Paper 6 : The Victorian Literature Assignment
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Assignment
Paper 6 : The Victorian Literature
Subject : George Eliot as a novelist
Name : Sagar B. Vaghela
Sem : 2
Roll No : 32
Enrollment No : 2069108420180052
Email Id : sagarvaghela2020@gmail.com
Submitted To : S.B.Gardi Department Of English MKBU
Mary Anne Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively "Mary Ann" or "Marian"), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of which are set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.
She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure that her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's lifetime, but she wanted to escape the
stereotype of women's writing being limited to lighthearted romances. She also wanted to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic. Another factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny, thus avoiding the scandal that would have arisen because of her adulterous relationship with the married George Henry Lewes.
Eliot's Middlemarch has been described by the novelists Martin Amis[2] and Julian Barnes[3] as the greatest novel in the English language.
George Eliot is known as a modern novelist in spite of living in Victorian Age. She wrote in the fashion contrary to that of her contemporaries, Dickens, Thackeray, etc. She is not completely divorced from the traditions. She draws her picture in the Victorian style, but she develops it in a new direction.
The Victorians, on the whole, were instructive and they wrote what they wanted to write. Eliot, on the other hand, was an intellectual and she wrote what she should have written. She is known as the first intellectual novelist. Her novels are the embodiment of her ideas.
The main charm of the Victorians lies in the individual expression, whereas, in Eliot, our interest is kept up in the way she analyses and diagnoses problems. Eliot rejects dogma and wants to analyze the causes of every problem she comes across.
Her scenes are more real than those of the Victorians because her realism is not only documentary but also psychological. To other novelists, realism is an intellectual necessity but in her case, it is a creed and emotion rather ambition which follows avidly. Her picture is more realistic owing to her clear perception of realities. She draws her characters inside out.
The Victorians were satisfied with the apparent realities whereas Eliot penetrated deep into the phenomenon and brought to light the hidden causes.
The Victorians, too, were satirist but they satirize just to create humour so they were ordinary humorist, whereas, Eliot satirized as a serious thinker. Her humour was of a distinct type i.e. intellectual and psychological humour soaked into deep pathos. She fused together comic irony and mild satire to create humour and her end was to moralize. Her humour had a serious message underlying it. This kind of humour is employed by the modern novelists.
Other Victorians did have a moral touch but, in Eliot, we find moral earnestness. Like Fielding, she wrote to inculcate moral in the people. But her concept of morality was quite different from that of Fielding’s. She reshapes the consciousness of the individuals in order to remould the whole structure of the society. She believes in the presence of the moral code at the heart of the universe. She made novels the embodiment of her moral ideas. In “The Mil on the Floss”, she denounces the dominance of the self recklessness, loose-living etc and emphasizes on the absoluteness of duty, endurance, renunciation etc. her concept of morality is based on human values and the laws of human heart.
Her psychological approach also makes her modern. The clear sighted vision of the essential of character gives her a definite edge over the Victorians like Bronte, Dickens, Austen, etc. The grasp on the psychological essentials makes her draw complex characters better than the Victorians, because she draws them inside out.
The insight into human nature makes Eliot’s picture of human nature more homogeneous than that of Dickens, etc. She shows that saints and sinners are made of the same clay; however, the latter lack the necessary strength of mind. She has ardent sincerity which compensates for many of the feelings of her aesthetic judgment.
Eliot is revealer of the self. Characters like Maggie are the self-portraitures of Eliot. She unveils herself through her female characters.
Eliot broke away from the fundamental conventions of form and matter. She rejected the standardized formula. She conceived one idea and its logical development.
She is modern in inspiration, too. Earlier, novel was meant only for the entertainment of the middle class reading public. Eliot’s intellectual approach made novel a ‘meeting place of problems’. She studied Man in relation to higher aspects of life. Eliot was the first novelist to discover this particular track on which the modern novelists are treading today.
Though Eliot lived in the Victorian era yet she is modern novelist since she wrote in the modern fashion. But she cannot be called ‘Victo-Modern’. Eliot, in contrast, is exclusively orthodox and Victorian in her ideas and modern in her approach. She can also be differentiated from Hardy in the sense that he is peculiarly Victoria in his style and approach and modern in his ideas. To be curt, Eliot is a modern novelist living amongst the Victorians.
George Eliot is known primarily for her novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862-1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876), as well as for her poetry and essays.
