Copyright by Charlotte Anne Damaris Fiehn 2020

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

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”) throughout this first critique enhances the sharpness of its tone. The subtle control of generalization with “usually,” “probably,” and “perhaps” shows Evans’s rhetorical powers at work and the successful construction of humor is hard to overstate. Reading her challenge to the representation of heroines, it is difficult not to fall in line with the argument.

Anyone familiar with Evans’s work as George Eliot, however, has occasion to pause and consider closely the plot and character types she condemns here. Both plot structures bear a striking resemblance to several of Eliot’s novels and the character types are clearly models for Eliot’s own heroines. In Middlemarch (1871-72), Dorothea Brooke is at least moderately wealthy; she persistently ignores the attentions of James Chetham, Baronet; Casaubon is a clergyman, and Ladislaw serves as the “irresistible younger son of a marquis…and a poet” (“Silly Novels” 442) given his initial aspirations that lead to his sojourn in Rome. Gwendolen Harleth’s fate in Daniel Deronda (1876) is foregrounded in the details of the second characterization: “it may be that the heroine is not an heiress – that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but 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” (“Silly Novels” 442).

Here are the blueprints for Malinger Grandcourt and Daniel Deronda – the “vicious baronet” and the “poet” who rescues the heroine. While Gwendolen does not exactly “secure the best” through her marriage, she does secure the wealth and position she desires. The role of jewels in Daniel Deronda fits as well: the jewels belonging to Grandcourt’s mistress are neither Gwendolen’s “family jewels” nor worn as “a sort of crown of 3 righteousness” (“Silly Novels” 442), but their function as part of Daniel Deronda’s moral dilemma again echoes what Evans condemns so viciously. Evans’s analysis of the eroticization of female characters foreshadows the attraction of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Gwendolen Harleth. Both character models described in the essay propose that the heroine is “dazzling” and in possession of a “superb intellect” as well as – relevant to Gwendolen – a “superb contralto” (“Silly Novels” 442). Maggie is a dark, exotic beauty when she reaches maturity, and her charms are sufficient to dazzle both Philip Wakem, in his own way, and, more strikingly, Stephen Guest. Eliot translates “dazzling” into the context of sexual attraction, but Maggie’s intellect is part of her appeal, coupled with the social confinement that results from her exclusion from the kind of education that might, Eliot hints, have brought her another type of satisfaction. Gwendolen, on the other hand, does not have a “superb” voice – at least not sufficient to secure her a professional opportunity – but she believes at one point that she might and she initially looks to a career on the stage as the only viable alternative to marriage when her family loses its fortune. When Evans attacks the learning of the “silly” heroines, there are traces of Maggie, Dorothea, and Romola, the eponymous character of Eliot’s 1863 novel. Although Evans is scathing in her criticism of “lady novelists” who have their heroines demonstrate profound learning, criticizing the representation of heroines as “amazingly eloquent” in their “recorded conversations” and “amazingly witty” in their “unrecorded ones” (“Silly

