Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

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 …

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 …

'Even Our Failures Are A Prophecy': The Mill On The Floss And The 1860s*, Marilyn Orr

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

My title comes from a poem, 'A Minor Prophet' " written by George Eliot in 1865, and I want to enlist its help in showing in this paper how the failures she experienced during the decade following the publication of The Mill on the Floss turned into a prophecy that shaped an aesthetic for the rest of her career.

Also known as 'My Vegetarian Friend’, this poem traces many of the important ideas that Eliot has been working with from the start of her career. It begins as a humorous characterization of 'a vegetarian seer', who anticipates a glorious 'Millennium' …

Introduction To Willa Cather And Modern Cultures [Cather Studies 9], Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

To some, linking Willa Cather to "the modern" or more narrowly to literary modernism still seems an eccentric proposition. As Richard Millington has pointed out, "one will look in vain for Cather's name in the index of most accounts, whether new or old, of the nature and history of Anglo-American modernism" (52). Perhaps she fails to feature in these accounts because in her public pronouncements and certain recurring motifs in her fiction, she appeared to turn her back on modernity. Cather was skeptical about many aspects of the culture that took shape around her in the early decades of the …

Uncoverings: The Research Papers Of The American Quilt Study Group, Volume 32 (2011), Laurel Horton, Loretta B. Chase, Jan Coor-Pender Dodge, Aimee E. Newell, Phyllis S. Herda, Margaret M. Bingham, Valerie J. Davis, Jackie (Jacqueline) Schweitzer, Carolyn K. Ducey, Deborah E. Kraak

Uncoverings Journal

Preface by Laurel Horton

The Dublin Quilt: A Civil War Textile Document by Loretta B. Chase and Jan Coor-Pender

Dodge Seeking Enlightenment: A Quilt Historian's Guide to Freemasonry Aimee E. Newell Tivaevae: Women's Quilting in the Cook Islands by Phyllis Herda

The Collaborative Relationship between Professional Machine Quilters and Their Customers in the Contemporary Quilt Movement by Margaret M. Bingham

The Policy of Good Design: Quilt Designs and Designers from the WPA Milwaukee Handicrafts Project, 1935-1942 by Valerie J. Davis and Jackie Schweitzer

Reminiscences of Women's Work: Chintz Applique Album Quilts of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia by Carolyn …

Did A Woman Write “The Great American Novel”? Judging Women’S Fiction In The Nineteenth Century And Today, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In the fall of 2009, as I was preparing to teach a senior capstone course for English majors on the nineteenth-century American novel and questions of literary value and the canon, I went trolling for suggestions of recent secondary readings about canonicity. The response came back loud and clear: “The canon wars are over. We all teach whatever we want to teach, and everything is fine.” My experiences with students suggest that, at least in American literary studies before 1900, the canon wars are not over, or, perhaps, they have entered a new stage. Most of my students had heard …

An Investigation Of Interpersonal Disruptions And Secondary Traumatic Stress Among Mental Health Therapists, Rachael Ann Robinson-Keilig

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Mental health therapists who work with victims of trauma are often exposed to vivid descriptions of traumatic events and strong emotional expressions from their clients. Research within the last fifteen years has started to explore the impact of this indirect form of trauma exposure on therapists who treat trauma clients.

The purpose of this study was to explore the prevalence of interpersonal and sexual disruptions as symptoms of secondary traumatic stress/vicarious trauma among practicing mental health therapists, to understand how various therapist characteristics predict interpersonal and sexual disruptions, and to explore the role that gender and prior trauma history play …

Contesting Sphere Boundaries Online: Private/Technical/Public Discourses In Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome Discussion Groups, Kittie E. Grace

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The internet is fast becoming a means for people to obtain information, creating a unique forum for the intersection of the public, technical, and private spheres. To ground my research theoretically, I used Jürgen Habermas’s sphere theory. Habermas (1987) explains that the technical sphere colonizes the private sphere, which decreases democratic potential. In particular, the internet is a place for altering technical colonization of the private and public spheres.

