Browsing by Subject "Adam Bede"
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Item “[G]irlish Passion and Vanity”: Female Alterity and Sympathy in George Eliot’s Fiction(2021) Kilmer, Kerri; MacKay, CarolItem “[G]irlish Passion and Vanity”: Female Anger and Sympathy in George Eliot’s Early Novels(2020-05) Kilmer, KerriItem The formation of George Eliot’s authorial identity(2020-05) Fiehn, Charlotte Anne Damaris; MacKay, Carol HanberyMary Ann (Marian) Evans (1819-1880), better known by her pseudonym, George Eliot, keenly understood the disadvantages of gender when she began writing fiction in 1856. She knew, from her experience as an editor and critic, that women writers were judged differently from their male counterparts. In an 1856 essay, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” Evans argued that women writers were all the more likely to be attacked if they were talented. She also recognized the risks of publishing under her own name. In 1854, she began a relationship with fellow writer, George Henry Lewes, traveling with him to Germany and eventually deciding to live with him, even though he was already married and options for divorce were limited. This report argues that Evans’s decision to adopt a male pseudonym when she began publishing fiction in 1857, and her decision to retain her pseudonym throughout her career, even when her real identity was widely known, represents an important instance in nineteenth-century British literature of a woman writer challenging the limitations of gender through the construction of sustained authorial identity. This report argues that the development of George Eliot’s authorial identity in her earliest published fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) and Adam Bede (1859), was a decision compelled not only by Eliot’s concerns about the impact that her unorthodox relationship with George Henry Lewes might have on the reception of her work, but by deep-seated concerns about gender stereotypes in fiction. This report proposes that Eliot not only sought to challenge these stereotypes by maintaining her authorial identity, but that she ultimately used her male narrative personae in Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede to help control her reception as a novelist.