Listings for Author:
George Eliot
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George Eliot :
'Our parents had accumulated a large number of books, which we were allowed to browse in as much as we liked.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Vivian (Molly) Hughes Print: Book
George Eliot :
'By age fourteen Durham collier Jack Lawson would find... emancipation at the Boldon Miners' Institute... "And didn't I follow the literary trail, once I found it. Like a Fenimore Cooper Indian I was tireless and silent once I started. Scott; Charles Reade, George Eliot; the Brontes; later on Hardy; Hugo; Dumas and scores of others. Then came Shakespeare; the Bible; Milton and the line of poets generally. I was hardly sixteen when I picked up James Thomson's Seasons, in Stead's 'Penny Poets'... I wept for the shepherd who died in the snow".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Jack Lawson Print: Book
George Eliot : The Mill on the Floss
'During these early years [Daphne du Maurier] filled her head with tales of adventure, romances, histories and popular novels, including such books as Treasure Island, The Snow Queen, The Wreck of the Grosvenor, Old St Paul's, The Tower of London, Nicholas Nickleby, Mr Midshipman Easy, Bleak House, Robinson Crusoe, The Mill on the Floss, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. The seeds of her own novels were planted during these intensive, sometimes acted-out, reading sessions. The fascination with the sea, the importance of an historical sense of place, the theme of the dual personality, are all reflected in her reading during these formative years'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Daphne du Maurier Print: Book
George Eliot : unknown
'As one participant recalled, "Many exceptional debates come back to mind on such subjects as Jane Austen, Charles Lamb, Victorian Novelists, George Eliot, Meredith, Pepys and the Navy, Frederick the Great, Wordsworth, Shelley, Napoleon, where the speaking was of high level and the debating power considerable."'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ladies' Edinburgh Debating Society Print: Book
George Eliot : The Mill on the Floss
'On 12 May [1890 Grace Macaulay] recalls that she "read part of Mill on Floss to children in aft, to their delight".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Grace Macaulay Print: Book
George Eliot : unknown
Geraldine Hodgson, The Life of James Elroy Flecker (1925), 'Reading aloud in the family circle was an established custom [in 1880s-90s] ... by a very early age, Roy had listened to large parts of Dickens, Longfellow, and Tennyson, and to much of Thackeray, George Eliot, Carlyle, and Browning.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: James Elroy Flecker Print: Book
George Eliot : unknown
Philip Gibbs in The Pageant of the Years (1946), on work as writer of series of articles under name "Self-Help" in early 1900s: "'All the reading I had done as a boy, all my youthful enthusiasm for Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy ... was a great source of supply now when I sat down to write aout great books ...'"
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Gibbs Print: Book
George Eliot : novels
June Badeni on readings by 13-year-old Alice Thompson, as recorded in her notebook: 'She has been reading more of Scott and Dickens, is plunging through the novels of George Eliot... has sampled Bulwer Lytton, Thackeray, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alice Thompson Print: Book
George Eliot : Adam Bede
Not long ago I happened to call at the railway carter, and found the wife of the man engaged in reading George Eliots' 'Adam Bede'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Print: Book
George Eliot : Felix Holt the Radical
'I have got two copies of "Felix Holt" - the last sent me by Mr Langford [...] I don't think I could say anything satisfactory about it. It leaves an impression on my mind as of "Hamlet" played by six sets of gravediggers. Of course it will be a successful book, but I think chiefly because "Adam Bede" and "Silas Marner" went before it. Now that I have read it, I have given up the idea of reviewing it.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret Oliphant Print: Book
George Eliot : Middlemarch
"I think, for example, that Shirley is very superior to Dorothea Brooke. She has far more character & power, though she does not have such a young lady like admiration for Greek & Hebrew scholarship."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Leslie Stephen Print: Book
George Eliot : Romola
"Then I promised Morley to contribute to a continuation of the 'Men of Letters' series a book upon George Eliot. I find it very hard to tell you the truth. I admire English country novels as much as I could wish; but later performances are not to my taste. Romola bores me and the 'poetry' - does not appear to be poetry."