George Eliot’s most significant achievement is her very place in the literary canon. Despite her male pseudonym, she became a respected female writer in her own day, admired by her peers. Her novels are part of the flowering of serious writing done by women in the nineteenth century. She achieved this respect in spite of her unconventional lifestyle, having broken with her church, taken up decidedly liberal causes such as reform and women’s rights, and lived openly with a married man. Such behavior was the downfall of other Victorian women, but Eliot was able to succeed and to be treated with the respect an author of her talents deserved. Eliot’s works are serious, contemplative, and thoughtful, and they brought the novel to a new height, combining such philosophical seriousness with artistic handling of her subjects. Eliot and her peers were in large part responsible for the so-called rise of the novel in the mid-nineteenth century.
Three of George Eliot’s early stories, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story,” and “Janet’s Repentance,” originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine, were collected as Scenes of Clerical Life in 1858. She wrote two other stories, “The Lifted Veil,” also published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1859, and “Brother Jacob,” published in the Cornhill Magazine in 1864. The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, a miscellany of sketches and essays, was published in 1879. Eliot’s poetry does not achieve the high quality of her prose; the most notable examples are The Spanish Gypsy (1868), a verse drama, and The Legend of Jubal, and Other Poems (1874). Eliot wrote more than seventy periodical essays and reviews; a comprehensive collection of these is found in Essays of George Eliot (1963), edited by Thomas Pinney. Eliot also translated David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1846) and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums as The Essence of Christianity (1854). Her translation of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethica (1677; Ethics, 1870) has never been published.
George Eliot’s pivotal position in the history of the novel is attested to by some of the most distinguished English novelists. Reviewing Middlemarch in 1873, Henry James concluded, “It sets a limit, we think, to the development of the old-fashioned English novel.” Middlemarch does, indeed, take what James calls the panoramic novel—“vast, swarming, deep-colored, crowded with episodes, with vivid images, with lurking master-strokes, with brilliant passages of expression,” seeking to “reproduce the total sum of life in an English village”—to an unsurpassed level of achievement. Eliot was also an innovator. In the words of D. H. Lawrence, “It all started with George Eliot; it was she who put the action on the inside,” thus giving impetus to the rise of the psychological novel, where the most significant actions derive from the motives of the characters rather than from external events. Eliot’s work is, then, both the culmination of the panoramic Victorian novel as practiced by Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray and the beginning of the modern psychological novel as practiced by James, Lawrence, and many others.
More than anyone else, Eliot was responsible for making the novel, a genre that had traditionally been read primarily for entertainment, into a vehicle for the serious expression of ideas. Few novelists can equal Eliot’s depth of intellect or breadth of learning. Deeply involved in the religious and philosophical ferment of her time, Eliot was probably the first major English novelist who did not subscribe, at least nominally, to the tenets of Christian theology. Nevertheless, her strong moral commitment, derived from her Evangelical Christian heritage, led her to conceive of the novel as an instrument for preaching a gospel of duty and self-renunciation.
Moral commitment alone, however, does not make a great novelist. In addition, Eliot’s extraordinary psychological insight enabled her to create characters who rival in depth and complexity any in English or American fiction. Few novelists can equal her talents for chronicling tangled motives, intricate self-deceptions, and anguished struggles toward noble acts. She creates a fictional world that combines, in a way unsurpassed in English fiction, a broad panorama of society and psychological insight into each character.
Novellas and short stories :
1. Scenes of Clerical Life
2. Blackwood's Magazine edition, [1st ed.] (1857)
3. First book edition, 2 vols. (1858) (External scans (multiple parts): 1, 2)
4. Scenes of Clerical Life, Everyman's Libraryedition (1910)
5. The Lifted Veil (1859)
6. Brother Jacob (1864)
Poetry :
7. The Spanish Gypsy (a dramatic poem), 1868 (External scan)
8. The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, 1874 (External scan)
1. The Legend of Jubal, 1870
2. Agatha, 1869 (External scan)
3. Armgart, 1871
4. How Lisa Loved the King
5. A Minor Prophet, 1874
6. Brother and Sister, 1869
7. Stradivarius, 1873
8. Two Lovers
9. Arion, 1874
10. O May I Join the Choir Invisible
9. A College Breakfast Party, 1879
10. The Death of Moses, 1879
11. Count That Day Lost
12. God Needs Antonio
13. I Grant You Ample Leave
14. In a London Drawingroom
15. Mid My Gold-Brown Curls
16. Roses
17. Sweet Endings Come and Go, Love
Essays :
18. Carlyle's Life of John Sterling, 1852
19. Woman in France : Madame de Sable, 1854
20. Three Months in Weimar, 1855
21. Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming, 1855
22. German Wit : Heinrich Heine, 1856
23. The Natural History of German Life, 1856
24. Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, 1856
25. Worldliness and Other-Worldsliness: the Poet Young, 1857
26. The Influence of Rationalism, 1865
27. Review of Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament, 1865
Work Cited :
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:George_Eliot
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot
https://www.enotes.com/topics/george-eliot/in-depth
Assignment
Paper 6 : The Victorian Literature
Subject : George Eliot as a novelist
Name : Sagar B. Vaghela
Sem : 2
Roll No : 32
Enrollment No : 2069108420180052
Email Id : sagarvaghela2020@gmail.com
Submitted To : S.B.Gardi Department Of English MKBU
Mary Anne Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively "Mary Ann" or "Marian"), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of which are set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.
