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Aspects Of 'Indefiniteness' In George Eliot's Middlemarch, Omar Sabbagh

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In this article I will be teasing out the significance of the various uses and senses of 'indefiniteness' in Middlemarch. Whether it is in relationships between other characters, or between Dorothea and other characters, or between Dorothea and herself, or indeed between Dorothea and the novel or the reader, it will be seen that indefiniteness often stands in for unfavourable conceptions of abstraction and externality, and that all contribute to disharmony in Eliot's rendering. This disharmony is resolved by the end of the novel, and it seems to me that this particular resolution is one of the novel's main themes. …

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton 13 June 2004, Nada Lyons

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I am honoured and delighted to be here today to pay tribute to my great-great-grandfather, George Henry Lewes, and to George Eliot in the year that marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of their life together. From an early age they have been part of my life. At home I sat on a sofa that belonged to them. Books by and about them lined our shelves. And occasionally biographers would visit my mother when they were researching their books. I was always very proud of Lewes's wide achievements as a writer and literary critic, scientist and amateur actor, raconteur …

Review Of Monomania: The Flight From Everyday Life In Literature And Art, Marina Van Zuylen

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The obvious monomaniac in Middlemarch is Casaubon, determined and devoted to writing his 'Key to All Mythologies'. This, his idee fixe, orders his world and certainly his relationship with his wife Dorothea, who seems an unwitting victim of his obsession and his coldness. But in Marina van Zuylen's Monomania, Dorothea becomes the focus of attention: in a chapter on Middlemarch, Miss Brooke's persistent 'urge to sublimate' her will to Casaubon's is read as monomania, with compelling results.

Van Zuylen's interdisciplinary study surveys incarnations of monomania beginning in nineteenth-century Europe; she constructs monomania as an obsession whose psychical function is to …

Address At Wreath-Laying In Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey 24 June 2004, Gabriel Woolf

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

150 years ago, in 1854, George Eliot, still Marian Evans at that point, and George Henry Lewes made the momentous decision to live together. They did so for 24 years until Lewes died and, in the first five years together, made literary history. We know they couldn't marry, we know that neither of them was regarded as physically attractive but, to quote an apposite line from a Shakespeare sonnet: Let me not to the marriage of true minds, admit impediment. Not even in this place.

The inspirational meeting of such minds and the rich love the two bore each other …

Review Of George Eliot & Middlemarch, Tim Dolin, George Eliot

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Both books under review appear in series that aim to give new currency to texts and authors by the provision of critical and cultural context. The implied audience is not simply the old 'sixth form and junior undergraduate' cohorts: there is a presumption of an informed wider readership which appreciates and in some cases requires assistance from critical commentary and scholarly apparatus. Such guidance is appropriately supplied in accordance with their respective series briefs by Gregory Maertz in his edition of Middlemarch and Tim Dolin in his study of George Eliot. Maertz makes a distinct scholarly contribution to study of …

The George Eliot Review: Journal Of The George Eliot Fellowship 2005 No. 36, Beryl Gray, John Rignall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

CONTENTS

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

ARTICLES Dinah Birch: 'School-Time': George Eliot and Education (The Thirty-Second George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 16 October 2004) ................................... 7

Ceri Hunter: Moving Beyond Signs: The Crisis of Language in Daniel Deronda (Prize Essay) ................................................................................ 17

Leonee Ormond: George Eliot and the Victorian Art World ........................... 25

Bonnie Shannon McMullen: Legitimate Plots, Private Lots in Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda ........................................................................................................ .39

Omar Sabbagh: Aspects of 'Indefiniteness' in Middlemarch............................................... 46

Richard Winter: Romantic Love as Spiritual Companionship? A Buddhist Re-reading of George Eliot ......................................................................... 53

Miyuki Amano: The Widening Vision and Undying Hope in The …

Moving Beyond Signs: The Crisis Of Language In Daniel Deronda, Ceri Hunter

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is no critical initiative to point out that George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) plays with the premises of realist narrative art.! Previous readings have, however, tended to engage only tangentially with the way in which the novel scrutinises the use of language? This omission of linguistic context is curious, given that Daniel Deronda is set during a decade which placed the Victorian ruling classes' confidence in the English language under strain. The 1860s teemed with words. There were more English speakers than ever before, owing to population increase and dispersal. The English language was democratised by the 1867 reform …