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Leslie Stephen Print: Book
George Eliot :
'[Helen Crawfurd] derived lessons in socialism and feminism from Carlyle, Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Ibsen's Ghosts and A Doll's House, Dickens, Disraeli's Sybil, Mary Barton, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Under the Greenwood Tree, Tennyson's The Princess, Longfellow, Whitman, Burns, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, George Sand, the Brontes, Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Helen Crawfurd Print: Book
George Eliot :
'Mrs Benson, wife of the Headmaster of Wellington College, [scandalized] his friends by letting her children read George Eliot ...'
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Benson family Print: Book
George Eliot : Adam Bede
'[On grounds of propriety] Lucy Caroline Lyttelton's grandmother ... left out one chapter of ... [Adam Bede] ... when she was reading it aloud to her grandchildren ...'
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Print: Book
George Eliot : Adam Bede
' ... as late as the 1890s, Harriet Shaw Weaver's mother was shocked when she came upon her adolescent daughter reading "Adam Bede" ... the local vicar was asked to call in order to explain the book's unsuitability.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Harriet Shaw Weaver Print: Book
George Eliot : Adam Bede
"Vera Brittain's far from bookish home contained, in addition to the yellow-back novels which formed the main staple of her early reading, a volume entitled Household Medicine: 'the treatment of infectious diseases left me cold, but I was secretly excited at the prospect of menstruation; I also found the details of confinement quite enthralling.' She added the knowledge thus gained to other sources, recalling 'that intensive searching for obstetrical details through the Bible and such school-library novels as David Copperfield and Adam Bede which appears to have been customary almost everywhere among the adolescents of my generation.'"
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
George Eliot : The Mill on the Floss
Jane Ellen Harrison, in Reminiscences of a Student's Life (1925) 11-12: "'Until I met Aunt Glegg in the Mill on the Floss, I never knew myself. I am Aunt Glegg; with all reverence I say it.'"
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Jane Ellen Harrison Print: Book
George Eliot : novels
"Alice Foley's father was an often drunk, sometimes violent Irish factory worker in Bolton, but when 'in sober mood, he read aloud to the family the novels of Dickens and George Eliot'."
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
George Eliot [pseud] :
'As a boy George Acorn [an] East Londoner, read "all sorts and conditions of books from 'Penny Bloods' to George Eliot" with "some appreciation of style", enough to recognise the affinities of high and low literature. Thus he discerningly characterised "Treasure Island" as "the usual penny blood sort of story, with the halo of greatness about it".'
Century: Reader/Listener/Group: George Acorn Print: Book
George Eliot :
'James Williams admitted that, growing up in rural Wales, "I'd read anything rather than not read at all. I read a great deal of rubbish, and books that were too 'old', or too 'young' for me". He consumed the Gem, Magnet and Sexton Blake as well as the standard boys' authors (Henty, Ballantyne, Marryat, Fenimore Cooper, Twain) but also Dickens, Scott, Trollope, the Brontes, George Eliot, even Prescott's "The Conquest of Peru" and "The Conquest of Mexico". He picked "The Canterbury Tales" out of an odd pile of used books for sale, gradually puzzled out the Middle English, and eventually adopted Chaucer as his favourite poet'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: James Williams Print: Book
George Eliot : [unknown]
Elizabeth Morrison, "Serial Fiction in Australian Colonial Newspapers": " ... the short novel A Woman's Friendship ... owes much to [Ada] Cambridge's reading of George Eliot, George Meredith, Henry James, and William Dean Howells ..."
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Ada Cambridge Print: Unknown
George Eliot : [unknown]
'George Acorn read George Eliot at age nine, but "solely for the story. I used to skip the parts that moralized, or painted verbal scenery, a practice at which I became very dextrous".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Acorn Print: Book
George Eliot : Middlemarch
H. J. Jackson notes annotations in a copy of Middlemarch by a reader who, "initially repelled by the books, was gradually won over."