Novels” 442), Maggie, Dorothea, and Romola stand out for their intelligence and their desire to learn. Maggie’s father complains, for instance, that his daughter is “too ’cute for a woman” (The Mill on the Floss 12) and “understands what one’s talking about so as never was. And you should hear her read – straight off, as if she knowed it all beforehand. And allays at her book! But it’s bad – it’s bad…a woman’s no business wi’ being so 4 clever…she’ll read the books and understand ‘em better nor half the folks as are growed up” (20). Maggie reads Daniel Defoe’s The History of the Devil and reports reading Aesop’s Fables and Pilgrim’s Progress with notable relish (22). Although she fails to make sense of Euclid when she visits her brother at school, she finds the Latin Grammar fascinating and believes she could “learn Latin very soon” if she had the chance because she does not “think it’s at all hard” (228). Being her father’s child, Romola is celebrated for her learning rather more sincerely. When Romola first appears in the narrative, Tito observes her reading to her father in Latin from Politian’s Miscellanea, including a Greek quotation from Nonnus (Romola 71). The issue of her learning is far less central to her narrative than Maggie’s or Dorothea’s is to theirs, but Romola appears the most educated of all Eliot’s heroines and she has a particular facility with languages. As for Dorothea, however much her acquaintances lament her lack of common sense, they also recognize her enthusiasm for learning. During their courtship, Dorothea asks Casaubon if she “could…not learn to read Latin and Greek aloud [to him], as Milton’s daughters did to their father, without understanding what they read?” (Middlemarch 91). He declines the offer, but Dorothea’s “ardent self-sacrificing affection” (71) and her apparent intelligence make her attractive to him. They are certainly part of what draws her to him, for all she fails to understand that modeling a marriage on Milton’s relationship with his daughters is bound to be problematic. As George Eliot, Evans clearly subverts the conventions that she condemns in “Silly Novels,” showing that it is possible to make successful the types of plots and characters that dominate popular novels by women, without undermining the creative and aesthetic integrity of the work as art. Criticizing the titular “Silly Novels” is not Evans’s only objective in the essay. Her articulation of aesthetic principles suggests her more substantial purpose of arguing for 5 women’s capacity as writers, challenging the conventional view that “silly novels” are all women writers can produce. Evans objects to the assumption that “destitute women [turn] novelists as they turned governess,” for instance, with “vacillating syntax and improbable incident [generating] a certain pathos” (“Silly Novels” 141). She also grumbles about the lack of research and the comparable inattention to detail evident in many women’s writings: “The fair writers have evidently never talked to a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no notion of the working classes except as ‘dependents’” (142).

Most disappointed, however, is the assessment of the critical response to all women writers, not just “silly” ones. Towards the end of the essay, Evans describes how three of her contemporaries – Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë), and Mrs Gaskell, of whom one is unmarried, one uses a male pseudonym, and one is married – “have been treated as cavalierly as if they had been men” (“Silly Novels” 161). She invites the “lady novelists” to “reflect for a moment on the chary praise, and often captious blame, which their panegyrists give to writers whose works are on the way to become classics” (161). She identifies people who praise “silly novels” as the most aggressive critics of women who write what might almost be distinguished here, for want of a better term, as “highbrow” fiction:

[n]o sooner does a woman show that she has genius or effective talent, than she receives the tribute of being moderately praised and severely criticized. By a peculiar thermometric adjustment, when a woman’s talent is zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and if ever she reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point. (161)

Evans highlights what she calls “the extremely false impression that to write at all is a proof of superiority in a woman” – an impression that results from the critical approach to

6 women’s writing that she so lambastes. She also argues that “No educational restrictions can shut women out of from the materials of fiction,” since it is fundamentally “free from rigid requirements. Like line masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful” (162). Conceiving this freedom as a lack of “absolute technique” and an absence of “external criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery” (163), which perhaps has the advantage of inviting experimentation, Evans does, of course, call for higher standards among writers. She reaffirms her condemnation of “lady novelists” who make no effort to achieve “mastery,” but she also implicitly calls on critics to hold to a higher standard, adjusting the way in which they evaluate novels written by women, and rejecting gender as an evaluative criteria. That Evans should write such an essay as this – presenting such a sharply scathing view of the assessment of women writers – goes a long way to explaining why she published her fiction writing as George Eliot. She wanted to be a critical and commercial success and viewed her gender as a barrier. But Evans did not resort to a male pseudonym only to avoid the stigma of being a woman – substantial though that was. Her infamous (and extramarital) relationship with George Henry Lewes exposed her to a different and more debilitating type of criticism against which her pseudonym provided a buffer.

Shortly after her elopement with Lewes, Evans became the subject of gossip. She was quickly branded a “fallen woman” and the “other woman” in Lewes’s legitimate marriage. Evans had written a decidedly short note to her friends, Charles and Cara Bray and Sara Hennell, “all three” (GEL 2: 166), to inform them that she was “Poste Restante,

Weimar for the next three weeks and afterwards Berlin” (GEL 2: 166). She avoided giving details and perhaps betrays some anxiety that traveling with Lewes would jeopardize even her longest-standing friendships. While the Brays and Sara Hennell decided to support their friend, Evans wrote to Charles Bray on August 21st that she and Lewes had met Dr. Brabant 7 on the train to Cologne (GEL 2: 171), indicating that details about her relationship with

Lewes were unlikely to remain private for long.