My research focuses on women’s health because it is a particularly useful case study for examining sphere tensions. Historically, the biomedical health establishment has been a powerful agent of colonization, resulting …

Women Gathered On Flat Rooftops And Thumprints In Black Coffee, Sana M. Amoura-Patterson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Women Gathered on Flat Rooftops and Thumbprints in Black Coffee is a creative dissertation that examines the lives of Arab women living in Jordan and Arab immigrants living in the United States. The first portion of the dissertation, Women Gathered on Flat Rooftops is an excerpt from the early portion of the novel by the same name. These first 53 pages provide the background of the characters and highlights aspects that are culturally specific to the women of the stories. For example, issues of arranged marriages, funeral practices, women’s custody rights are all illustrated through these early stories. The early …

Forming Bodies And Reforming Healthcare: The Co-Construction Of Information Technologies And Bodies Through The Imperative For Self Care, Scout Calvert

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

Care work and technological work are markedly striated by sex; the sites where they overlap are few. What happens when the labor of care meets up with information technologies? It makes good methodological sense to look at largely feminized environments that are also increasingly technological. Gender, Health, and Information Technology in Context, edited and with contributions by Ellen Balka, Eileen Green, and Flis Henwood, is a welcome contribution to the body of evidence about the socio-technical co-construction of technology, health, and gender. The volume houses nine studies, bookended by an astute introduction and conclusion by the editors. Each study …

Mrs. Meyrick's Cat, Derek Miller

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

'''Great God!" the words escaped Deronda' as he watched the just-prevented-from-drowning Mirah. 'The old thought had come now with a new impetus of mingled feeling, and urged that exclamation in which both East and West have for ages concentrated their awe in the presence of inexorable calamity.'!

Among those who welcome Mirah to Mrs. Meyrick's household is the cat Hafiz, seen by Deronda as it 'came forward with tail erect and rubbed himself against her ankles', an Eastern moment accompanying Mirah's entrance into the Meyrick family. Hafiz is later to purr as Mirah starts to tell her story to Mrs. …

Review Of Charles Dickens, Michael Slater

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

On the first page of this splendid new biography, Dickens is cited referring to his own earliest writings as 'certain tragedies achieved at the mature age of eight or ten and represented with great applause to overflowing nurseries'. The genially tongue-in-cheek celebration of his own precociousness is entirely characteristic, with the final flourish of 'overflowing nurseries' an example of the kind of 'unnecessary detail' that Orwell identified as a typical device of Dickensian comedy. 'Overflowing' both transforms the brief recollection into a comic scene and indicates the essential quality of the creative imagination at work here. A very different writer …

Review Of Women Reviewing Women In Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception Of Lane Austen, Charlotte Bronte And George Eliot, Joanne Wilkes

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The subtitle of Joanne Wilkes' elegant and meticulous monograph is somewhat misleading. Although Austen, Bronte and Eliot make regular appearances, as one would expect the three major female literary figures of the nineteenth century to do, the work does not seek to investigate their critical histories - something which Wilkes has already done in a compelling essay published in Joanne Shattock's collection Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900 (2001). Instead, Wilkes' attention here is firmly directed at the careers of the critics who, for the most part, remain on the margins of Victorian studies: Maria Jane Jewsbury, Sara Coleridge, Hannah …

'Hetty Had Never Read A Novel': Adam Bede And Realism, Rachel Bowlby

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

It is not just the famous Chapter 17, 'In Which the Story Pauses a Little’, which makes George Eliot's Adam Bede one of the first candidates for any discussion of the tenets and aims of nineteenth-century literary realism. The question is opened in the very first paragraph of the novel - so very prominently, perhaps, and in so many dimensions, that we may miss its compacted meanings as we read on or rush on, past the beginning, to enter the narrative. Much of its meaning, of course, is not immediately available without the understandings that subsequent chapters will add, including …

George Eliot Birthday Luncheon, 22 November 2009- The Toast To The Immortal Memory, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

2009 is the 150th anniversary of the publication of two works of fiction by George Eliot. As no one here could fail to know, throughout the year there have been all kinds of celebrations of her first - and wonderful- novel, Adam Bede (and the word has spread even to London of great Adam Bede happenings in these parts). On the other hand, I've heard of nothing commemorating 'The Lifted Veil', which appeared in the same year as the novel. While this strange, supernatural tale of an acutely sensitive, unproductive poet whose clairvoyance alienates him from his fellow mortals is …

Japanese Branch Report- 2009, Yohko Nagai

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Overlooking the meandering Edo River and the panoramic view of the Tokyo skyline, the thirteenth annual convention of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan was held at the scenic campus of Wayo Women's University on Saturday, 28 November 2009.