Century: 1800-1849 / 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
George Eliot : Adam Bede
'[Ethel] Mannin was firmly rooted in the autodidact tradition. In her father's library she enjoyed Gissing and Wells, "Adam Bede" and "The Cloister and the Hearth". A Clapham letter-sorter, he collected Nelson's Sevenpenny Classics, which she applauded as "a great boon to poor people"... By age fifteen she was quoting Wilde, Dr Johnson, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, Elizabeth Browning, Omar Khayyam, Anatole France, Emily Bronte, Shaw, Hazlitt, Stevenson, W.E. Henley, and Schopenhauer in her commonplace book...Except "Orlando", she read nothing of Virginia Woolf, whom she found "too intellectual, too subtle and complicated and remote from reality"...Mannin made sure to read "Ulysses" (or at least the final chapter) and she admired Gertrude Stein'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ethel Mannin Print: Book
George Eliot :
[L.M. Montgomery] 'read a great deal; she mentions fifty different authors in her journal which covers the years 1910 to 1921. Titles range from Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to Beatrix Potter's "Peter Rabbit" and Thackeray's "Vanity Fair". She also read many female writers, such as George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Edith Wharton and Olive Schreiner'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Lucy Maud Montgomery Print: Book
George Eliot : Adam Bede
?The library of the Mechanics' Institute gave me the opportunity to read some books which were then new to me, among them being, I remember, "Adam Bede", and other of George Eliot?s novels. My appetite for Ruskin had been whetted by his "Unto this Last", which I had read with care and keen appreciation. Ruskin?s works were at the time beyond the reach of my slender purse. Now I read with delight his "Crown of Wild Olive", his "Sesame and Lilies", and other of his smaller books. These, together with his "Modern Painters", I soon afterwards added to my own little library, as well as a complete set of George Eliot?s works. Next to Wordsworth I do not think any writer has influenced me more deeply and more healthily than Ruskin.?
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Burt Print: Book
George Eliot : Daniel Deronda
Henry James to Alice James, 22 February, 1876: "Of course you have read Daniel Deronda, and I hope you have enjoyed it a tenth as much as I. It was disappointing, and it brings out strongly the defects of later growth ... But ... I enjoyed it more than anything of hers ... I have ever read. Partly for reading it in this beastly Paris ..."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry James Print: Book
George Eliot : Daniel Deronda
Henry James to Mrs. Henry James Sr., 8 May 1876: "... [Daniel Deronda] disappoints me as it goes on -- the analysing and the sapience -- to say nothing of the tortuosity of the style -- are overdone."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry James Print: Unknown
George Eliot : Adam Bede
'I also read again Silvio Pellico's "Prisons". I read it once at Granton- a lovely book (same edition) and "Adam Bede" and a French Novel and other new works. I like all Adam Bede immensely except the extremely inartistic plot. Geo. Eliot loves to draw self-righteious people with good instincts being led into crime or misery by circumstances.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Sir Walter Raleigh Print: Book
George Eliot (pseud) : Janet's Repentance
'read G. the three first chapters of "Janet's Repentance".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot (pseud) Manuscript: MS of own work
George Eliot (pseud.) : Adam Bede
'Read my new story to G. this evening as far as the end of the third chapter. He praised it highly... I am in the Choephorae now. In the evenings we are reading "History of Thirty Years' Peace" and Beranger. Throughly disappointed in Beranger'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot (pseud) Manuscript: MS of own novel
George Eliot (pseud.) : Romola
'I read to G. the Proem and opening scene of my novel and he expressed great delight in them'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud] Manuscript: Sheet, MS of novel
George Eliot (pseud.) : Romola
'Read aloud what I had written of Part IX to George, and he to my surprize entirely approved it'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud] Manuscript: Sheet, MS of novel
George Eliot (pseud.) : The Spanish Gipsy
'Read my 2nd Act to George. It is written in verse - my first serious attempt at blank verse. G. praises and encourages me'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud] Manuscript: Sheet, MS of own work
George Eliot (pseud.) : Felix Holt