Gordon Haight’s edition of Eliot’s letters includes a note dated October 4th, 1854, that Thomas Woolner wrote to his friend, William Bell Scott: “have you heard of two blackguard literary fellows, Lewes and Thornton Hunt?” Both of these men, Woolner says,

seem to have used wives on the ancient Briton practice of having them in common: now blackguard Lewes has bolted with a -- and is living in Germany with her. I believe it dangerous to write facts of anyone nowadays so I will not any further lift the mantle and display the filthy contaminations of these hideous satyrs and smirking moralists -- these workers in the Agepemone -- these Mormonites in another name -- stink pots of humanity. (GEL 2: 176)

If this is any indication of the general reaction to news of Evans’s relationship with Lewes, again the need for a pseudonym to protect her reputation is obvious. Although Lewes and Hunt are the targets of this criticism – the “blackguard” men and the “hideous satyrs and smirking moralists” (GEL 2: 176) – the general sense of “filthy contamination” must inevitably extend to Evans herself, with her contributing to it as a willing participant or, at best, a thoroughly corrupted object of rampant lust.

On October 19th, 1854, Lewes received a letter from Thomas Carlyle, confirming the growing public scandal. Lewes responds affectionately to Carlyle, thanking him for having judged him “rightly” and somehow not having assumed the worst (GEL 2: 176). Lewes goes on, however, to defend Marian, who is the principal target of Carlyle’s criticism and that which he was repeating:

Now for justice: On my word of honor there is no foundation for the scandal as it runs. My separation was in nowise caused by the lady named, nor by any other lady. It has always been imminent, always threatened, but never before carried out, because of those assailing pangs of anticipation which would not let me carry resolution into fact. At various epochs I have

8 explicitly declared that unless a change took place I would not hold out. At last -- and this more because some circumstances into which I do [not] wish to enter, happened to occur at a time when I was hypochondriacal and hopeless about myself, fearing lest a chronic disease would disable me from undertaking such responsibilities as those previously borne -- at last, I say, the crisis came. But believe me the lady named had not only nothing whatever to do with it but was, I solemnly declare, ignorant of my own state of mind on the subject. She knew the previous state of things, as indeed others knew it, but that is all. (GEL 2: 177)

Defending Marian’s behavior and confirming that she knew the particulars of his relationship with Agnes, Lewes’s response to Carlyle suggests that people saw Marian as

Lewes’s seductress, drawing him away from his family, or as a woman deceived by Lewes, eloping with him without knowledge of his marital status. Insisting that neither of these interpretations is correct, Lewes proceeds to address the allegation of a letter written by Marian to Harriet Martineau:

Then as to the “letter to Miss Martineau” -- not only is [Marian] totally incapable of anything she justly considers so foolish and unworthy; but in fact she has not written to Miss Martineau at all -- has had no communication with her for twelvemonths -- has sent no message to her, or any one else -- in short this letter is a pure, or impure, fabrication -- the letter, the purport, the language, all fiction. And I shall feel doubly bound to you if you will, on all occasions, clear the lady from such unworthy aspersions and not allow her to be placed in so totally false a position. Thus far I give you a solemn denial of the scandal. Where gossip affects a point of honour or principle I feel bound to meet it with denial; on all private matters my only answer is silence. (GEL 2: 177)

Despite the attempts at damage control that letters like this represent, Marian relationship with Lewes significantly damaged her reputation, and the damage was not limited to the literary circles in which they moved. Surviving letters show only a sporadic correspondence between Marian and her brother Isaac in the early 1850s. Marian wrote far

9 more frequently to her half-sister Fanny, now Mrs. Henry Houghton, but she concealed her relationship with Lewes from her family for several years.

