Abstract
The critics’ response to George Eliot is usually regarded historically as a story of fall and rise. After adulation in her own day she was denigrated for half a century and then rehabilitated for good. Evidence can be adduced to support this view, but it has been done rather too selectively, I think. I am aware of an instability of critical opinion about her all the way along, of constant shifts of approval and disapproval, with both arising on varying grounds. Two factors have always weighed for and against her simultaneously; she is both a difficult writer and a woman writer. The sheer volume of comment which these issues have aroused inevitably involves controversy and disagreement.
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Notes
D. Carroll, George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 1.
G. Saintsbury, Corrected Impressions: Essays on Victorian Writers (London: Heinemann, 1895), p. 172.
G. S. Haight, A Century of George Eliot Criticism (London: Methuen, 1966), p. xiii; ‘their knowledge of her novels grew dimmer with the years.’
W. E. Henley, Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation (London: Nutt, 1890), pp. 130–32. Leslie Stephen in the unsigned obituary article in the Cornhill, vol. LXIII, pp. 152–68 (February 1881), commented that her ‘men were often simply women in disguise’, p. 160.
W. C. Brownell, Victorian Prose Masters (New York: Scribner, 1901), p. 145.
H. H. Bonnell, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Jane Austen: Studies in their Works (London: Longman, 1902), p. 237.
L. Stephen, George Eliot (London: Macmillan, 1902), pp. 74 and 182–83.
Henry James, Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1888), pp. 46, 50 and 61.
Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother (London: Macmillan, 1914), pp. 442–43.
Henry James, The Middle Years (London: Collins, 1917), p. 85. James is echoing here, I think, Matthew Arnold’s final word on Wordsworth; ‘I am a Wordsworthian myself … No Wordsworthian has a tenderer affection for this pure and sage master than I, or is less readily offended by his defects’, Preface to Arnold’s selection of The Poems of Wordsworth: (London: Macmillan, 1879). See The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. IX, ed. R. H. Super, English Literature and Irish Politics (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1973), p. 55.
Mrs Humphrey Ward, A Writer’s Recollections (London: Collins, 1918), pp. 108–9.
R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (London: Constable, 1975). Middlemarch ‘was one of the two or three English novels Edith Wharton most respected.’ Her review of Leslie Stephen’s George Eliot in Bookman (15 May 1902) suggests that the later novels are used by George Eliot as unconscious vehicles of rehabilitation.
E. T. [Jessie Chambers], D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (London: Cape, 1935), pp. 97–98 and 103–5.
H. Spurling, Ivy when Young: The Early Life of I. Compton-Burnett (London: Gollancz, 1974), pp. 163–71.
E. Gosse, Aspects and Impressions (London: Cassell, 1922), pp. 14–15.
O. Elton, A Survey of English Literature 1830–1880 (London: Arnold, 1920), vol. II, pp. 272–75.
D. Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation (London: Constable, 1934), pp. 283, 304, 310, 322 and 328.
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), p. 13.
B. Hardy, The Appropriate Form: An Essay on the Novel (London: Athlone Press, 1964), pp. 3 and 130–31.
B. Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London: Athlone Press, 1959), pp. 233, 235 and 237.
W. J. Harvey, Character and the Novel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), pp. 148–49.
W. J. Harvey, The Art of George Eliot (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), pp. 88 and 114–15.
A. Ketde, An Introduction to the English Novel, vol. I, To George Eliot (London: Hutchinson, 1951), pp. 171, 174 and 177.
R. Williams, Culture and Sodety, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958, repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), pp. 115 and 119.
R. Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), p. 180.
T. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976), pp. 111–12 and 124–25.
E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. C. C. O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 135.
C. MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 15–21.
D. Lodge, After Bakhtin (London: Roudedge & Kegan Paul, 1990), pp. 48–51.
J. Hillis Miller, ‘Narrative and History’, English Literary History, vol. XI, pp. 467–88 (Fall 1974).
Z. Austen, ‘Why Feminist Critics are angry with George Elio’, College English, vol. XXXVII (1976), p. 551.
G. Beer, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), p. 1. Four searching and up-to-date surveys of George Eliot criticism, to each of which I am indebted,
are Graham Handley, State of the Art George Eliot (Bristol: Bristol Press, 1990),
J. Russell Perkin, A Reception History of George Eliot’s Fiction (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1990),
K. M. Newton (ed.), George Eliot (London: Longman, 1991)
and J. Peck (ed.), New Casebooks: Middlemarch (London: Macmillan, 1992).
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© 1993 Alan W. Bellringer
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Bellringer, A.W. (1993). George Eliot Criticism. In: George Eliot. Macmillan Modern Novelists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22810-2_7
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