'Read my MS to George up to p.468. He was delighted with it'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud.] Manuscript: Unknown, MS of own novel
George Eliot : [unknown]
'As I began to mend, the Governor, to keep me from brooding too much, gave orders that I was to have all the reading matter I wanted within the limits of the prison library, and my book changed just as often as I liked and at any hour of the day. To a man eager to improve his acquaintance with standard literature such a privilege was immeasurably great, and for the next six weeks or so I browsed among the Victorian novelists - Austin [sic?], the Brontes, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Meredith, Lytton, Kingsley, Reade, Hughes, Trollope and others.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Stuart Wood [pseud?] Print: Book
George Eliot : [unknown]
'I often found peace in the pages of Ecclesiastes or Isaiah, or in the writings of men whom Barry has described as the heralds of revolt - John Inglesant, George Eliot, Carlyle, Heine, Loti, Nietzsche, etc. But in time even literature palls.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Stuart Wood [pseud?] Print: Book
George Eliot : Middlemarch
'Have you yet seen Middlemarch? You would not be quite so unsophisticated a visitor to Rome as Miss Brooke.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Serial / periodical
George Eliot : Middlemarch
Virginia Woolf to Hugh Walpole, 8 November 1931: 'I'm reading Middlemarch with even greater pleasure than I remembered: and Ford M. Ford's memoirs [Thus to Revisit] -- fascinating, and even endearing; but I long to know the truth about him'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
George Eliot : Adam Bede
'Our library too was a weighty affair. Shipton had the longest novel that had been published in recent years, Warren a 2,000-page work on physiology.[...] On Good Friday [...] the rest of us lay about, played chess or read the less technical portion of our curiously assorted library. This included "Gone with the Wind" (Shipton) "Seventeenth Century Verse" (Oliver), "Montaigne's Essays" (Warren), "Don Quixote" (self), "Adam Bede" (Lloyd), "Martin Chuzzlewit" (Smythe), "Stones of Venice" (Odell) and a few others. Warren, who rejoined us that day, besides his weighty tome on Physiology -in which there were several funny anecdotes if one took the trouble to look - had with him a yet weightier volume on the singularly inappropriate subject of Tropical Diseases. '
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Peter Lloyd Print: Book
George Eliot [pseud.] : Scenes from Clerical Life
'Read 'Scenes of Clerical Life', published in Blackwood, for [italics] this [end italics] year, - I shd think they began as early as Janry or February - They are a discovery of my own, & I am so proud of them. [italics] Do [end italics] read them. I have not a notion who wrote them'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Serial / periodical
George Eliot [pseud.] : Amos Barton
'I am going to make a request to you, Sir, which is of a slightly impudent nature. It is, that you will be so good as to give me a copy of "Adam Bede", - and I advance three pretexts for asking this favour from you. Firstly my delight in the book; and in the "Stories from Clerical Life", ever since the first part of "Amos Barton" in Blackwood. It almost seems presumptuous in me to express all the admiration I feel; you might be tempted to quote Dr Johnson'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Serial / periodical
George Eliot [pseud.] : Adam Bede
'I am going to make a request to you, Sir, which is of a slightly impudent nature. It is, that you will be so good as to give me a copy of "Adam Bede", - and I advance three pretexts for asking this favour from you. Firstly my delight in the book; and in the "Stories from Clerical Life", ever since the first part of "Amos Barton" in Blackwood. It almost seems presumptuous in me to express all the admiration I feel; you might be tempted to quote Dr Johnson'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Book
George Eliot [pseud.] : Adam Bede
'I received the copy of "Adam Bede" which you were so kind as to send me quite safely; and I am very much obliged to you for it. - I thoroughly admire this writer's works - (I do not call him Mr Elliot, because I know that such is not his real name.) I was brought up in Warwickshire, and recognize the county in every description of natural scenery. I am thoroughly obliged to you for giving it to me; it is a book that it is a real pleasure to have, and if for every article in your Magazine, abusive of me, you will only be so kind as to give me one of the works of the author of "Scenes from Clerical Life", I shall consider myself your debtor'. [Later on the same page, Gaskell says 'One of Mrs Poyser's speeches is as good as a fresh blow of sea-air; and yet {it} she is a true person, and no caricature']
