014, days short of his sixty-fourth birthday, and only months after his retirement from the position of Development Director for Academic Publishing at Cambridge University Press. He joined the Press as a Graduate Trainee in 1976, and over subsequent decades was influential in developing first the literary studies list, then Humanities and Social Science more broadly, and finality the whole of Academic and Professional Publishing. While he had an extraordinary range of interests, his scholarly heartland was Victorian fiction: his Cambridge doctorate was on 'The Metaphysical Novels of Edward …

Japanese Branch Report- 2013, Ayako Tani

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Saturday 7 December 2013, the Seventeenth Annual Convention of The George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Keio University.

The morning session started with an opening address by Maiko Otake (Obirin University). Three papers were presented in the morning session. The first two were commented on by Toyotsugu Matsui (Daido University) and the third by Hideo Takano (Komazawa University).

The first speaker was Nanae Hama (Seinan Gakuin University), whose subject was 'The Hero Worship and the Imperial Consciousness: How George Eliot Described Heroes among Children'. In her presentation on The Mill on the Floss (1860), Hama argued that …

Laughter Vesus Sympathy In Romola And Felix Holt, Louise Lee

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I want to start with a useful rather than a funny question posed by the critic Hilary M. Schor: 'What acts of information-organization do we perform on the Eliot career?'! The answer is possibly a succession of familiar base-touchings: Eliot's Warwickshire childhood and family life, the loss of her evangelical faith, her London journalism and reviewing, the development of her artistic values through engagement with European art and literature - the works of Baruch Spinoza, Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, and Auguste Comte - and, of course, her partnership with George Henry Lewes. Other notable Eliot 'themes' might include science, religion, …

Obituary Of Andrew Brown, Joanne Shattock

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I first met Andrew Brown on the conference circuit in the early 1980s. As the recently appointed senior editor for literature at Cambridge University Press he was a regular presence at Victorian Studies conferences, wearing his Press hat, but unlike many other publishers, attending as a productive scholar in his own right. He got in touch with me in 1989 asking if he could come to Leicester to talk about a project he was contemplating, a new edition of the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, the nineteenth-century volume of which had been last updated under George Watson's editorship in 1969. …

Politics And Pastoral In Silas Marner, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

When eighteen-year-old sumameless Eppie stands by Silas Mamer and against Godfrey Cass she joins a line of subversive children in Victorian fiction. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre speaks out against her aunt; Dickens's Oliver Twist asks for more gruel; his Paul Dombey asks the capitalist father, 'What is money after all?' One child rebels against adult power; one against institutional power; one against the cash nexus. The children are all economic dependants but there is no emphasis on class. Oliver behaves like a little gentleman; Paul is a little gentleman; Jane tells Brocklehurst she would not like to be poor, and …

Review Of After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, And The Mind, Angelique Richardson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This extremely interesting and well organized collection of 11 original essays and an 'Afterword' is not greatly concerned with George Eliot, although it would seem every major Victorian concern somehow ends by involving her. As a study that aims at what its title indicates, it includes George Eliot and G. H. Lewes as direct subjects, hut only in one essay, Angelique Richardson's 'George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, and Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and Morals'. Although, she concedes, both 'maintained human distinction in their writing' (p. 137), George Eliot felt and expressed through anthropomorphism, a real kinship with animals. With Lewes (whose …

Conference Report: Romola And Felix, Institute Of English Studies, 23 November 2013., A.G. Van Den Broek

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's two Marmite novels - given their reputations, not everyone tries them, and when they do, they often leave them only partially digested - Romola (1862-3), the one she famously said aged her, and Felix Holt (1866), the one with that involved legal plot, were the focus of last year's George Eliot Conference sponsored by the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. Nevertheless, despite their uneven appeal, the Conference drew a tolerably-sized audience. Barbara Hardy (Birkbeck and Swansea) and Louise Lee (Roehampton) once again organized the Conference, bringing together a group of speakers who variously dealt …

'The Antigone And Its Moral': George Eliot's Antigonean Considerations, Kathryn Brigger Kruger

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

As early as 1856 with the publication of the essay, 'The Antigone and Its Moral' ,1 George Eliot turned her literary attention to the Sophoclean figure of Antigone. Scholars such as Gerhard Joseph' and David Moldstad' have enumerated Eliot's multiple references to Antigone, and they have argued that Eliot makes Antigone a relevant figure for '"modern" life' (Joseph, 27) and an example of 'the continuity of man's elemental self, concerned in all ages with similar needs and problems, though moral codes have come and gone' (Moldstad, 531). Where Joseph traces the specific Antigone references in Eliot's fiction - especially in …

