On November 22, 1867 (her birthday) George Eliot wrote to Sara Hennell: “There is a scheme on foot for a women’s college, or rather university, to be built between London and Cambridge, sharing its professors, examinations and degrees!” Only a few…
Anyone reading George Eliot's novels for the first time will be struck by the revelation that her heroines break with the traditional role these fair ladies have enacted in English-fiction prior to the appearance of The Mill on the Floss and its…
In the summer of 1977 my graduate course in Four Women Novelists (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather) included Middlemarch in its syllabus. During the period of intensive study with an unusually perceptive group of students, I…
Romola is not, and never has been, one of George Eliot’s more popular novels. Her contemporary critics were very hard on her ambitious Italian adventure, and, to this day, critical acclaim has not come to this novel which the author herself held in…