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Book
George Eliot [pseud.] : Adam Bede
'Please say [if Marian Evans is really the author of Adam Bede...] It is a noble grand book, whoever wrote it, - but Miss Evans' life taken at the best construction, does so jar against the beautiful book that one cannot help hoping against hope'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Book
George Eliot [pseud.] : Janet's Repentance
'I think I have a feeling that it is not worth while trying to write, while there are such books as Adam Bede & Scenes from Clerical Life - I set "Janet's Repentance" above all, still.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Book, Serial / periodical
George Eliot [pseud.] : Scenes from Clerical Life
'Since I heard, from authority, that you were the author of Scenes from "Clerical Life" and "Adam Bede", I have read them again; and I must, once more, tell you how earnestly fully, and humbly I admire them. I never read anything so complete, and beautiful in fiction, in my whole life before. [She then writes a bit about the imposture of Mr Liggins as the books' author, concluding] I should not be quite true in my ending, if I did not say before I concluded that I wish you [italics] were [end italics] Mrs Lewes. However, that can't be helped, as far as I can see, and one must not judge others. Once more, thanking you most gratefully for having written all - Janet's Repentance perhaps most especially of all, - (& may I tell you how I singled out the 2nd No of Amos Barton in Blackwood, & went plodging through our Manchester Sts to get every number, as soon as it was accessible from the Portico reading table - )'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Book, Serial / periodical
George Eliot [pseud.] : Adam Bede
'Since I heard, from authority, that you were the author of Scenes from "Clerical Life" and "Adam Bede", I have read them again; and I must, once more, tell you how earnestly fully, and humbly I admire them. I never read anything so complete, and beautiful in fiction, in my whole life before. [She then writes a bit about the imposture of Mr Liggins as the books' author, concluding] I should not be quite true in my ending, if I did not say before I concluded that I wish you [italics] were [end italics] Mrs Lewes. However, that can't be helped, as far as I can see, and one must not judge others. Once more, thanking you most gratefully for having written all - Janet's Repentance perhaps most especially of all, - (& may I tell you how I singled out the 2nd No of Amos Barton in Blackwood, & went plodging through our Manchester Sts to get every number, as soon as it was accessible from the Portico reading table - )'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Book, Serial / periodical
George Eliot [pseud.] : 'Amos Barton'
'Since I heard, from authority, that you were the author of Scenes from 'Clerical Life' and 'Adam Bede', I have read them again; and I must, once more, tell you how earnestly fully, and humbly I admire them. I never read anything so complete, and beautiful in fiction, in my whole life before. [She then writes a bit about the imposture of Mr Liggins as the books' author, concluding] I should not be quite true in my ending, if I did not say before I concluded that I wish you [italics] were [end italics] Mrs Lewes. However, that can't be helped, as far as I can see, and one must not judge others. Once more, thanking you most gratefully for having written all - Janet's Repentance perhaps most especially of all, - (& may I tell you how I singled out the 2nd No of Amos Barton in Blackwood, & went plodging through our Manchester Sts to get every number, as soon as it was accessible from the Portico reading table - )'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Serial / periodical
George Eliot [pseud] : Mill on the Floss, The
'only think of having the Mill on the Floss the second day of publication, & of my very own. I think it is so kind of you, & am so greedy to read it I can scarcely be grateful enough to write this letter'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Print: Book
George Eliot [pseud.] : Mill on the Floss, The
'I am so much enjoying [italics] The Mill on the Floss [end italics] but would so much like to earn the right to read it.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
George Eliot [pseud.] : Mill on the Floss, The
