The Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot

Abstract

As the author of The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, George Eliot was one of the most admired novelists of the Victorian period, and she remains a central figure in the literary canon today. She was the first woman to take on the kind of political and philosophical fiction that had previously been a male preserve, combining rigorous intellectual ideas with a sensitive understanding of human relationships and making her one of the most important writers of the nineteenth century. This innovative introduction provides students with the religious, political, scientific and cultural contexts they need to understand and appreciate her novels, stories, poetry and critical essays. Nancy Henry also traces the reception of her work to the present, surveying a range of critical and theoretical responses. Each novel is discussed in a separate section, making this the most comprehensive short introduction available to this important author.

Fathers, Daughters, and Domesticity in the Early Novels of George Eliot

“…For Mr. Tulliver, who is trapped in a “bewildering legal forest,” Tom seems to be the only hope for solving his legal troubles, by realizing greater success; accordingly, all efforts are made for Tom’s education. As Henry (2008) describes Mr. Tulliver: He wants Tom to be something better than a miller, but also a son who will help him to negotiate the bewildering legal forest into which he has naively wandered. The way in which he talks about Tom as an instrument for achieving his own designs contributes to the sympathetic portrait of pressures facing sons whose fathers make decisions about their futures without consulting them.…”

“…For Mr. Tulliver, who is trapped in a "bewildering legal forest," Tom seems to be the only hope for solving his legal troubles, by realizing greater success; accordingly, all efforts are made for Tom's education. As Henry (2008) describes Mr. Tulliver:…”

Of literary jackfruits and the female sage: The colonial Bengali reception of George Eliot

“…This phenomenon cannot be correlated immediately to her critical fortunes in the Anglo‐American press and classroom. Notably, the Bengali responses to George Eliot mostly encompass the decades after her death, when her reputation had heavily suffered among metropolitan Anglophone readers (Henry, 2008, pp. 107–108).…”

“…107–108). Similarly, the resurgence of critical interest in her corpus and life in the Anglo‐American academe from the middle of the twentieth century (Henry, 2008, pp. 109–114) has been hardly reflected in Bengali writings.…”