After an opening remark by Mizue Aida of Nihon University, a welcome address was made by Midori Uematsu, a professor of Wayo Women's University. This year we had the privilege of listening to four papers in the morning session. The first two papers were chaired by Akiko Kimura, of Waseda University and the last two papers by Itsuyo Shimizu of Kinki …

The Art Of Conduct, The Conduct Of Art And The 'Mixed Science' Of Eliot's Ethics: ' Sympathetic Impulse' And 'The Scientific Point Of View' In The Mill On The Floss, Simon Calder

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The Mill on the Floss is full of keys and clues. Most famously, Maggie Tolliver, following her father's bankruptcy, 'wanted some key that would enable her to understand and, in understanding, endure, the heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart.' 1 In chapter three of Book Four of Eliot's novel, Maggie believes herself to have found just such a key in Thomas a Kempis's The Imitation of Christ (MF, 298):

Here, then, was a secret of life that would enable her to renounce all other secrets ... [F]or the first time she saw the possibility of shifting the …

Editor's Note - 2010

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

1. The articles in this issue by Dinah Birch, Rachel Bowlby, Barbara Hardy, and Josephine McDonagh were originally delivered as papers at the Adam Bede conference held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, on 7 November 2009.

George Eliot As Historian: The Case Of Mr. Crewe And Hugh Hughes, David Paterson

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Historians look for as many different sources of evidence as they can to describe and interpret the past. How far is fiction a valid source? Great fiction may reveal great truths but is this only in a general sense? George Eliot herself seems to suggest above that reliance on 'descriptions of novelists' may be a perilous route to an accurate portrait: but what about relying on descriptions of those in her own books? Despite one specific denial, some of her 'portraits of clergymen' contain valuable historical elements.

An examination of one part of Scenes of Clerical Life shows George Eliot's …

The Representation Of Place In Middlemarch, Adam Wright

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Critics in the past have tended to refer to the rootedness of characters in George Eliot's novels. This is particularly true of Adam Bede, where the naturalistic roots of characters are often explicitly stated, such as when Dinah affirms 'I'm not free to leave Snowfield, where I was first planted, and have grown deep into it, like the small grass on the hill-top'.1 Catherine Middleton, in her essay 'Roots and Rootlessness', when analysing Middlemarch refers to seven different types of roots in just four pages (,emotional', 'physical', 'moral', 'affective', 'social', 'intellectual' ,and 'local').2 These terms not only complicate our understanding …

Notes On Middlemarch And Romola, Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Rereading Middlemarch and Romola recently, 1 was struck by some unrecorded musical and literary parallels, none of them substantial enough (or indeed sufficiently interconnected) to be woven into an integrated article, but having, 1 hope, enough intrinsic interest to warrant my presenting them here as so many Casaubonic 'leavings' that might or might not be incorporated into future work on the author.

A Schubertian Moment in Middlemarch

George Eliot's enthusiasm for the Lieder of Schubert is attested by a letter written in October, 1859 - 'Schubert's songs, 1 especially delight in' (Letters, Ill: 178) - and our knowledge of that …

'Good Teaching': Adam Bede And Education, Dinah Birch

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

George Eliot's commitment to teaching motivates her writing from the first. Like many of those whose thinking was shaped by early nineteenth-century evangelicalism, she saw education as a vital responsibility. In 1847, when she was twenty-eight years old, she remarked to Sara Hennell that she thought '''Live and Teach" should be a proverb as well as "Live and Learn"'.1 Eliot's persistent interest in teaching and learning was a reason for her turning to fiction as her primary medium as a writer - not the only reason, but an important one. She had no inclination whatsoever to become a professional teacher, …

Annual Report 2009, John Burton

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

I am pleased to report that last year was a successful one. There are things we might have done better, or differently, but I think we can say that 2009 was marked by events which provided huge pleasure and satisfaction for our members, and for a much wider audience beyond our membership.

