Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Significant Themes In 19th-Century Literature, Matthew L. Jockers, David Mimno

Department of English: Faculty Publications

External factors such as author gender, author nationality, and date of publication affect both the choice of literary themes in novels and the expression of those themes, but the extent of this association is difficult to quantify. In this work, we apply statistical methods to identify and extract hundreds of "topics" from a corpus of 3,346 works of 19th-century British, Irish, and American fiction. We use these topics as a measurable, data-driven proxy for literary themes. External factors may predict fluctuations in the use of themes and the individual word choices within themes. We use topics to measure the evidence …

Review Of Women And Personal Property In The Victorian Novel, Deborah Wynne

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Dorothea Brooke was reluctant to accept the bequest of her mother's jewellery, but was George Eliot equally resistant to the allure of pretty things? Deborah Wynne thinks not. Wynne cites a letter from Eliot to her friend Elma Stuart in which the energizing pleasure of 'little joys' is a cause for celebration:

it is cheering to think that there are blue clocks as well as troubles in the world. There is another spiritual daughter of mine whom I should gladly see eager about some small delight - a china monster or a silver clasp - instead of telling me that …

'The Generations Of Ant And Beavers': Classical Economics And Animals In The Mill On The Floss, Andrew Lallier

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Before any named characters find their way into The Mill on the Floss, the narrator introduces us to two sets of animals (aside from a human driver): white ducks dipping their heads into the stream and horses pulling a covered wagon. The ducks are characterized as being 'unmindful of the awkward appearance they make in the drier world above' (24). This characterization serves a comic purpose, indicating a disparity between the mentality of the unreflective animals and the implicit judgement of the narrator's gaze. By contrast, the horses seem to possess a surprisingly developed interiority (however conditioned by the narrator's …

'There Is No Such Thing As Natural Barrenness In Natural Women': Childless Marriages In Silas Marner And The Lifted Veil., Marianne Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'There is no such thing as natural barrenness in natural women' wrote the eminent French psychologist Eugene Becklard in the 1840s, and, in general, physicians agreed with him. Certainly in mid-nineteenth-century literature children were the sine qua non of a successful marriage; courtship novels rarely ended at the altar, happy endings demanded babies. Unlike lady novelists who wrote silly novels, George Eliot thought marriage, with its complications, compromises, and lack of easy exits, was quite as interesting as courtship, and childless marriages were generally more interesting than generative ones. The two childless marriages' in Silas Mamer and The Lifted Veil …

Chairman's Annual Report 2011, Jphn Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It was a good year for the Fellowship. Our membership numbers held their own, and although some older members have difficulty getting to events, we have attracted new members who have been enthusiastic in their support.

The theme for the year was Silas Mamer, which celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2011. The first event of the year was the AGM, which we had hoped to expand with a keynote lecture to start the year by Barbara Hardy. Unfortunately, Barbara had to cancel due to ill-health but undaunted, we arranged a review of the previous year and had useful discussions about …

Deronda And The Tigress: Buddhism, Compassion, And National Consciousness In George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Josh Moats

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Many scholars have written about George Eliot's treatment of Judaism in Daniel Deronda (hereafter DD), but no one has yet explored why George Eliot includes Buddhism in the novel. Eliot engages with Buddhism most explicitly in chapter thirty-seven when Mirah compares Deronda to the Buddha: 'Mr Hans said yesterday that you thought so much of others you hardly wanted anything for yourself. He told us a wonderful story of Bouddha giving himself to the famished tigress to save her and her little ones from starving. And he said you were like Bouddha. That is what we all imagine of you' …

From George Eliot To Her 'Rabbi': An Epistolary Find, Peter A. Brier

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I cannot be easy without writing a word or two this morning for I am conscious that I made myself more disagreeable than nature obliges me to be by my hard quips to you. They were not warrantable by anything but a strong personal and impersonal interest in that sensitive being of yours, which holds what may be very precious things in its keeping. And even with that warrant it will be a proof of your fondness if you quite forgive me.

