Abstract
The rise, fall and resurgence of George Eliot’s literary reputation represents many of the changes and fluctuations in literary taste that have taken place over the last 150 years. In her own day Eliot was widely regarded as an iconic sage, a sibyl, and moral teacher — roles which she herself seemed to take very seriously.1 Through her work, the English novel was seen to reach new heights of social and philosophical concern. Justin McCarthy described the reading public’s adulation of Eliot as ‘a kind of cult, a kind of worship’.2 Yet in the years following her death, attacks on a morality that came to be regarded as quintessentially Victorian rapidly displaced Eliot as a literary idol and she was transformed into a figure of ridicule: ‘Pallas with prejudices and a corset’, as W. E. Henley labelled her in 1895.3
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Notes
Justin McCarthy, Reminiscences (London, 1899), Vol. II, p. 310.
For a more recent examination of the power of the George Eliot myth, her acolytes and the financial benefits she gained by its perpetuation, see Leah Price, ‘George Eliot and the Production of Consumers’, Novel, 30: 2 (1997), 145–70.
Cited in Gordon S. Haight (ed.), A Century of George Eliot Criticism (Boston, 1965), p. 162.
John Cross, George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals, 3 Vols (Edinburgh, 1885).
Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘George Eliot’, in Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign, ed. Margaret Oliphant et al. (London, 1897), p. 64.
See: F. Joseph Jacobs, Literary Studies (London, 1895) ‘[T]he reputation of George Eliot is undergoing a kind of eclipse in this last decade of the nineteenth century. It is becoming safe to indulge in cheap sneers at the ineffectiveness of her heroes, at the want of élan’ (p. xxi).
George Saintsbury, Corrected Impressions (London, 1895) likewise noted that by 1895 she had passed out of ‘contemporary appreciation’ (p. 172).
Edmund Gosse, Aspects and Impressions (London, 1922), p. 1.
See, for example, Kristen Brady, George Eliot (London, 1992), pp. 4–12.
Virginia Woolf, ‘George Eliot’, in Collected Essays (London, 1966), Vol. I, p. 196.
Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetics of Reception (Minnesota, 1982), p. 27.
On the changing categories by which fiction is evaluated, see also Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work Of American Fiction (Oxford, 1985). The classification of fiction is dependent upon the ‘changing currents of social life’, currents which affect the perceptual frames and horizon of expectations through which critics read and evaluate texts (p. 192).
Cited in Deirdre David, Intellectual Woman and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (London, 1987), p. 171.
Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did (Oxford, 1995), p. 45.
For further discussion of the apparent decline of Eliot’s critical reputation, see Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London, 1992), ch. 4.
J. Russell Perkin, A Reception History of George Eliot’s Fiction (London, 1990), ch. 4.
To designate the female figure ‘who wields the phallic tools of the symbolic order, of language and culture…’ Jim Reilly in Shadowtime: History and Representation in Conrad, Hardy and George Eliot (London, 1993), uses Jane Gallop’s term ‘phallic mother’ (p. 89).
See, also, Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction (Ithaca, NY, 1982), pp. 77–8.
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (Harmondsworth, 1962), p. 10.
Elinor Shaffer, Kubla Kahn and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (Cambridge, 1975);
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction (London, 1983);
Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Science (London, 1984).
Elizabeth Ermarth, George Eliot (Boston, 1985), p. 139.
From an unsigned review, Guardian, 25 April 1860, in David Carroll (ed.), The Critical Heritage (London, 1971), p. 115.
In Eliot’s Journal, 22 November 1860, in R. A. Draper (ed.), The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner: A Casebook (London, 1977), p. 35.
Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. James Kirkup (Harmondsworth, 1963), p. 140.
Jessie Chambers, D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (London, 1965), pp. 17–18.
A.S. Byatt, ‘Introduction’, The Mill on the Floss (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 7.
Examples of earlier feminist impatience with George Eliot are given in Zelda Austen’s article, ‘Why Feminists are Angry with George Eliot’, College English, 37 (1976), 549–61.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton, NJ, 1977).
J. Hillis Miller, ‘Narrative and History’, ELH, 41 (1974), 462.
These are Terry Eagleton’s definitions. For a usefully succinct discussion of deconstruction, see Peter Barry, Beginning Theory (Manchester, 1996), pp. 70–1.
Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore, MD, 1980), p. 5.
For other examples of deconstruction in action, see G. Douglas Atkin, Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading (Lexington, MA, 1983).
J. Hillis Miller, Victorian Subjects (London, 1991).
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), trans H. M. Parshley (London, 1972), p. 1;
Ruth Robbins, ‘“Snowed Up”: Feminist Approaches’, in Julian Wolfreys and William Baker (eds), Literary Theories (London, 1996), p. 118.
Cited in Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (eds), The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism (London, 1997), p. 46.
Nancy K. Miller, ‘Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction’, PMLA, 96 (1981), 36–48. See Perkin A Reception History of George Eliot’s Fiction.
Frances Taylor, ‘Adam Bede’, Dublin Review, 47 (1859), 34.
Josephine McDonagh, George Eliot (Plymouth, 1997), pp. 5–6.
Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848–1932 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 87–108.
Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (London, 1994), p. 11. In ‘Industrial Culture and the Victorian Novel’ Joseph Childers also stresses Eliot’s ‘quiet but insistent nostalgia’ (in Deirdre David [ed.], Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel [Cambridge, 2001] p.91).
Kerry McSweeny, George Eliot (London, 1991), p. 88.
Q. D. Leavis, ‘Introduction’, Silas Marner (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 41.
Ken Newton, ‘Victorian Values and Silas Marner’, in Varieties of Victorianism, ed. Gary Day (London, 1998), p. 113.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859), in Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: A Life (London, 1996), p. 238.
Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (London, 1985), p. 33.
Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago, 1985).
Karl Marx, Capital (New York, 1965), p. 167.
See, for example, David Maria Hesse, George Eliot and Auguste Comte (London, 1996);
Nancy L. Paxton, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer (Princeton, NJ, 1991).
See K. McCormack, ‘George Eliot’s First Fiction: Targeting Blackwood’s’, The Bibliotheck, 21 (1996), 69–80.
See, for example, Nicola Thompson, ‘Responding to the woman question; rereading non-canonical Victorian women novelists’, in Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, ed. Nicola Thompson (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 9–10.
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Yousaf, N., Maunder, A. (2002). Introduction. In: Yousaf, N., Maunder, A. (eds) The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. New Casebooks. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21296-1_1
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