'I have just finished [italics] The Mill on the Floss[end italics]. Reading it and [italics] Adam Bede [end italics] have given me the most extraordinary pleasure. I begin to think George Eliot is not only the greatest English woman novelist but perhaps the greatest English novelist. She has not the fiery poetry of Emily Bronte nor the exquisite surface of Jane Austen but she has a richness and sweep and depth that is Shakespearean. The one thing that maims or constrains her a little is some rigid moral sense which goes against her [italics] natural [end italics ] morality. She is haunted by an impossible ideal of purity and strictness. In [italics] Middlemarch [end italics] and [italics] Adam Bede [end italics] she incarnates this in two women; one so impossibly good that she is repellent. I am in for a George Eliot bout as a drunkard goes on a jag. Over dinner I raced through a short life of her.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
George Eliot [pseud.] : Adam Bede
'I have just finished [italics] The Mill on the Floss[end italics]. Reading it and [italics] Adam Bede [end italics] have given me the most extraordinary pleasure. I begin to think George Eliot is not only the greatest English woman novelist but perhaps the greatest English novelist. She has not the fiery poetry of Emily Bronte nor the exquisite surface of Jane Austen but she has a richness and sweep and depth that is Shakespearean. The one thing that maims or constrains her a little is some rigid moral sense which goes against her [italics] natural [end italics ] morality. She is haunted by an impossible ideal of purity and strictness. In [italics] Middlemarch [end italics] and [italics] Adam Bede [end italics] she incarnates this in two women; one so impossibly good that she is repellent. I am in for a George Eliot bout as a drunkard goes on a jag. Over dinner I raced through a short life of her.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
George Eliot [pseud.] : Middlemarch
'I have just finished [italics] The Mill on the Floss[end italics]. Reading it and [italics] Adam Bede [end italics] have given me the most extraordinary pleasure. I begin to think George Eliot is not only the greatest English woman novelist but perhaps the greatest English novelist. She has not the fiery poetry of Emily Bronte nor the exquisite surface of Jane Austen but she has a richness and sweep and depth that is Shakespearean. The one thing that maims or constrains her a little is some rigid moral sense which goes against her [italics] natural [end italics ] morality. She is haunted by an impossible ideal of purity and strictness. In [italics] Middlemarch [end italics] and [italics] Adam Bede [end italics] she incarnates this in two women; one so impossibly good that she is repellent. I am in for a George Eliot bout as a drunkard goes on a jag. Over dinner I raced through a short life of her.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
George Eliot : [unknown]
'I have been struck by finding the same thought within a few days in two very different places - in George Eliot and in an American magazine. That is the idea of a person's horror at a crime coming not from the crime but from the fact that [italics] they [end italics] have committed it.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
George Eliot : Silas Marner
Passages transcribed in E. M. Forster's Commonplace Book (1941) include speech about Christmas by Dolly Winthrop in chapter 10 of George Eliot, Silas Marner, which followed by remark: 'G. E. shows her greatness in this minor interview. Who else in her century or in any could present simplicity and goodness without patronage [italics]end[end italics] without self-abasement? Atmosphere all through both thick and unforced; buried buried are we in the depths of a deeper England than Hardy's. [comments further on text]'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Morgan Forster Print: Book
George Eliot : Middlemarch
From Diary of E. M. Forster, 8 September 1940: 'London Burning! I watched this event from my Chiswick flat last night with disgust and indignation, but with no intensity though the spectacle was superb, I thought It is nothing like the burning of Troy. Yet the Surrey Docks were ablaze, at the back with towers and spires outlines [sic] against them, greenish yellow searchlights swept the sky in futile agony [...] Now and then tracts of the horizon flashed a ghastly electric green. Or the fire ahead burst up as I hoped it was dying down. "Oh!" I cried once faintly, then returned to my bed and read Middlemarch.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edward Morgan Forster Print: Book
George Eliot : Romola
'My desultory and totally unorganised reading of George Eliot, Thackeray, Mrs Gaskell, Carlyle, Emerson and Merejkowski made little impression upon this routine, though their writings offered occasional compensation for its utter futility. "The reading of 'Romola,'" enthusiastically records my diary for April 27th, 1913, "has left me in a state of exultation!"'