On April 16th, 1857, Marian wrote to Isaac, asking him for news of their older sister Chrissey, who was ill, and instructing him to give 15 pounds of her “next half-year’s income due at the beginning of June” along with a note she enclosed (GEL 2: 317). She wrote again on May 26th, having received no response to her other letter, finally acknowledging her relationship with Lewes and describing herself as married (GEL 2:

331). Addressing Isaac as “my dear Brother,” she imagined that he would be “surprised, I dare say, but I hope not sorry, to learn that I have changed my name, and have someone to take care of me in the world” (GEL 2: 331). She went on to explain that the “event is not at all a sudden one, though it may appear sudden in its announcement to you” (GEL 2:

331). Identifying Lewes as “[m]y husband,” she revealed that he had “been known to [her] for several years, and [she was] well acquainted with his mind and character” (GEL 2: 331). She described him as pursuing scientific interests and having three children.

Following the May 26th letter, which contained notes for Chrissey and Sarah,

Isaac’s wife, Evans sent another letter to her sister Fanny on June 2nd, notably more confident. In this second letter, Evans signs herself Marian Lewes and responds to her sister’s suggestion that Joseph Liggins was the author of the what she calls the “Clerical Sketches”:

You are wrong about Mr. Liggins or rather your informants are wrong. We too have been struck with the ‘Clerical Sketches,’ and I have recognized some figures and traditions connected with our old neighbourhood. But Blackwood informs Mr. Lewes that the author is a Mr. Eliot, a clergyman, I presume. Au reste, he may be a relation of Mr. Liggins's or some other ‘Mr.’ who knows Coton stories. (GEL 2: 336-7) It is of course striking that Evans’s sister (or her informants) had identified “some figures and traditions connected with our old neighbourhood” (GEL 2: 336-7). The “Coton stories” 10 were apparently so prevalent in Scenes of Clerical Life that Fanny and other Nuneaton residents were “struck” by their presentation. Joseph Liggins, born and raised in the area, emerged as the most likely author after various people made inquiries. Overwhelmed by the attention, Liggins would later actively claim authorship of Scenes of Clerical Life and

Adam Bede, finding himself a local celebrity. Several of his supporters drummed up publicity on his behalf, writing letters to various newspapers, including The Times, calling it a scandal that Blackwood’s Publishers was refusing to pay their author.

The development of this scandal was undoubtedly central to the revelation of George Eliot’s identity in 1858, but Evans’s letter to her sister in May of the previous year, mentioning Liggins, is more significant because of what it suggests about Evans’s familial relationships and her underlying anxieties about acknowledging her authorship, even to those who ought to have kept her secret. On June 9th, Evans received a communication from the family lawyer, Vincent Holbeche, addressing her as “Mrs. Lewes.” Holbeche described “an interview with [her] Brother in consequence of [her] letter about [her] marriage” (GEL 2: 346). He proceeds to explain that Isaac

is so much hurt at your not having previously made some communication to him as to your intention and prospects that he cannot make up his mind to write, feeling that he could not do so in a Brotherly Spirit. I have at his request undertaken to address you in the belief that you will receive my letter as coming from an old Friend of your Family. Your Brother and Sister (who is gradually gaining a little strength) are naturally anxious to obtain some information respecting your altered state. Perhaps you will not object to make some communication to me which I may convey to them. Permit me to ask when and where you were married and what is the occupation of Mr. Lewes, who I think you refer to in your letter as being actively employed, and where his residence is as you request a remittance to be made to his Bankers in London by the Trustees under your Father's Will. (GEL 2: 346)

11 Given Isaac’s subsequent behavior, this letter is indicative of his ruthless conservativism.

Holbeche steps in because Isaac feels that he “cannot make up his mind to write, feeling he could not do so in a Brotherly Spirit” (GEL 2: 346). Requesting information about Evans’s “altered state,” Holbeche asks for particulars that will allow him and Isaac to verify the legitimacy of the marriage and confirm Lewes’s identity.

