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The Role Of George Henry Lewes In George Eliot’S Career: A Reconsideration, Beverley Rilett
The Role Of George Henry Lewes In George Eliot’S Career: A Reconsideration, Beverley Rilett
Department of English: Faculty Publications
This article examines the “protection” and “encouragement” George Henry Lewes provided to Eliot throughout her fiction-writing career. According to biographers, Lewes showed his selfless devotion to Eliot by encouraging her to begin and continue writing fiction; by fostering the mystery of her authorship; by managing her finances; by negotiating her publishing contracts; by managing her schedule; by hosting a salon to promote her books; and by staying close by her side for twenty-four years until death parted them. By reconsidering each element of Lewes’s devotion separately, Rilett challenges the prevailing construction of the Eliot–Lewes relationship as the ideal partnership of …
George Henry Lewes, The Real Man Of Science Behind George Eliot’S Fictional Pedants, Beverley Rilett
George Henry Lewes, The Real Man Of Science Behind George Eliot’S Fictional Pedants, Beverley Rilett
Department of English: Faculty Publications
This paper demonstrates that George Eliot drew on George Henry Lewes’s actual experience as an emerging scientist in her depiction of two fictional scholars, Edward Casaubon of Middlemarch and Proteus Merman, a lesser-known character from the chapter entitled “How We Encourage Research” in her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. After Thomas Huxley published a devastating review of Lewes’s first book of science, Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences, the evidence suggests that Lewes became highly focused on disproving his critics and earning lasting recognition as a scientist, a feat he expected to achieve with his five-volume series, Problems …