Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
George Eliot
-
Standard Name: Eliot, George
Birth Name: Mary Anne Evans
Nickname: Polly
Nickname: Pollian
Self-constructed Name: Mary Ann Evans
Self-constructed Name: Marian Evans
Self-constructed Name: Marian Evans Lewes
Pseudonym: George Eliot
Pseudonym: Felix Holt
Married Name: Mary Anne Cross
GE
, one of the major novelists of the nineteenth century and a leading practitioner of fictional realism, was a professional woman of letters who also worked as an editor and journalist, and left a substantial body of essays, reviews, translations on controversial topics, and poetry.
"George Eliot" by Universal Images Group/Contributor,Retrieved from https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/george-eliot-pen-name-of-mary-ann-evans-important-british-news-photo/113634333.
BRP
knew personally and corresponded with many of the Victorian intelligentsia. In addition to her Langham Place associates already mentioned, her literary friends and acquaintances included Matilda Hays
, Harriet Martineau
, Anthony Trollope
,...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Gaskell
She meanwhile sustained her usual energetic and gossipy flow of correspondence with a wide range of literary and personal connections. She got caught up in the speculation surrounding the split between Effie
and John Ruskin
Friends, Associates
Edith J. Simcox
Elma Stuart
, who had also been an intimate friend of George Eliot
, became a close friend of EJS
. In March 1881 they spent a week together at Malvern, where they exchanged...
Friends, Associates
Florence Nightingale
Around this time FN
became acquainted with other literary women as well. In July 1852 George Eliot
, who had become her correspondent, remarked in another letter that there is a loftiness of mind about...
Health
Adrienne Rich
After her third delivery she decided to be sterilised, though she met with social disapproval even from nurses caring for her in hospital: Had yourself spayed, did you?
qtd. in
O’Mahoney, John. “Poet and Pioneer: Adrienne Rich”. The Guardian, 15 June 2002, pp. Review 20 - 3.
22
She later recalled her isolation during...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
This story of infidelity features an Italian financier who as a furiously jealous foreigner is compared to Shakespeare's Othello. (At least Provana is not black
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Beyond These Voices. Hutchinson, 1910.
68
comments one character.) There the resemblance ends, for...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jessie Ellen Cadell
The reader meets Ida as an immature girl of sixteen who, with three elder brothers, wishes herself a boy. Her mother is a clergyman's widow, and she has had an unconventional, economical upbringing, largely abroad...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Gaskell
Reviews of Cranford were positive, focusing on its charm and apparent simplicity. In the Athenæum, Henry Fothergill Chorley
commended its touches of love and kindness, of simple self-sacrifice and of true womanly tenderness.
qtd. in
Easson, Angus, editor. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1991.
194
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Oakley
The authors use as epigraph a passage from Sylvia Plath
's Three Women: a Poem for Three Voices.
Oakley, Ann et al. Miscarriage. Fontana, 1984.
9
They then begin with some shocking statistics. Nobody knows what proportion miscarriages bear to live...
Intertextuality and Influence
Germaine de Staël
After completing this novel GS
wrote, I'd like a really big [writing] table, it seems to me I've got the right to it now.
qtd. in
Kobak, Annette. “Mme de Staël and Fanny Burney”. The Burney Journal, Vol.
4
, 2001, pp. 12-35.
19
Corinne was enormously influential for nineteenth-century women writers. The model...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rosa Nouchette Carey
In an interview of 1893, Helen C. Black
described RNC
as tall, slender, and erect with large blue-grey eyes with long lashes,soft dark hair, and a low, tuneful voice.
Black, Helen C. Notable Women Authors of the Day. Maclaren, 1906.
147-8
Carey revealed in this...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Gaskell
The plot elements link the novel to its moment of sensation fiction more strongly than any of EG
's other books, but are integrated with a nuanced portrait of a specific locale and a now...
Intertextuality and Influence
C. E. Plumptre
CEP
takes an unconventional critical approach in applying her theory of causation to a lengthy analysis of literature. She concludes that it is when depicting the subtler operations of the human mind that George Eliot
Intertextuality and Influence
Maggie Gee
Like her first novel to see print, Gee says, this one took seven years to find a publisher. Speaking about it at a date fairly early in its long quest for print, she mentioned that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Hélène Barcynska
Vista Stuart as first met is no dancer, but a rich little upper-middle-class girl tearing up the Great North Road in a sports car given her by her father, who feels instant, mutual attraction for...