You look wretched - and I have now so much of that subtle misery which can be explained …

The George Eliot Review: Journal Of The George Eliot Fellowship- 2012 No. 43, Beryl Gray, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors .............................................................. 5

ARTICLES Josh Moats: Deronda and the Tigress: Buddhism, Compassion, and National Consciousness in Daniel Deronda (Prize Essay)....................................................... 7

Joanne Shattock: Models of Authorship: Margaret Oliphant and George Eliot...................18

Marianne Burton: 'There is no such thing as natural barrenness in natural women': Childless Marriages in Silas Marner and The Lifted Veil..................... 31

Melissa Raines: Knowing Too Much: The Burden of Consciousness in the Lifted Veil ........................................................................................... 39

Andrew Lallier: 'The generations of ants and beavers': Classical Economics and Animals in The Mill on the Floss................................................................. .4 7

Peter A. Brier: From George Eliot to her …

Japanese Branch Report - 2011, Mizue Aida

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Saturday 3 December 2011, the Fifteenth Annual Convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Ferris University.

The morning session began with an opening address by Hidetada Mukai (Ferris University). Three papers were presented in the morning: the first two were introduced and commented upon by Hiroshi Ikezono (Yamaguchi University) and the third by Mie Abe (Shoin University).

The first paper 'Sensitivity and Materiality in "The Lifted Veil'" was presented by Mari Takumi (Tokyo University). She focused on Latimer and his supernatural ability to look into the minds of others and see the reality through his …

Knowing Too Much: The Burden Of Omniscience In The Lifted Veil, Melissa Raines

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In the spring of 1859, not long after the success of her first novel, Adam Bede, George Eliot submitted a much shorter work to her publisher, John Blackwood, for his consideration. Blackwood's eventual letter in response to the piece arrived more than a fortnight later and had to be prompted by Eliot's partner, George Henry Lewes. Perhaps Blackwood's belated reply was somewhat understandable: he must initially have been thrilled by the prospect of another submission from the rising new author, but the strangeness of this undeniably macabre new tale unsettled him. A story of supernatural power and science that pushed …

Models Of Authorship: Margaret Oliphant And George Eliot, Joanne Shattock

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This article is about the profession of authorship in the nineteenth century. More specifically it is about the writing lives of two women novelists. Margaret Oliphant's (1828-1897) work is unfamiliar to most modem readers, apart from her Autobiography, one or two of her supernatural tales, and possibly the 'Chronicles of Carlingford', the series for which she was best known, novels and stories set in an English provincial town where life revolves around church and chapel. George Eliot (1819-1880) on the other hand, needs no introduction to today's readers.

In one of her many reviews of the works of her contemporaries, …

Review Of Dorothea's Daughter And Other Nineteenth-Century Postscripts, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This book is the fruit of many years of thought about nine great novels. Barbara Hardy does not present us with a series of sequels, though we do learn of things that happened after the action of the novels ended. Rather, she offers a set of conversations in which two (or, in some cases, three) characters from each novel reflect on the past. This formula allows her to focus on aspects of the stories that intrigue her, or that frustrate her wish to have a full understanding of fictional people who, it is clear, move and interest her as much …

Review Of George Eliot: Interviews And Recollections, K.K. Collins

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In his introduction to this fascinating collection of accounts and comments by those who met George Eliot, K. K. Collins points out that modem biographies draw on about forty recollections that have come to form a canon of reminiscence. To this canon his volume adds a large number of unfamiliar sources, arranging more than two hundred items in sections which follow the chronology of her career, with subdivisions for the years of her fame under headings such as 'Sunday Gatherings at the Priory' and 'Eton, Cambridge and Oxford', and with full and helpful annotation of names and details. Of the …

Review Of George Eliot, European Novelist, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On the opening page of this series of connected essays, John Rignall points out that 'George Eliot's readers and reviewers took it for granted that her novels belonged to a European tradition of fiction'. When Leavis conscripted her into his new canon after the Second World War, this dimension of her work was largely erased and has only recently begun to re-emerge thanks to the work of Rosemary Ashton, Elinor Shaffer and others - not least John Rignall himself. One reason for this neglect was no doubt intrinsic to the work: Rignall concedes that George Eliot's fictions are set overwhelmingly …

Review Of Landscape And Gender In The Novels Of Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, And Thomas Hardy: The Body Of Nature, Eithne Henson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

At the heart of Eithne Henson's book is a comment made by George Eliot when she reviewed Ruskin's Lectures on Architecture and Painting in 1854: 'To a certain degree, all artistic interpretation of Nature is conventional' (p. 75). Henson's concern is with the precise nature of the conventions on which Victorian novelists were able to draw in their representations of landscape, and the extent to which those conventions were gendered. But Henson also asks: who is looking? From what position or perspective? The result is a rich study of what we might call the 'painterly' eye of Victorian narrative. Henson …