Review Of The Effective Protagonist In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Scott, Bronte, Eliot, Wilde, Terence Dawson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Let me declare my critical prejudices from the outset. Terence Dawson's study is a work of psychological criticism, of post-Jungian criticism to be exact, and I am frequently left unconvinced by such critical inquiry. As Dawson admits, 'it is often held that the weakness of psychological analyses of literary works is that they require the reader to accept their premises. This both is, and is not so.' In the case of Dawson's book, I can't help but feel that it is so, and by the end of a dense, if often suggestive, study, I remained unpersuaded as to the merits …

George Eliot And The Victorian Art World, Leonee Ormond

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Reading the letters and diaries of Victorian practitioners of the different arts reminds us that their social world differed markedly from that of artists today. In nineteenth-century London the number of people involved was sufficiently small for artists of all kinds to meet each other regularly.

Among the public functions at which such meetings could take place were the various events at the Royal Academy, held in the National Gallery building in Trafalgar Square until 1868 and, after that, in the Academy's grand new residence at Burlington House in Piccadilly. The Private View of the summer exhibition in May was …

Legitimate Plots, Private Lots In Felix Holt And Daniel Deronda, Bonnie Shannon Mcmullen

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A preoccupation with the idea of home was central to George Eliot's fiction from its beginnings until its end. In Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, however, this theme is developed in terms that involve legal complexities that have embroiled her characters, perplexed her readers, and sent the author to seek advice and reassurance from the barrister Frederic Harrison. Esther Lyon has a 'right in remainder'! in a property, while Harold Transome has 'a reversion tantamount to possession' (p. 284), Sir Hugo Mallinger is a tenant for life, his nephew Grandcourt a tenant in tail. These intricacies of plot have puzzled …

George Eliot Birthday Lucheon, 21 November 2004 The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Rosemary Ashton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a special year because it is ISO years since George Eliot and G. H. Lewes began to live together openly. 22 November 1854 was her thirty-fifth birthday. Where were she and Lewes? What were they doing?

They were in Berlin, having moved on from Weimar on 3 November. They had left England on 19 July, the day Marian Evans sent her famous telegram to her Coventry friends Charles and Cara Bray and Sara Hennell:

Dear Friends - all three

I have only time to say good bye and God bless you. Poste Restante, Weimar

for …

History Of Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Review Of Gender And The Victorian Periodical, Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green, Judith Johnston

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'We are dominated by Journalism' 'a really remarkable power', Oscar Wilde observed, not entirely neutrally, in 'The Soul of Man under Socialism' published in the Fortnightly Review in 1891. Like many of his contemporaries, Wilde recognized not only the power of the press, but also its modernity. In this wide ranging and important study Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston argue that precisely because of its power the periodical press occupied a central position in the construction of gender in Victorian cultural history.

Journalism was gendered masculine by those who accorded it a lofty status within the profession of …

The Exceptional Woman And Her Audience: Armgart, Performance, And Authorship

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Mirah, the Alcharisi, Gwendolen, Dinah, and Rosamond are all, to various degrees, performing women. Eliot's grandest diva, however, is also her least studied. The opera singer Armgart takes centre stage in the poetic closet drama of the same name that Eliot wrote in 1861. A focused study of an exceptional woman, Armgart conveys both Eliot's belief in the dangers of the influence of public opinion and her belief that exceptionally talented women could gain power through interacting with audiences. Armgart demonstrates that Eliot advocated for community among exceptional women and ordinary women. Finally, Armgart's examination of the talented female performer …

Address At Wreath-Laying In The George Eliot Memorial Garden, Nuneaton 8 June 2003, Catherine Nisbet

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is now I suppose more than six months since Kathleen asked me to deliver this address and whilst I have given the task much thought, it is only now, a few days before the event, that I am committing myself to paper. I followed my usual course when faced with any task at the museum. I've thought a great deal around the subject often in the middle of the night or on my commute to and from work. I have done my research, scanned books, looked at previous examples and most important of all talked to other people who …

Notes On Contributors 2004

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

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 and A Community of Interest: The Story of the George Eliot Fellowship 1930-2000 in 2000.