The AGM last year heard a request from Liz Mellor for some sabbatical time whilst she dealt with health problems and members agreed to that request. We then held a discussion about the Fellowship and what we hoped to see develop in the future. Members enjoyed the chance …

Expressive Things In Adam Bede, Barabar Hardy

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A drop of ink is the first thing in the first sentence of George Eliot's first novel: 'With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance corner farreaching visions of the past.' Like many objects in Adam Bede, this one is more complicated than first appears. In its generalized imaging of magical creation, ritual and prophesy, it is an invocation, introducing and solemnizing the other object with which it is twinned and compared, the real drop of ink at the end of the author's pen which has actually written this sorcerer's …

Review Of Daniel Deronda

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A dramatized version of Daniel Deranda scripted by John Cooper was produced by the Traffic of the Stage Company at the Upstairs at the Gatehouse Theatre in Highgate in May. Directed by Harry Meacher, it had a cast of seventeen actors who between them played forty-one different parts. The audience sat on three sides of the acting area (the floor of which was patterned like a giant roulette wheel) and the actors, when not directly engaged in the action, moved to the edges of this space where they would, when appropriate (i.e., when the scene was a party or some …

Superior Domesticity: Two George Eliot Cats, Beryl Gray

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

The Persian cat, Hafiz, appears in two scenes in Daniel Deronda (1876) .1 The first of these appearances occurs in chapter 18, which introduces the compact, creative little Meyrick women - mother and three daughters - just as they are about to become Mirah Lapidoth's hospitable benefactresses, though she is as yet unknown to them. They are gathered harmoniously together in the evening lamp- and candle-lit, miniature double parlour of their narrow riverside house. 'All four, if they had been wax-work, might have been packed easily in a fashionable lady's travelling trunk.'2 Their corporeal diminutiveness is …

Review Of George Eliot's Intellectual Life, Avrom Fleishman

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Avrom Fleishman's study of George Eliot as a Victorian intellectual comes late in a distinguished career of scholarly publication that stretches over more than forty years. The book primarily concerns itself with some large questions: What were Eliot's central ideas and how were they modified over the course of her development? How did they overlap or differ from those of her contemporaries? In working out his answers, Fleishman creates an admiring and admirable account of 'a mighty mind' (2) interested in others' theoretical systems but always independent of them, forging its own deeply ethical and ultimately tragic versions of humanism, …

Adam Bede And Emigration, Josephine Mcdonagh

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

Although emigration to settler colonies was a widespread phenomenon in mid nineteenth century Britain, it is a theme to which George Eliot appears to give very little attention. Of all the works, Adam Bede is the novel which seems especially home-bound. Characters who go abroad do so in penitence: Hetty is transported to Australia, where she dies; and Arthur goes to the East to make up for having committed 'the sort of wrong that can never be made up for' ('Epilogue'). In so far as it is discussed in the novel, migration is the chimera of the mistaken Mr. Gedge, …

Rationale For Pride Of Baghdad, Crag Hill Ph.D.

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

A rationale for teaching the graphic novel Pride of Baghdad at the secondary level.

The Thirty-Eighth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2009- A Loss For Words, Giles Foster

The George Eliot Review Online, ISSN: 2831-5375

A loss for words ... I am genuinely lost for words in my admiration of the novels but the title of today's talk is intended to dig a bit below the surface of simple enjoyment and highlight some of the differences - strengths and weaknesses - between novels and adaptations. What words alone can and can't do. What a film adaptation can achieve and omit. What a stage version can offer. And we should not forget other experiences of encountering books - a mother reading to children, a radio or audio tape reading.

A few years ago there was a …