Review Of Modernizing George Eliot: The Miter As Artist, Intellectual, Proto-Modernist, Cultural Critic, K.M. Newton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This distinguished work by a major Eliot scholar is the product of decades of reading, writing and reflection on her fiction and thought. It brings together in revised, homogenized form a series of essays from 1972 to the present day, including new material; and further, it engages with and amplifies two of Newton's earlier monographs on Eliot, as well as his collection of essays by other critics on Eliot utilizing modem literary theory. Despite dealing with complex philosophical ideas, Newton's writing is clear and lucid throughout, bringing to light new insights without the unnecessary jargon that occasionally taints modem criticism. …

Review Of Silas Marner On Bbc Radio 4

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Unheralded in the Radio Times and elsewhere, Silas Mamer, dramatized by Richard Cameron, was broadcast as the Classic Serial on Radio 4 in two one-hour instalments on 16 and 23 October 2011. I was pleased that I spotted it. George Eliot has been favourably treated on radio and television, especially in the past twenty years or so. We've had televised versions of Silas Mamer, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, The Lifted Veil and Daniel Deronda have all been serialized on the radio. Radio 7 recently repeated a broadcast of Silas Mamer with the late …

Review Of The Art Of Comparison: How Novels And Critics Compare, Catherine Brown

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This book is a defence of comparative literature in theory - if it has a theory - and in practice by concentrating on three novels - Daniel Deronda, Anna Karenina, Women in Love - which are structurally similar in various respects, most obviously in employing double plots focusing on two couples, and thematically related in terms of their interests and concerns. The book is clearly derived from a doctoral dissertation and has some obvious features of the genre: a thesis which it endeavours to make persuasive by argument and supporting evidence, reference to much previous criticism on the subject, a …

Review Of The Business Of The Novel: Economics, Aesthetics And The Case Of Middlemarch., Simon R. Frost

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

With excellent research available on the publication history of Middlemarch, including work by John Sutherland, N. N. Feltes, Carol Martin, David Finkelstein and others, it may seem surprising that an entire book has now been devoted to the topic. But as the title of Simon R. Frost's The Business of the Novel: Economics, Aesthetics and the Case of Middlemarch suggests, this book takes Middlemarch as a case study to illustrate and test some larger theoretical claims and methodological practices. In his introduction, Frost admits that most of the material on Middlemarch has been covered by other critics, but that he …

Review Of The Life Of George Eliot: A Critical Biography, Nancy Henry

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The literary biographer's most difficult task is to find plausible, sophisticated ways of connecting a human life with the art that emerges from it. In the case of a major imaginative artist like George Eliot, the accumulated weight of previous biographies and critical studies only makes that task more challenging. Nancy Henry confronts this situation head-on in The Life of George Eliot. Her book is not just another re-telling of the familiar narrative, written as if it were starting anew. Instead, Henry has grappled with what a genuinely 'critical biography' might mean on a number of different levels. She interrogates …

“The Grin Of The Skull Beneath The Skin:” Reassessing The Power Of Comic Characters In Gothic Literature, Amanda D. Drake

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Neither representative of aesthetic flaws or mere comic relief, comic characters within Gothic narratives challenge and redefine the genre in ways that open up, rather than confuse, critical avenues. Comic characters in the Gothic texts of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Clara Reeve establish the comic as a serious and legitimate part of the Gothic aesthetic. Comic characters continue to appear in all forms of the Gothic, including its parodies, well into the nineteenth-century, suggesting that these characters endure as necessary and vital elements within the evolving Gothic genre. As the genre evolves, the characters evolve as well, progressing from …

Piracy, Slavery, And Assimilation: Women In Early Modern Captivity Literature, David C. Moberly

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines a hitherto neglected body of works featuring female characters enslaved in Islamicate lands. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Englishmen and women were taken captive by pirates and enslaved in what is now the Middle East and North Africa. Several writers of the time created narratives and dramas about the experiences of such captives. Recent scholarship has brought to light many of these works and pointed out their importance in establishing what was still a young, unsure, and developing English identity in this early period. Most of this scholarship, however, has dealt with narratives of the …

Between Deafness And Sound: Aurality And The Limits Of Sympathy In The Mill On The Floss, Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In his review of The Mill on the Floss on 19 May 1860 for The Times, E. S. Dallas began by arguing that Eliot's first novel Adam Bede was successful because 'the temporary delight of listening to a pleasant tale' it gave its readers helped to achieve 'the permanent good of an increased sympathy with our kind'.1 Although the publication of The Mill on the Floss proved, according to Dallas, that 'George Eliot' was 'as great as ever', it could not match the triumph of Adam Bede because she was determined not to repeat the idealism of a world that …

Mr. And Mrs. Cross With The Artist John Wharlton Bunney In Venice, June 1880, Sarah Bunney

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The dramatic incident in Venice on the morning of 16 June 1880, when the newly married John Walter Cross jumped into the Grand Canal from his hotel room's balcony, has attracted much curiosity and speculation. Understandably Mrs. Cross (George Eliot) was reticent about the happening in her journal and letters, and also wrote little about her stay in Venice before and after the event. But there is another source of information about the couple's Venetian experiences - the personal recollections and correspondence of the English artist John Wharlton Bunney (1828-82).

