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Mahawatte explores George Eliot‘s use of the Gothic in Middlemarch (1871–72) and in particular the literary connections between Dorothea Casaubon and the heroine of the Gothic novel. He argues that Eliot has a conflicting relationship with this figure, at once wanting to satirize her, and yet also deploying Gothic images and resonances to add an authenticity of affect to her social commentary. Using Jerold E. Hogle‘s idea that the Gothic re-fakes what is already read as a copy, Mahawatte presents Dorothea as a quasi-reproduction of Sophia Lee‘s heroines in The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times (1783–85) and also as part of a Gothic process within a social realist novel.
This book argues that Victorian culture perceived the orphan as a scapegoat - a promise and a threat, a poison and a cure. It first establishes a discursive context in which to read the orphan figure as embodying a difference within the family. To do so, it describes the figure of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights against a number of discourses - namely, those of the foundling, the orphan as foreigner, and the orphan as criminal. The book then looks at the role of the orphan and popular orphan adventure narratives in policing and extending empire. It considers Charles Dickens's 'The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and Their Treasure in Women, Children, Silver and Jewels' within the context of both the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and Dickens's own imperial sympathies. The book also offers the historical context for the schemes adopted at the time for emigrating orphans. It focuses on the three main destinations -Bermuda, New South Wales and Canada - in order to consider the motivations behind the emigrating of orphans and the contemporary evaluations of it. In this historical context, the book positions Rose Macaulay's Orphan Island (1924), which in its Utopian framework poses problems for the both the rationale of the schemes and for current debates within post-colonial studies. It further looks at the exiling of difference, in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and the return of the exiled orphan from the colonies to the heart of empire, London, in Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
This book addresses the special relationship from the perspective of post-Second World War British governments. It argues that Britain's foreign policy challenges the dominant idea that its power has been waning and that it sees itself as the junior partner to the hegemonic US. The book also shows how at moments of international crisis successive British governments have attempted to re-play the same foreign policy role within the special relationship. It discusses the power of a profoundly antagonistic relationship between Mark Twain and Walter Scott. The book demonstrates Stowe's mis-reading and mis-representation of the Highland Clearances. It explains how Our Nig, the work of a Northern free black, also provides a working-class portrait of New England farm life, removed from the frontier that dominates accounts of American agrarian life. Telegraphy - which transformed transatlantic relations in the middle of the century- was used by spiritualists as a metaphor for the ways in which communications from the other world could be understood. The story of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship is discussed. Beside Sarah Orne Jewett's desk was a small copy of the well-known Raeburn portrait of Sir Walter Scott. Henry James and George Eliot shared a transatlantic literary network which embodied an easy flow of mutual interest and appreciation between their two milieux. In her autobiography, Gertrude Stein assigns to her lifelong companion the repeated comment that she has met three geniuses in her life: Stein, Picasso, and Alfred North Whitehead.
8 Beyond the Americana: Henry James reads George Eliot Lindsey Traub With typically magisterial conviction, F.R. Leavis announced in the first chapter of The Great Tradition that ‘it can be shown, with a conclusiveness rarely possible in these matters, that James did actually go to school to George Eliot’.1 His argument is certainly convincing but his acute observations about the development of The Portrait of a Lady (1881) out of Daniel Deronda (1876), include the assertion that ‘Isabel Archer is Gwendolen Harleth and Osmond is Grandcourt’ or, on concession
’s attempts to grasp at him as he is of his own unknown origins. It is possible to read a ‘Jewish panic’ alongside an erotic one: the so-called ‘homosexual panic’ that has powered so much of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work. In her final novel, George Eliot created an eroticism of fear around Daniel and his Jewish identity, one that eventually becomes quite explicit. When viewed against the other plot in the
Introduction I n July 1875, George Henry Lewes, a man of letters and a scientist, accepted an invitation to a garden party which the Queen of Holland attended. During the course of the afternoon, Lewes had a conversation with the monarch. She complimented his writings, then added, ‘as to your wife’s – all the world admires them’.1 What is startling about this story was that Lewes’s legal wife, Agnes, had never written a book in her life. Instead, the queen referred to Lewes’s cohabitee, Marian Evans (George Eliot), with whom he had lived for seventeen years
drives the development of the post-Romantic novel. 7 The matters raised here involve complex issues in literary history, particularly with respect to narrators and characters and the new technologies of nineteenth-century narrative fiction. In this chapter, though, I will confine myself to a discussion of two of the most fully achieved and most commonly discussed English novels from the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–61) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72). And I will focus my discussion further by
Alice Barber Stephens (1858–1932) was among the first readers to recognize Dorothea, the heroine of George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872), as a modern woman determined to define a purposeful life. Of the seventeen illustrations Stephens contributed to the 1899 American edition of Middlemarch , nearly half focus on Dorothea, isolating key moments that chart her growing authority, from sisterhood through a difficult marriage to widowhood. 1 The illustrations won Stephens a gold medal at the 1899
George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) has often been examined from religious and gender studies perspectives. Jon Singleton remarks, for instance, that ‘Adam's views on the Bible seem to establish the narrative's frame of reference within a traditional Christian worldview’. 1 Tim Dolin, meanwhile, uses Adam Bede to explain that ‘Assumptions about women's nature and vocation are also carried through into the language of the fiction, where a woman's very authority to speak must constantly be
In literary studies George Eliot (1819–80) is often identified as the most ardent proponent of realism. Historical discussions of realism frequently invoke her letters, her novels and her review of two works by German ethnographer W. H. Riehl (1823–97). Today we read ‘The Natural History of German Life’ as a kind of manifesto for realist fiction. Eliot famously states that ‘the greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies’, but she problematises those sympathies when they are