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Copyright by Charlotte Anne Damaris Fiehn 2020 Copyright by Charlotte Anne Damaris Fiehn 2020 The Report Committee for Charlotte Anne Damaris Fiehn certifies that this is the approved version of the following Report: The Formation of George Eliot’s Authorial Identity APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Carol H. MacKay, Supervisor George S. Christian The Formation of George Eliot’s Authorial Identity by Charlotte Anne Damaris Fiehn Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin May 2020 Dedication This report is dedicated to my children, Jason and Olivia, who have graciously participated in every step of this process, and to my niece, Grace, who made an entrance the year of its production. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Carol MacKay for her invaluable support and guidance throughout this process. She has championed me from the very first, even before I arrived at UT. This project would not have come about without her and it benefited immeasurably from her input, particularly on car journeys to and from recent conferences. George Christian – my fellow George Eliot Essay Prize winner – offered excellent feedback, was a generous and insightful teacher of British literature, and allowed me to ramble on about George Eliot more than once. My thanks as well to Alexandra Wettlaufer, whose classes on nineteenth-century French literature expanded my understanding of feminist criticism, introduced me to George Sand, completely changed my perspective on Eliot, and proved so enjoyable I had no trouble using up my out-of-department credits. This report would not have been possible without the incredible resources and support of Beverley Park Rilett, whose work on the George Eliot Archive is breath-taking and game-changing for Eliot criticism. For her generosity as a friend and fellow Eliot enthusiast, I am profoundly grateful. Linda Ferreira-Buckley and Sam Baker have also helped refine my thinking about Eliot, particularly with regard to realism and form. At Lucy Cavendish College, Isobel Maddison was another important mentor, introducing me to Elizabeth von Arnim and expanding my awareness of women writers in the early twentieth century. As ever, my lovely friends, Carrie van Buskirk, Kimberley Hall, Seth Martin, Natascha Hennessey, and Maggie Schneider, have been wonderful cheerleaders and I cannot possibly repay their many acts of kindness. v Last but not least, thanks to Lisa and Faye Pioli, and to my stepmother Kim, and my grandmother, Anne Polhill, who have also been supportive in this process. vi Abstract The Formation of George Eliot’s Authorial Identity Charlotte A. Fiehn, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2020 Supervisor: Carol H. MacKay Mary 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 vii 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. viii Table of Contents List of Figures ......................................................................................................................x The Formation of George Eliot’s Authorial Identity ...........................................................1 Works Cited and Consulted ...............................................................................................29 Vita .....................................................................................................................................31 ix List of Figures Figure 1: Photograph of George Eliot's Proof Copy of Adam Bede (1861) ................23 x The Formation of George Eliot’s Authorial Identity George Eliot1 (1819-1880) has the unusual distinction of being known almost exclusively by her male pseudonym. Only George Sand (1804-1876) enjoys a similar status, despite many women writers having disguised their gender when they initially published, including all three of the Brontë sisters. The implications of Eliot’s name are largely ignored in critical discourse. Rosemary Bodenheimer discusses the significance of Eliot’s play with gender in broad terms, both in The Real Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (1996) and again in “A Woman of Many Names” (2001), but the circumstances that inspired the use of Eliot’s pseudonym (beyond the obvious biographical details), go largely unquestioned in mainstream criticism, despite evidence that Mary Ann (Marian) Evans (Lewes Cross) was keenly aware of the role that authorial gender and identity played in the reception of novels. Shortly after she began writing what would become “The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton” on September 23rd, 1856, Marian Evans Lewes, as she was then, received an invitation from her friend John Chapman to contribute an article to The Westminster Review, of which he was still owner and managing editor. Between 1851 and her July 1854 journey to the continent with George Henry Lewes, Evans served as the de facto editor for the journal and wrote much of its content. Not looking to reprise this role, Evans responded to Chapman’s proposal with a counteroffer: “an article on ‘Silly Women’s Novels’ [which] might be the vehicle for some wholesome truth as well as some amusement” (George Eliot’s Letters [GEL] 2: 258). 1 Throughout this report, I distinguish between George Eliot and the woman behind the pseudonym. Unless I am referring to the work or experiences of George Eliot specifically, I use Marian Evans, the name Eliot used from the late 1840s, when she asked people to call her “Marian,” through to about 1857. I opt not to use Marian Evans Lewes or Marian Lewes to distinguish between Evans and her partner, George Henry Lewes. 1 Published anonymously in The Westminster Review in October 1856, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” explores the influence of gender upon the critical reception of women’s novels, beginning with a scathing account of the article’s principal target. Evans identifies the “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” as “a genus with many species” (“Silly Novels” 442) and proceeds to describe “the particular qualities of silliness that predominate in them – the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic” (442). Framing her criticism with scientific language, Evans identifies errors of both substance and style, but distinguishes her criticism according to various subcategories. The “largest class” of “silly novels” is the “mind-and- millinery species” (442), she says, which is “a mixture” of the faults exhibited by the others and “a composite order of feminine fatuity” (442). With her own identity concealed from the vast majority of her readers, Evans undertakes a heavily gendered attack on a certain type of novel produced by women writers. Outlining two potential characterizations, she first describes the heroines of these novels as “usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond” (442). In the second scenario, the heroine is perhaps not an heiress but rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient…. [She] infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric; indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. (442) 2 The copious employ of adjectives (“vicious,” “amiable,” “irresistible,” “deficient,” “impotent”) and adverbs (“usually,” “probably,” “perhaps,” “infallibly,” “loftly”)
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