Major Literary Figures - ENG 350 Resource Guide

The article discusses Middlemarch in the context of Victorian realism, George Eliot and science, and gender and female authorship in Middlemarch. A selected bibliography is also provided.

The article provides biographical information and a selected bibliography.

Discussions of George Eliot’s fiction often begin by quoting chapter 17 of Adam Bede, in which she makes one of the most persuasive statements of the creed of the realistic novelist to be found in nineteenth century literature.

English realist novelist, poet, essayist and translator, Eliot believed that art could approach truth only through the faithful reproduction of ordinary human existence, describing her own complex narratives as 'simply a set of experiments in life'.

Modestly subtitled “A Study of Provincial Life,” George Eliot’s Middlemarch has long been recognized as a work of great psychological and moral penetration. Indeed, the novel has been compared with Leo Tolstoy’s Voyna I mir (1865-1869; War and Peace, 1886) and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-1848, serial; 1848, book) for its almost epic sweep and its perspective of early nineteenth century history. These comparisons, however, are partly faulty.

In the history of the novel in English, Middlemarch still looms large. Written in the same generation as Charles Darwin’s theories—and by a one-time intimate of evolutionary thinker Herbert Spencer—George Eliot’s 1871–72 novel seems to mark the crown of creation, the fittest, most perfected example and telic endpoint of the species the development of which Ian Watt traced in The Rise of the Novel (1957)—what Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and (later) Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott were striving toward.

For George Eliot this was indeed a question in the richest meaning of the word, a long interrogation into the social fate of woman. Her origins as a novelist coincided with the origins of a modern feminism, and her reluctance to lend her energies to the new movement has been the cause of both suspicion and disappointment in her time as in ours.

Includes articles from MLA International Bibliography, JSTOR, anf Project Muse.

Includes articles from MLA International Bibliography, JSTOR, and Project Muse

This overview of the life and literature of George Eliot from the Famous Authors series follows Eliot's comfortable childhood through the several phases of her education and religious development, during which she discovered major influences like Sir Walter Scott, Shakespeare, and evangelism.