On June 13th, Evans responded, anticipating that she would have to write to Holbeche for the foreseeable future. For all Holbeche’s letter can be read as patronizing towards a thirty-six-year-old woman, Evans’s response is confident and controlled. She insists that her brother “judged wisely” in having Holbeche communicate on his behalf:

If his feelings towards me are unfriendly, there is no necessity for his paining himself by any direct intercourse with me; indeed, if he had written to me in a tone which I could not recognize (since I am not conscious of having done him any injury) I must myself have employed a third person as a correspondent. (GEL 2: 349)

She proceeds to describe Lewes as “a well-known writer, author among other things, of the

‘Life of Goethe’ and the Biographical History of Philosophy” and declares that “[o]ur marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a sacred bond. He is at present unable to contract a legal marriage, because, though long deprived of his first wife by her misconduct, he is not legally divorced” (GEL 2: 349). Evans then insists that she has been Lewes’s “wife” and “borne his name for nearly three years; a fact which has been known to all my personal friends except the members of my own family, from whom I have withheld it because, knowing that their views of life differ in many respects from my own, I wished not to give them unnecessary pain” (GEL 2: 349). Evans confirms these details in communication with her friends, including the Brays and John Chapman, as well as the surviving records about her relationship with

Lewes at this time. As a couple, the Lewes had a limited social life when they were resident 12 in England before the peak of George Eliot’s celebrity, in part because of the stigma surrounding unmarried couples. Evans’s immediate circle certainly knew the particulars of their arrangement, though, and tacitly supported it by maintaining contact. There is little reason to distrust Evans’s assertion that she had concealed her relationship with Lewes from her family because she correctly anticipated her brother’s response. She and Isaac had previously clashed during the “Holy War” of 1842, when Evans refused to attend church with her father. While Robert Evans threatened to give up the house he then shared with his daughter, Isaac suggested that his sister was selfish to remain unmarried, creating an unnecessary financial burden for the rest of the family, particularly their father (GEL 1: 128-130). More striking in her letter to Holbeche, though, is the way in which Evans explains her reasons for finally, after three years, informing her family of her circumstances. She insists that she is “not dependent on any one, the larger part of my income for several years having been derived from my own constant labour as a writer” (GEL 2: 350). She does not reveal her success as George Eliot, this being still very much a secret, even from Blackwood. Instead, she insists that “in my conduct towards my own family I have not been guided by any motives of self-interest, since I have been neither in the reception nor the expectation of the slightest favour from them” (GEL 2: 350), and she instructs Holbeche to send the money she received from her inheritance to the bank account of Mr. Lewes. Presumably she could not make such a request without arousing Isaac’s suspicions about the nature of the relationship and she might have anticipated the kind of communication she received from Holbeche in response to this request as well. Had Evans attempted to publish under her own name or indeed made her authorship known early on, it is entirely possible that the scandal of her personal life could have colored the critical evaluation of her work and undermined her success. That Isaac would 13 not communicate at all with his sister until May 1880, following her marriage to John

Cross, is evidence of how seriously such a scandal was considered and how harsh and unforgiving the judgment could be again the woman at the center of it. It becomes difficult to ignore the biographical parallels that prefigure Tom Tulliver’s condemnation of his sister

Maggie in The Mill on the Floss and how deeply Isaac’s bitterness filtered through Holbeche’s response. When Maggie returns to her brother, seeking “‘refuge’” and hoping to confess, to “‘tell [Tom] everything’” (The Mill on the Floss 238), he rejects her violently and unrelentingly: “‘You will find no home with me,’ he answered, with tremulous rage. ‘You have disgraced us all. You have disgraced my father’s name. You have been a curse to your best friends. You have been base, deceitful; no motives are strong enough to restrain you. I wash my hands of you forever. You do not belong to me’” (238).

Although Eliot’s fiction hardly reduces to biography – here or anywhere else – the evidence is sufficient to support the comparison of Tom and Isaac’s ruthlessly uncompromising moral standards, which serve to justify the ostracizing of a family member. Eliot is no Maggie Tulliver in her devotion to her brother, particularly in later life. The tone of her letter revealing her relationship with Lewes suggests that she has long disagreed with her brother’s ideas and thought his conservativism stifling. If she also took her brother’s reaction as a test case for how the general public might react to the details of her personal life, Evans’s decision to maintain her pseudonym again appears as a practical and defensive maneuver to protect herself and her work. Some women writers certainly did not conceal their unorthodox sexual relationships as strenuously as Eliot did hers, including George Sand and Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915), for instance. But Sand was French and not a subject of Victorian England’s distinct moral codes, as Evans must have appreciated from her first visit to Germany with Lewes in 1854, free to attend social events despite their unorthodox relationship. Braddon was also able to marry the man she 14 continued an affair with while his first wife was confined to a mental asylum; add to that, she clearly appealed to a different market with works like Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Evans’s choice of Blackwood’s Publishers and her early relationship with John Blackwood further demonstrate her anxiety that her personal life and her gender might undermine the critical reception of her work. Blackwood’s Magazine was a well-regraded publication with a strong readership; it was a prestigious venue for any author’s work in the 1850s. There were other venues of similar prestige, still allowing for anonymous publication. A magazine like Cornhill might have offered a more appropriate readership for “Mr Gilfil’s Love Story” and “Janet’s Repentance” and their respective treatments of racism, sexual tension, sexual violence, and alcoholism. Lewes, however, had published in Blackwood’s several times, and he appears to have had a good working relationship with