Beryl Gray teaches literature at the Faculty of Continuing Education, Birkbeck College. She is the author of George Eliot and Music (1989) and many articles on George Eliot. Her current project concerns the figure of the dog in Victorian Culture.

Barbara Hardy is Emeritus Professor of English, University of London, and her …

Review Of Dead From The Waist Down. Scholars And Scholarship In Literature And The Popular Imagination, A.D. Nuttall

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In this book, which derives its title from Browning's poem 'A Grammarian's Funeral', Professor Nuttall seeks to explore the profound change that he believes took place in the popular conception of scholars (Knowers') and scholarship between the Renaissance when Faustus was seen as an excitingly powerful figure, definitely 'sexy' as the current phrase goes, and the Nineteenth Century when the scholar became a representative of 'sexless deathliness'. Nuttall believes that a qualification needs to be made, however, in that from Francis Bacon onwards the Knower figure was split into two, the scientist and the scholar, with the former retaining elements …

Review Of Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Bronte And The Mentor-Lover, Patricia Menon

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Patricia Menon's title may be cumbersome, but her theme of the lover who becomes the instructor, guide and judge is a fascinating one. In her Prologue, she finds the 'mentor-lover' in Richardson's Pamela, Rousseau's Emile, Dryden's adaptation of Ovid's Pygmalion and Galatea, and the mediaeval letters between Abelard and Heloise which were widely read in the eighteenth century. She also sees a keen interest in moral judgements in those proliferating 'conduct-books' which sought to regulate behaviour, promote the right education for middleclass women and the right attitude to love and marriage. Such anxious concern with orderly living was intensified by …

The Thirty-Second George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2003; What's In A Name: Competing Claims To The Authority Of George Eliot, Pam Hirsch

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The contentious issue of fame, infamy, and notoriety is the issue at stake in this lecture. On the one hand I focus attention on a tiny moment at the beginning of George Eliot's career, but argue that its gendered implications remain provocative. It acts as a test case of how nineteenth-century women writers had to justify the 'unfeminine' attribute of ambition. It also tells us something about the double standards operating in the reception of fiction by male and female writers.

On 1 February 1859 literary history was made with the publication of a novel called Adam Bede. A chorus …

Toast To George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 23 November 2003; The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Rosalind Shanks

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Foreword: I have written the following speech after I delivered it - long after. Much thought went into the preparation. However I did not want to read at the lunch, I wanted to talk. I spoke with only skeletal notes and a script of 'The Female Shakespeare, so to speak' to hand in case I dried. I may have forgotten things that I actually said and included things that I meant to say on the day and didn't - my apologies. I did not expect the Toast to be printed.

Toast

Why am I here? That is not a philosophical …

Basil And Vampire: Fears Of Dissection In Middlemarch, Keiji Yata

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

In the final chapter of George Eliot's Middlemarch, after describing the death of Lydgate and Rosamond's subsequent second marriage to 'an elderly and wealthy physician', the narrator tells us that Lydgate

once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains. (Finale; 513)

Rosamond is, before marrying Lydgate, 'admitted to be the flower of Mrs. Lemon's school, the chief school in the county' (11; 62). Now her husband uses a different metaphor. In what sense can Lydgate consider himself 'murdered'?

Tertius Lydgate …

Review Of The Mills On The Floss: George Eliot & Le Moulin Sur La Floss, Alain Jemeau

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Writing to her first French translator, Francois d' Albert-Durade, in 1865, George Eliot remarked on how little known his translations appeared to be in France, since she was always being approached by people who wanted to translate her works into French. After her death d' Albert-Durade's La Famille Tulliver: ou le Moulin sur la Floss did go on to be reprinted several times from the late nineteenth century onwards, but it has now been superseded by a new translation by Alain Jumeau which will have more appeal to modem readers and will certainly reach a far wider audience than d' …