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain
George Eliot : Daniel Deronda
'Uneasily I recalled a passage from Daniel Deronda that I had read in comfortable detachment the year before:'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
George Eliot : Adam Bede
From Emily Tennyson's journal (1871): 'July 14th. A. travelled down from London with G. H. Lewes, who took him to his house at Witley and introduced him to Mrs Lewes (George Eliot) [...] He likes her Adam Bede, Scenes of Clerical Life, Silas Marner best of her novels. Romola he thinks somewhat out of her depth.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Unknown
George Eliot : Scenes of Clerical Life
From Emily Tennyson's journal (1871): 'July 14th. A. travelled down from London with G. H. Lewes, who took him to his house at Witley and introduced him to Mrs Lewes (George Eliot) [...] He likes her Adam Bede, Scenes of Clerical Life, Silas Marner best of her novels. Romola he thinks somewhat out of her depth.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Unknown
George Eliot : Silas Marner
From Emily Tennyson's journal (1871): 'July 14th. A. travelled down from London with G. H. Lewes, who took him to his house at Witley and introduced him to Mrs Lewes (George Eliot) [...] He likes her Adam Bede, Scenes of Clerical Life, Silas Marner best of her novels. Romola he thinks somewhat out of her depth.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Unknown
George Eliot : Romola
From Emily Tennyson's journal (1871): 'July 14th. A. travelled down from London with G. H. Lewes, who took him to his house at Witley and introduced him to Mrs Lewes (George Eliot) [...] He likes her Adam Bede, Scenes of Clerical Life, Silas Marner best of her novels. Romola he thinks somewhat out of her depth.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Unknown
George Eliot [pseud.] : Adam Bede
'[letter from Frederic Harrison to Mrs Ward] I am one of those to whom your book ["The Case of Richard Meynell"] specially appeals, as I know so much of the literature, the persons, the questions it dealt with. It has given me the most lively interest both as romance - as fine as anything since "Adam Bede" - and also as controversy - as important as anything since "Essays and Reviews". Meynell seems to me a far higher type than Elsmere, both as a man and as a book, and I am sure will have a greater permanent value'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Frederic Harrison Print: Book
George Eliot : The Spanish Gipsy
'It was strange that, as a girl of fifteen, my greatest friend should have been this Colonel Berkeley. The thirty years difference in our ages did not seem to matter. He was fond of reading and we read poetry together, a great deal of Tennyson, and although I had read George Eliot's novels, I was surprised that she who produced the dry prose of "Daniel Deronda", should also have produced "The Spanish Gipsy".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Zoe Procter Print: Book
George Eliot : Daniel Deronda
'It was strange that, as a girl of fifteen, my greatest friend should have been this Colonel Berkeley. The thirty years difference in our ages did not seem to matter. He was fond of reading and we read poetry together, a great deal of Tennyson, and although I had read George Eliot's novels, I was surprised that she who produced the dry prose of "Daniel Deronda", should also have produced "The Spanish Gipsy".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Zoe Procter Print: Book
George Eliot :
'various readings from George Eliot in character & otherwise were then given by members bringing a very pleasant meeting to a close.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: members of XII Book Club Print: Book
George Eliot [pseud.] : Romola
'Mr Kaye followed [a talk on the artists of Florence] with a life of Savonarola after which Miss Joyce Heelas & Miss Angus [?] gave readings from Romola'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joyce Heelas Print: Book
George Eliot [pseud.] : Romola
'Mr Kaye followed [a talk on the artists of Florence] with a life of Savonarola after which Miss Joyce Heelas & Miss Angus [?] gave readings from Romola'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Miss Angus [?] Print: Book
George Eliot : Daniel Deronda
'Did you − I forget − did you have a kick at the stern works of that melancholy puppy and humbug Daniel Deronda himself? − the Prince of Prigs: the literary abomination of Desolation in the way of manhood: a type which is enough to make a man forswear the love of women, if that is how it must be gained….'