She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure that her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's lifetime, but she wanted to escape the
stereotype of women's writing being limited to lighthearted romances. She also wanted to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic. Another factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny, thus avoiding the scandal that would have arisen because of her adulterous relationship with the married George Henry Lewes.
Eliot's Middlemarch has been described by the novelists Martin Amis[2] and Julian Barnes[3] as the greatest novel in the English language.
George Eliot is known as a modern novelist in spite of living in Victorian Age. She wrote in the fashion contrary to that of her contemporaries, Dickens, Thackeray, etc. She is not completely divorced from the traditions. She draws her picture in the Victorian style, but she develops it in a new direction.
The Victorians, on the whole, were instructive and they wrote what they wanted to write. Eliot, on the other hand, was an intellectual and she wrote what she should have written. She is known as the first intellectual novelist. Her novels are the embodiment of her ideas.
The main charm of the Victorians lies in the individual expression, whereas, in Eliot, our interest is kept up in the way she analyses and diagnoses problems. Eliot rejects dogma and wants to analyze the causes of every problem she comes across.
Her scenes are more real than those of the Victorians because her realism is not only documentary but also psychological. To other novelists, realism is an intellectual necessity but in her case, it is a creed and emotion rather ambition which follows avidly. Her picture is more realistic owing to her clear perception of realities. She draws her characters inside out.
The Victorians were satisfied with the apparent realities whereas Eliot penetrated deep into the phenomenon and brought to light the hidden causes.
The Victorians, too, were satirist but they satirize just to create humour so they were ordinary humorist, whereas, Eliot satirized as a serious thinker. Her humour was of a distinct type i.e. intellectual and psychological humour soaked into deep pathos. She fused together comic irony and mild satire to create humour and her end was to moralize. Her humour had a serious message underlying it. This kind of humour is employed by the modern novelists.
Other Victorians did have a moral touch but, in Eliot, we find moral earnestness. Like Fielding, she wrote to inculcate moral in the people. But her concept of morality was quite different from that of Fielding’s. She reshapes the consciousness of the individuals in order to remould the whole structure of the society. She believes in the presence of the moral code at the heart of the universe. She made novels the embodiment of her moral ideas. In “The Mil on the Floss”, she denounces the dominance of the self recklessness, loose-living etc and emphasizes on the absoluteness of duty, endurance, renunciation etc. her concept of morality is based on human values and the laws of human heart.
Her psychological approach also makes her modern. The clear sighted vision of the essential of character gives her a definite edge over the Victorians like Bronte, Dickens, Austen, etc. The grasp on the psychological essentials makes her draw complex characters better than the Victorians, because she draws them inside out.
The insight into human nature makes Eliot’s picture of human nature more homogeneous than that of Dickens, etc. She shows that saints and sinners are made of the same clay; however, the latter lack the necessary strength of mind. She has ardent sincerity which compensates for many of the feelings of her aesthetic judgment.
Eliot is revealer of the self. Characters like Maggie are the self-portraitures of Eliot. She unveils herself through her female characters.
Eliot broke away from the fundamental conventions of form and matter. She rejected the standardized formula. She conceived one idea and its logical development.
She is modern in inspiration, too. Earlier, novel was meant only for the entertainment of the middle class reading public. Eliot’s intellectual approach made novel a ‘meeting place of problems’. She studied Man in relation to higher aspects of life. Eliot was the first novelist to discover this particular track on which the modern novelists are treading today.
Though Eliot lived in the Victorian era yet she is modern novelist since she wrote in the modern fashion. But she cannot be called ‘Victo-Modern’. Eliot, in contrast, is exclusively orthodox and Victorian in her ideas and modern in her approach. She can also be differentiated from Hardy in the sense that he is peculiarly Victoria in his style and approach and modern in his ideas. To be curt, Eliot is a modern novelist living amongst the Victorians.
George Eliot is known primarily for her novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862-1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-1872), and Daniel Deronda (1876), as well as for her poetry and essays.