Annual Report 2003, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The Fellowship year always begins with the Annual General Meeting and in 2003 we amended our Constitution to exclude our Vice Presidents from the management team. This was because the Charity Commission rule that all members of the Fellowship Council are automatically trustees of the charity, and are unable to receive any payment from the Fellowship. This meant that we could not pay any of them for lectures, readings etc - an unacceptable situation. All the Vice Presidents were happy with this decision and we still keep them closely in touch with our affairs through the Minutes of the Council's …

'That Vankyke Duchess': Portraiture And Epic In Daniel Deronda, Susannah Rutherglen

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Portraits abound in Daniel Deronda - not only on the drawing-room walls of the Grandcourts and Mallingers, and in the 'grave Holbein faces' of the Meyrick family lithographs, but also in the actions and physiognomies of the novel's characters themselves. Daniel, in whom 'the family faces of various types, seen on the walls of the gallery, found no reflex' (166), nonetheless 'had that sort of resemblance to the preconceived type which a finely individual bust or portrait has to the more generalized copy left our minds after a long interval' (479).1 Gwendolen, 'that Vandyke duchess of a beauty' (558), sees …

'That Most Despicable Travesty Of A Women': Eliza Lynn Linton And Elma Stuart, Kathleen Adams

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The George Eliot Collection in Nuneaton Library includes a previously unpublished letter written by Elma Stuart, one of George Eliot's greatest admirers. It was written in response to a critical and spiteful article about George Eliot in 1895 by Eliza Lynn Linton in the journal The Woman at Home. It was inevitable that the vicious article would antagonize Elma, who was so besotted with her idol that she had engraved upon the headstone on her grave in Highgate Cemetery in London - and next to George Eliot's own grave .... 'whom for 8'h blessed years George Eliot called by the …

Japanese Branch Report 2003, Yoshei Abe

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The seventh annual convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Nihon University in Tokyo, on Saturday 29 November 2003.

The morning session began with an opening address by Kimitaka Hara, a vice-president of the Japanese Branch and a professor at Nihon University. In the morning, three members read their papers under the chairmanship of Noriko Kubota, a professor at Tsuru Bunka University and Kyoko Kishimoto, a professor at Kyoto Sangyo University.

The first paper, "'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton" - the beginning of conflict' was presented by Naomi Ohno, a lecturer at Toyo …

Review Of Rereading George Eliot: Changing Responses To Her Experiments In Life, Bernard J. Paris

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

While he was still writing his doctoral thesis, which became his influential Experiments in Life: George Eliot's Questfor Values (1965), Paris fully accepted the rhetoric in Eliot's fiction that is designed to shape our moral and intellectual responses to her characters. By rhetoric Paris means not just Eliot's 'authorial commentary but titles, chapter headings, epigraphs, characters' observations about one another, the use of foils and juxtapositions, and a wide variety of stylistic and tonal devices ... ' (p.15). All of these combine to persuade us to see her characters maturing, becoming wiser, more often than not through painful bouts of …

The Two Timothy Coopers, Barbara Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Once or twice when I read and re-read the scene of the railway survey in Middlemarch I felt a sense of niggling lost connection, then one day I belatedly found it. George Eliot had copied the name of Elizabeth Gaskell's Timothy Cooper, in Cousin Phillis, for her character in Middlemarch.

Eliot wrote to Gaskell1 that she felt an affinity with 'the feeling which inspired "Cranford" and the earlier chapters of "Mary Barton'" and had read Cranford when writing Scenes of Clerical Life and Mary Barton when writing Adam Bede. When The Moorland Cottage was proposed as source for The Mill …

Selected Definitions For Work In Communication And Media Studies & Selected Bibliography Of Publications In Comparative Media Studies, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Chasing Demons: Female Villains And Narrative Strategy In Victorian Sensation Fiction, Heather Sowards

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis explores Victorian sensation fiction and key authors who rely on essentialism, employing the classifications of either angel or demon to their literary female figures. Using Nina Auerbach's theories on these above categorizations and Helene Cixous's linguistic binaries, I examine the ways in which the narrators of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, and Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science force this taxonomy onto the female villains who dominate the novels' themes. By looking closely at the narrative strategies, I conclude that these female characters themselves are proposing a very different sense of self or …