Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Review Of George Eliot In Society: Travels Abroad And Sundays At The Priory, Kathleen Mccormack

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

This is a welcome and wholly worthwhile extension of the author's George Eliot's English Travels: Composite Characters and Coded Communication (2005), a densely written and stimulating examination of places and people in Eliot's life which have some resonance, in varying degrees of coding, from the seemingly casual to the subtly integrated, in her published work. McCormack there defined three categories of place identification. These range from 'absolute certainties' through 'pretty good cases' to 'alluring, probable, but irretrievably speculative suppositions', categories certainly applicable to herpresent study, in which her dedication and saturation in George Eliot, the works, the life, and a …

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 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 …

Review Of Reading For Our Time: 'Adam Bede' And 'Middlemarch' Revisited, J. Hillis Miller

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

As his sub-title indicates, J. Hillis Miller is returning in his latest book to the study of George Eliot, bringing to bear on Adam Bede and Middlemarch the insight and erudition acquired in a long and distinguished career as a scholar and critic. He pursues a similar line to his wellknown articles from the 1970s on 'Narrative and History' and 'Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch', subjecting that novel to a close and tenacious deconstructive reading that brings out the sophisticated self-qualifying nature of George Eliot's fiction. This is preceded by a shorter discussion of Adam Bede which shows how its …

Japanese Branch Report- 2012, Shinsuke Hori

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On Saturday 1 December 2012, the Sixteenth Annual Convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at Kansai University of Foreign Studies.

The morning session started with an opening address by Chizuko Watari (Kansai University of Foreign Studies). Three papers were presented in the morning session. The first two were commented upon by Midori Niino (Kobe University of Foreign Studies) and the third by Masayuki Kato (Kobe University).

The first speaker was Ayako Tani (Fukuoka University), whose subject was 'The Idea of a Double in Daniel Deronda: Grandcourt's Death and Gwendolen's Rebirth'. Grandcourt's death has been often criticized …

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, …

Review Of Form And Feeling In Modern Literature: Essays In Honour Of Barbara Hardy, Isobel Armstrong, William Baker

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Does criticism move in circles and cycles? Perhaps, like a Yeatsian gyre, it progresses by revolving and rotating. If times have changed utterly since the appearance of Barbara Hardy's first book, The Novels of George Eliot (1959), then it is also hard to ignore how some new directions in criticism appear to be rediscovering matters close to this great critic's heart. Form and feeling, certainly, are both back. Professor Hardy used these two unfussy terms to describe, respectively, literature's structured way of happening and its potential to arouse or enrich a reader's felt experience; now, in the more modish guises …

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 …

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 …

Review Of The Ladislaw Case, Inke Thormahlen

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

We live in an age of prequels and sequels either in book form or in television serials, with nineteenth-century novelists providing the majority of the material for contemporary writers to develop or elaborate. It was perhaps only a matter of time before one of George Eliot's novels was to form the basis for such treatment. In this case the novel is probably her greatest, Middlemarch, and the sequel, The Ladislaw Case, is the first major work of a young Swedish graduate of Lund University, Imke Thormahlen.

Twelve years after the conclusion of Middlemarch, Will Ladislaw, now married to Dorothea (Brooke, …

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 …

Reality And Imagination: The Authorial Decisions Of May Welland Archer And Emma Woodhouse, Melinda R. Vetter

EWU Masters Thesis Collection

The ideal woman of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the "Angel in the House"-a woman who was sweet, shy, and modest. She lived to please the men in her life. She was also the child-woman who was sheltered from the knowledge of the world because it would be too painful and heavy for her fragile shoulders to endure. Edith Wharton, in The Age of Innocence, and Jane Austen, in Emma challenge this ideal picture by creating their respective heroines, May and Emma, to be the exact opposite of it. Though May constantly acts like the ideal woman mentioned earlier, …

Queering The Sublime: Virginia Woolf, Sexology, And Sexuality, Emily Whitmore

Masters Theses

Using Virginia Woolf's novels, The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando, I begin to explore moments where the characters experience the sublime as defined by Edmund Burke. Woolf uses the traditional sublime, but complicates the concept beyond its initial intention. The moments that mimic the sublime, but include the body, the natural world, and artistic creativity grows into what I will call the "queer sublime," which is new for both Woolf scholarship and for the sublime. Woolf's experimentation with the term and part of the "queer sublime" also helps to create a different …

Performing Literacy: How Women Read The World In The Late Eighteenth-Century British Novel, Amy Hodges

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the intersection of sensibility, Social identity, and literacy practices among representations of women readers in four late eighteenth-century British novels. Through an analysis of the authors' use of identity constructs which shaped and were shaped by reading practices, this study documents the rise of Social identity formation as mutually constitutive with the history of reading. The first chapter reveals how Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote uses Arabella's follies as education for readers about the corresponding processes of reading their society and reading novels. The second chapter argues that Frances Burney's Evelina considers women's ability to read others …

On Editing The Merry Muses, Valentina Bold

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the sources and issues in reediting the late 18th century Scottish song collection, The Merry Muses of Caledonia (1799), in connection the 50th anniversary of the first modern scholarly edition, edited by Sydney Goodsir Smith, James Barke, and J. Delancey Ferguson in 1959.

The Bitter Relicks Of My Flame: The Embodiment Of Venereal Disease And Prostitution In The Novels Of Jane Austen, Melanie Erin Osborn

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Resembling the mercurial, black beauty mark used as an ornamental concealment of syphilitic sores, Jane Austen’s comedy of manners likewise acted as a superficial cosmetic device that concealed the ubiquity of venereal disease and prostitution hidden within. Through her characters, Austen used veiled narrative to highlight the reality of venereal disease and prostitution in eighteenth-century England. This thesis uncovers the hidden narrative in Jane Austen’s novels, as a means of better understanding the impact venereal disease and prostitution had on sexual issues with women and the female body during the eighteenth century. Beginning with an almost comic reference to venereal …

Happily Ever After? Redefining Womanhood And Marriage In Nineteenth-Century Novels, Laura Elizabeth Cox

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and Henry James challenged patriarchal conventions and assumptions by redefining womanhood and marriage in their novels, particularly by breaking from the traditional marriage ending. While Pride and Prejudice, North and South, and Jane Eyre end in marriage, these novels depict a freely chosen companionate marriage based on equality; Villette replaces the typical marriage ending with complete independence; and Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady both portray the decisive rejection of the marriage ideal for a life of renunciation. This thesis analyzes the ways in which these novels challenge nineteenth-century society, as well …

Wounded Women, Varied Voice, Kathryn Johnston

Undergraduate Review

Daphne du Maurier and Sylvia Plath both use voice as a tool in their respective pieces, “La Sainte-Vierge” and “Lesbos.” Through the implementation of varied voices, these women convey female interiors. Du Maurier’s use of a third-person narrative voice in her short story “La Sainte-Vierge” allows her to comment on the lives of the main characters through the eyes of an outsider. Du Maurier’s outsider reveals a naïve and delusional housewife, unhealthy in her denial within a failing relationship. Contrasting with du Maurier’s Marie is Plath’s first-person voice of a scorned, dissatisfied housewife in her poem, “Lesbos.” Plath’s use of …

`The Only Beguiled Person?': Accessing Fantomina In The Feminist Classroom., Kate Levin

Publications and Research

This article explores how Eliza Haywood's 18th-century novella Fantomina serves as an allegory for the challenges of maintaining a feminist classroom.

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 …

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 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 …

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 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 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. …

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 …

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 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 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 …

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' …