George Eliot, Pseudonym of Marian Evans
George Eliot, pseudonym of Marian Evans (1819-1880)
This article appeared in The Times Literary Supplement and was reprinted in
The Common Reader: First Series. Virginia Woolf also wrote on George Eliot in the Daily Herald of 9
To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one knows about her. It is also to become aware of
the credulity, not very creditable to one’s insight, with which, half consciously and partly maliciously, one had
accepted the late Victorian version of a deluded woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more deluded
than herself. At what moment and by what means her spell was broken it is difficult to ascertain. Some people
attribute it to the publication of her Life. Perhaps George Meredith, with his phrase about the ‘mercurial little
showman’ and the ‘errant woman’ on the daïs, gave point and poison to the arrows of thousands incapable of aiming
them so accurately, but delighted to let fly. She became one of the butts for youth to laugh at, the convenient
symbol of a group of serious people who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the same
scorn. Lord Acton had said that she was greater than Dante; Herbert Spencer exempted her novels, as if they were
not novels, when he banned all fiction from the London Library. She was the pride and paragon of her sex.
Moreover, her private record was not more alluring than her public. Asked to describe an afternoon at the Priory,
the story-teller always imitated that the memory of those serious Sunday afternoons had come to tickle his sense of
humour. He had been so much alarmed by the grave lady in her low chair; he had been so anxious to say the
intelligent thing. Certainly, the talk had been very serious, as a note in the fine clear hand of the great novelist bore
witness. It was dated Monday morning, and she accused herself of having spoken without due forethought of
Marivaux when she meant another; but not doubt, she said, her listener had already supplied the correction. Still,
the memory of talking about Marivaux to George Eliot on a Sunday afternoon was not a romantic memory. It had
faded with the passage of the years. It had not become picturesque. Indeed, one cannot escape the conviction that
the long, heavy face with its expression of serious and sullen and almost equine power has stamped itself
depressingly upon the minds of people who remember George Eliot, so that it looks out upon them from her pages.
The timeline carries on chronologically, the intense imagery exaggerated to allow the poem to mimic childlike mannerisms. This, subjectively, lets the reader experience the adventure through the young speaker’s eyes. The personification of “sunset”, (5) “shutters”, (8) “shadows”, (19) and “lamplights” (10) makes the world appear alive and allows nothing to be a passing detail, very akin to a child’s imagination. The sunset, alive as it may seem, ordinarily depicts a euphemism for death, similar to the image of the “shutters closing like the eyelids”
“A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without
In the 18th century, reading novels served as a pass time and a diversion from household chores for the women. Though formal female education is not developed, the female characters are seen having a keen interest in books, something that was earlier frowned upon for the sentimental content of books might be destructive to societal values. At the time, books were meant to teach and reflect upon the socially acceptable ideas of romance, courtship, and marriage. We find Miss Wharton asking for books to read from her friend Mrs. Lucy Sumner, “Send me some new books; not such, however, as will require much attention. Let them be plays or novels, or anything else that will amuse and extort a smile.” (Foster, 192) Mrs. Sumner sends her novels which she considers “chaste and of a lighter reading” (Foster, 196). We can thus construe that books and novels in The Coquette though meant for reading pleasure, also play form part of the female
She was aware of the situation of women in her times, especially being a puritan woman. They were restricted to certain modes of behavior, speech
excused it on the pretense that her views reflected the past times in which she
became more opinionated and she opened the eyes to other writers in this time period to express their true feelings. Without this push and brav...
of morals, that it was not fit that she should meet with and mix with members of
Nancy Mairs is completely straightforward with her condition throughout the entire passage. “As a ...
She constantly thinks about being a “good person,” she would even like to have been a saint, “because that included everything you could know” (243) but she thinks that she has too many faults such as being a liar, ...
Other images of Eliot’s, in contrast, are much larger than Shakespeare, but again succeed in making Eliot’s character look small and insignificant in comparison. Eliot describes the enormous amount of adornments around the room, including her ‘vials of ivory and coloured glass’, which contain many perfumes, which are described as ‘drowning the sense in odours’ and again it is the lack of subtlety t...
Both Browning and Eliot seek to improve upon the nature of the dramatic monologue. Browning emphasizes structure and a separation between the poet and the character which is reiterated by Eliot’s poem. Browning’s influence on Eliot can be seen by the form and structure of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” adding working intrinsically with the theme and subject of the work. However, Eliot deviates slightly from Browning by the portrayal of his characters, and the amount of information that he is willing to share with the reader. The intended message of Browning’s poem is much more apparent than Eliot’s who creates an open ended poem that can be interpreted differently by each reader.
about her. We do learn that she is haughty, but this might be evidence of the bias on the
“In Tradition and the Individual Talent”, T.S. Eliot affirms that the greatest writers are those who are conscious of the writers who came before, as if they write with a sense of continuity. T.S Eliot addresses literary tradition as well as poetic tradition, and states that it is important to focus on “significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet” (18). In this sense, the importance of tradition in poetry relies on the fact that a poet must be aware of the achievements of his predecessors, for, as we shall see in the case of Stevens and Ashbery, “the emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless...
In actuality, she was defiant, and ate macaroons secretly when her husband had forbidden her to do so. She was quite wise and resourceful. While her husband was gravely ill she forged her father’s signature and borrowed money without her father or husband’s permission to do so and then boastfully related the story of doing so to her friend, Mrs. Linde. She was proud of the sacrifices she made for her husband, but her perceptions of what her husband truly thought of her would become clear. She had realized that the childlike and submissive role she was playing for her husband was no longer a role she wanted to play. She defied the normal roles of the nineteenth century and chose to find her true self, leaving her husband and children
Eagleton, Terry, "George Eliot: Ideology and Literary Form," in Middlemarch: New Casebooks, Ed. John Peck.