Bunney, described by Marian as 'an excellent painter and an …

Japanese Branch Report- 2010, Naomi Ohno

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Saturday 4 December 2010, the Fourteenth Annual Convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Okayama University.

The morning session began with an opening remark by Hiroshi Oshima (Hyogo University of Teacher Education), followed by a Welcome Address by Shintetsu Fukunaga (Okayama University). In the morning, we had three papers presented. The first two papers were introduced and commented upon by Shota Nakajima (Tokushima Bunri University), and the third by Mizue Aida (Nihon University).

The first paper was 'The Seductive Power of Eyes - Re-examining Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss' by Eri Yoshimura …

The Thirty-Nine George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2010- The Mill On The Floss And The Difficulties Of Relationships, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

By late 1859, when she had almost finished writing The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot was still unsure of its final title. The working title was 'Sister Maggie', which was particularly appropriate to the first two thirds of the novel, where interest is concentrated on the pleasures and pains of the childhood relationship between Tom and Maggie Tulliver. But in the last third of the book, attention had turned to the romantic relationship between Maggie and Stephen Guest, itself intruding into Maggie's near-engagement to Philip Wakem, with Tom kept in the background until the death of brother and sister …

The George Eliot Review- Journal Of The George Eliot Fellowship 2011: No. 42, Beryl Gray, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors ........................................................ .5

ARTICLES Sarah Bunney: Mr and Mrs Cross with the Artist John Wharlton Bunney in Venice, June 1880 (Prize Essay)................................................................ 7

K. M. Newton: Narration in Middlemarch Revisited...................................................... .19

Rosemary Ashton: The Mill on the Floss and the Difficulties of Relationships (Thirty-Ninth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2 October 2010)....................................................26

Marilyn Orr: 'Even our failures are a prophecy': The Mill on the Floss and the 1860s.................................... 38

Kathryn Hughes: Enter the Aunts.............................................................49

Alain Jumeau: Translating The Mill on the Floss into French.................................................. 63

Catherine Brown: The Mill on the Floss on the BBC in 1978........................................... 70 …

Narration In Middlemarch Revisited, K.M. Newton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In a previously published article entitled 'The Role of the Narrator in George Eliot's Novels',1 I attempted to defend her narrator (particularly in regard to Middlemarch) from a variety of critical attacks. The main points of my argument were: (I) that the narrator should not be identified with Eliot herself as it often is but is a persona with a tone of voice separate from the author and thus both integrated into the fiction and central to its structure; (2) form and realism were reconciled by the fact that the narrator was represented as a historical novelist writing a novel …

Enter The Aunts...., Kathryn Hughes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My title is taken from Chapter 7 of 'Book First' of The Mill on the Floss which describes the moment we first meet Aunts Glegg, Pullet and Deane in all their bustling, sharp-tongued, comic glory. The full title of the chapter is 'Enter the Aunts and Uncles' and the three redoubtable Dodson sisters are indeed accompanied by their husbands, the Uncles, as they descend upon Dorlcote Mill for a family summit about their nephew Tom Tulliver's education. Yet while Messrs Glegg, Pullet and Deane subsequently play their individual parts in the unfolding of the novel's plot, it is the Aunts …

Conference Report- The Mills On The Floss, Juliette Atkinson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'The Mill on the Floss is everyone's favourite novel' was the provocative declaration that launched the conference, devoted to Eliot's second novel, held at the Institute of English Studies on 6 November 2010. Barbara Hardy's opening statement was given some weight by the day's papers which, in tackling subjects as diverse as translation, inheritance, idleness, and adaptation, repeatedly expressed the speakers' highly personal relationship with the novel.

In the first of two hour-long papers, entitled 'Inheritance and parental investment in The Mill on the Floss' , David Amigoni (Exeter) offered fresh insights into the intersection of aesthetic and scientific concerns …