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The Literary Criticism of George Eliot

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Richard Stang
Richard Stang*
Affiliation:
The City College, New York 31
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Extract

This essay is an attempt to present some of the most important aspects of the aesthetic underlying George Eliot's novels and to give some account of her little known critical writings. She was perhaps unique among the major novelists up to her time in formulating a coherent set of ideas about life and art before she started to write her first novel. She was known as an important figure in the intellectual life of London during the fifties, as the translator of David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, and as the subeditor of the Westminster Review, the most important organ of liberal thought in England at that time. She was also a prolific writer of articles for magazines and a reviewer of belles-lettres for the Westminster for three years, 1855–57. In these essays and reviews, all published before her first novel, almost all her important ideas about art are stated explicitly, and although many of these ideas are later developed and amplified in her novels and letters, they remain essentially the same. Her later statements of the same theme are often fuller and richer than those found in her periodical writing, but they are rarely inconsistent with each other. Her essays and reviews, together with Gordon Haight's edition of the letters and statements in the novels themselves, furnish an invaluable source from which her creed as a novelist may be derived.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 5 , December 1957 , pp. 952 - 961
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

1 Westminster Rev., lxvi (July 1856), 54; hereafter the Westminster Rev. will be designated as WR.

2 Middlemarch, Cabinet ed. (Edinburgh and London, 1878), i, 323; The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven, 1954), iii, 111—hereafter designated as GEL.

3 Theophrastus Such, Cabinet ed., p. 242.

4 WR, lxiv (July 1855), 289–291.

5 Joseph Conrad, Preface, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” The Portable Conrad, ed. M. D. Zabel (New York, 1949), p. 708.

6 WR, lxiv (July 1855), 289.

7 J. G. Hammerton, George Meredith in Anecdote and Criticism (New York, 1909), p. 140.

8 WR, lxiv (Oct. 1855), 612.

9 WR, lxiv (Oct. 1855), 597–601.

10 WR, lxiv (July 1855), 294–295.

11 Cabinet ed., i, 265–266.

12 WR, lxvi (Oct. 1856), 574.

13 WR, lxv (April 1856), 626.

14 Theophrastus Such, p. 195.

15 WR, lx (Oct. 1853), 372–373.

16 WR, lxvii (Jan. 1857), 30–31.

17 WR, lxiv (July 1855), 297–298.

18 WR, lxiv (Oct. 1855), 604.

19 WR, lxvi (July 1856), 260.

20 WR, lxiv (July 1855), 296.

21 WR, lxv (April 1856), 642. Ironically, she was to be given the same advice by a French critic in 1863. In a review of Romola appearing in La revue des deux mondes, “E. D. Forgues regretted that George Eliot had not better appreciated, or perhaps known … Stendhal. From him she would have learnt to condense her action, and not to burden it with useless details and insignificant characters. … His vigorous sketches were worth more than many patiently elaborated descriptions” (M. G. Devonshire, The English Novel in France, 1830–1890, London, 1929, pp. 374–375).

22 See “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” WR, lxvi (Oct. 1856), 442–461.

23 WR, lxii (Oct. 1854), 472.

24 Ibid., pp. 451–452.

25 WR, lxvi (Oct. 1856), 576–578.