The Golden Gates Are Passed, Robert Muscutt

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

There have always been attempts not just to conceal knowledge of George Eliot's life but also to manipulate it into conformity with a preconceived profile. In the Preface to his edition of The George Eliot Letters in nine volumes, Gordon Haight revealed that those pages of her Journal from immediately after her father's death in 1849 until shortly before she went to Weimar with Lewes in 1854 were tom out and presumably destroyed, probably by Cross. Charles Lewes, George Eliot's main literary executor, also seems to have destroyed nine of his father 's journals, the first volume extant beginning in …

The Two Felixes: Narrational Irony And The Questions Of Radicalism In Felix Holt And 'Address To Working Men, By Felix Holt', Helen Kingstone

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In this characterization of Dorothea by the narrator of Middlemarch (1871-2), the 'Great' Reform Act of 1832 is posited as a dividing line between two phases of history, so distinct as to have separate spheres of interest and judgements of normality. George Eliot flatters her mid-Victorian reader by insinuating that only the 'modem' mind of their shared present could understand the zeal of a humanistic 'exalted enthusiasm' that took its source of energy from within. In this passage, therefore, 'reform' seems to be the key to historical, social and personal change. The issue of reform - of society, of institution …

'And Her Wings Fall From Her And She Drops To The Ground': Reading Eliot's Mr Casaubon Through Benjamin Jowett's Phaedrus, Royce Best

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In the scene describing Casaubon 's pathetic mental state prior to his heart attack in Chapter XXIX of Middlemarch, the narrator makes an enigmatic reference: 'Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control'.' It seems odd to conclude this powerful passage, long read as a telling example of the hazards of over-study without meaningful application, with a reference to ancient Greek drama. Yet, perhaps not enough attention has been given to the indebtedness …

Chairman's Annual Report 2012, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The year began in March with an introduction to Romo/a for the Nuneaton George Eliot Study Group which was attended by nearly forty local members. This was followed up by more in depth sessions on Romola at Bedworth Almshouses after Easter. These sessions were aimed at those going to Florence in November, to walk in Romola's footsteps. Numbers were constant throughout the sessions and we ended the ten sessions by watching the 1924 silent film version of the book. The study notes for these sessions will be made available to members worldwide on the website

Following the AGM that same …

The Forty-First George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2012- Romola's Artists, Leonee Ormond

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

2012-2013 marks the one hundred and fiftieth birthday of Romola. Originally published in the Comhill Magazine from July 1862 to August 1863, it later appeared in a three volume edition in 1863. An illustrated edition followed in 1865.

George Eliot had begun work on the novel in 1861, when she was forty-one. She had recently published Silas Mamer, and The Mill on the Floss, preceded by Adam Bede, had come out not long before that. The genesis of Romola came in May 1860 when George Eliot and George Henry Lewes spent two weeks in Florence. Lewes noted that, …

George Eliot, Marcel Proust, And The Logic Of Desire, Kenichi Kurata

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The influence of George Eliot's fiction on Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time has often been discussed. For instance, L. A. Bisson drew attention in 1945 to 'the possibility, even the likelihood, of[ ... ] [an] immediate and sympathetic suggestion' by Eliot, citing Proust's claim in 1910 that 'II n'y a pas de litterature qui ait sur moi un pouvoir comparable a la litterature anglaise ... deux pages du Moulin sur la Floss me font pleurer.'2 Bisson goes on to suggest that three specific passages in The Mill on the Floss have their counterparts in Proust's work, the …

George Eliot, Scientific Materialism And Literary Form: Some Relfections On Felicia Bonaparte's Will And Destiny, K.M. Newton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Felicia Bonaparte's study of Eliot's fiction, Will and Destiny: Morality and Tragedy in George Eliot's Novels, was published in 1975. I read it rather quickly towards the end of the 1970s because at the time I was working on a study of Eliot of my own and inevitably my attention was somewhat focused on whether there was going to be any overlap with my book. Since Bonaparte's book argued strongly that Eliot was intellectually committed to empiricism and scientific rationality and mine attempted to bring out her relation to aspects …

George Eliot's Brazilian Critical Fortune And The Case Of Romola, Jaqueline Bohn Donada

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I would like to begin this paper with a comment by Professor Felicia Bonaparte about George Eliot's novels. In an introductory reflection, she once observed that

We have found nothing yet that Eliot did not deliberately put in her novels; [ ... ]. Indeed, the fact is we have not yet read in these novels all that Eliot wrote. We have not yet, for example, looked carefully at what Eliot had to say about women in society. Eliot was a great feminist, and her novels, although they never stoop to mere propaganda, urge a relentless war against the conditions by …