George Eliot’s most significant achievement is her very place in the literary canon. Despite her male pseudonym, she became a respected female writer in her own day, admired by her peers. Her novels are part of the flowering of serious writing done by women in the nineteenth century. She achieved this respect in spite of her unconventional lifestyle, having broken with her church, taken up decidedly liberal causes such as reform and women’s rights, and lived openly with a married man. Such behavior was the downfall of other Victorian women, but Eliot was able to succeed and to be treated with the respect an author of her talents deserved. Eliot’s works are serious, contemplative, and thoughtful, and they brought the novel to a new height, combining such philosophical seriousness with artistic handling of her subjects. Eliot and her peers were in large part responsible for the so-called rise of the novel in the mid-nineteenth century.
Three of George Eliot’s early stories, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story,” and “Janet’s Repentance,” originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine, were collected as Scenes of Clerical Life in 1858. She wrote two other stories, “The Lifted Veil,” also published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1859, and “Brother Jacob,” published in the Cornhill Magazine in 1864. The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, a miscellany of sketches and essays, was published in 1879. Eliot’s poetry does not achieve the high quality of her prose; the most notable examples are The Spanish Gypsy (1868), a verse drama, and The Legend of Jubal, and Other Poems (1874). Eliot wrote more than seventy periodical essays and reviews; a comprehensive collection of these is found in Essays of George Eliot (1963), edited by Thomas Pinney. Eliot also translated David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1846) and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums as The Essence of Christianity (1854). Her translation of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethica (1677; Ethics, 1870) has never been published.
George Eliot’s pivotal position in the history of the novel is attested to by some of the most distinguished English novelists. Reviewing Middlemarch in 1873, Henry James concluded, “It sets a limit, we think, to the development of the old-fashioned English novel.” Middlemarch does, indeed, take what James calls the panoramic novel—“vast, swarming, deep-colored, crowded with episodes, with vivid images, with lurking master-strokes, with brilliant passages of expression,” seeking to “reproduce the total sum of life in an English village”—to an unsurpassed level of achievement. Eliot was also an innovator. In the words of D. H. Lawrence, “It all started with George Eliot; it was she who put the action on the inside,” thus giving impetus to the rise of the psychological novel, where the most significant actions derive from the motives of the characters rather than from external events. Eliot’s work is, then, both the culmination of the panoramic Victorian novel as practiced by Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray and the beginning of the modern psychological novel as practiced by James, Lawrence, and many others.
More than anyone else, Eliot was responsible for making the novel, a genre that had traditionally been read primarily for entertainment, into a vehicle for the serious expression of ideas. Few novelists can equal Eliot’s depth of intellect or breadth of learning. Deeply involved in the religious and philosophical ferment of her time, Eliot was probably the first major English novelist who did not subscribe, at least nominally, to the tenets of Christian theology. Nevertheless, her strong moral commitment, derived from her Evangelical Christian heritage, led her to conceive of the novel as an instrument for preaching a gospel of duty and self-renunciation.
Moral commitment alone, however, does not make a great novelist. In addition, Eliot’s extraordinary psychological insight enabled her to create characters who rival in depth and complexity any in English or American fiction. Few novelists can equal her talents for chronicling tangled motives, intricate self-deceptions, and anguished struggles toward noble acts. She creates a fictional world that combines, in a way unsurpassed in English fiction, a broad panorama of society and psychological insight into each character.
Novellas and short stories :
1. Scenes of Clerical Life
2. Blackwood's Magazine edition, [1st ed.] (1857)
3. First book edition, 2 vols. (1858) (External scans (multiple parts): 1, 2)
4. Scenes of Clerical Life, Everyman's Libraryedition (1910)
5. The Lifted Veil (1859)
6. Brother Jacob (1864)
Poetry :
7. The Spanish Gypsy (a dramatic poem), 1868 (External scan)
8. The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, 1874 (External scan)
1. The Legend of Jubal, 1870
2. Agatha, 1869 (External scan)
3. Armgart, 1871
4. How Lisa Loved the King
5. A Minor Prophet, 1874
6. Brother and Sister, 1869
7. Stradivarius, 1873
8. Two Lovers
9. Arion, 1874
10. O May I Join the Choir Invisible
9. A College Breakfast Party, 1879
10. The Death of Moses, 1879
11. Count That Day Lost
12. God Needs Antonio
13. I Grant You Ample Leave
14. In a London Drawingroom
15. Mid My Gold-Brown Curls
16. Roses
17. Sweet Endings Come and Go, Love
Essays :
18. Carlyle's Life of John Sterling, 1852
19. Woman in France : Madame de Sable, 1854
20. Three Months in Weimar, 1855
21. Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming, 1855
22. German Wit : Heinrich Heine, 1856
23. The Natural History of German Life, 1856
24. Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, 1856
25. Worldliness and Other-Worldsliness: the Poet Young, 1857
26. The Influence of Rationalism, 1865
27. Review of Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament, 1865
Work Cited :
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:George_Eliot
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot
https://www.enotes.com/topics/george-eliot/in-depth
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