John Blackwood, who was by then the principal representative for the magazine. As Nancy Henry explains in her 2012 biography, The Life of George Eliot, the unusual detail about the initial publication of her work was not that it was anonymous – much magazine fiction was – but that the publisher did not know his author’s true identity either (103). To achieve this double anonymity, Blackwood’s knowledge of Lewes might have played a more substantial role. As Rosemary Ashton notes, Blackwood’s accepted a number of “pot- boiling stories” from Lewes in 1848, and he continued writing pieces for the magazine thereafter (64). When Lewes initially shared “The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton” with Blackwood in a letter dated November 6th, 1856, he did so in a way that seems decidedly casual:

“Meanwhile I trouble you with a m.s. of ‘Sketches of Clerical Life,’” he said, following up about a letter “proposing an article on Sea Anemones” (GEL 2: 269). Lewes then describes Eliot as “my friend” and clearly foregrounds that he is doing a favor for a friend, leveraging his relationship with Blackwood at the request of a first-time author who “desired my good 15 offices with you” (GEL 2: 269). He repeats the phrase, “my friend,” before finally shifting to the male pronoun, “he.” Summarizing the scope of what became Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), Lewes hints that Eliot is a clergyman – at least someone quite intimately acquainted with “the actual life of our country clergy about a quarter of a century ago” and able, in any case, “to represent the clergy like any other class” (GEL 2: 271). Lewes also downplays his relationship with his “friend” and his particular knowledge of his writing (GEL 2: 270). He insists – famously now, of course – that he

“had considerable doubts about my friend’s power as a writer of fiction” (GEL 2: 270). Though this may be true, given that Evans describes similar reservations from Lewes in her journal note, “How I came to write fiction” (1857), it is likely that this admission is performative – another maneuver to allay Blackwood’s suspicions that Lewes’s notorious domestic partner, Marian Evans, might have turned her hand to creative witing. Once Blackwood acknowledged receipt and indicated that the story was acceptable for publication, Lewes expounds on Eliot’s personality in a second letter, dated November

12th. This time, Lewes states outright that Eliot is a “clerical friend, who, though somewhat discouraged by [Blackwood’s response to “Amos Barton”], has taken [Lewes’s] advice and will submit the second story…when it is written” (GEL 2: 274). Describing Eliot as exceedingly shy, “unusually sensitive” (GEL 2: 276-77), and unlikely to respond well to criticism, Lewes reinforces the importance of his own role, both in discovering and protecting Eliot’s literary talent. He also emphasizes the importance of their friendship and stresses his own role as a mentor for less experienced writers; he specifically mentions

“another paper sent to me by another friend – the Reverend George Tugwell” (GEL 2: 275), which reinforces the idea that Lewes serves as a literary agent for his various male friends. If Blackwood had suspicions at this point in the process, as he was reviewing “Amos

Barton” and considering its publication, no record survives. 16 Instead, Blackwood responds to Lewes with a qualified confidence about “Amos

Barton.” He says that what he read was “unquestionably very pleasant reading” (GEL 2: 272), but he says that he wants to see more of the series: “until I saw more I could not make any decided proposition for the publication of the Tales in whole or in part in the Magazine”

(GEL 2: 272). He then offers a critical review of “Amos Barton,” suggesting that “[p]erhaps the author falls into the error of trying too much to explain the characters of his actors by descriptions instead of allowing them to evolve in the action of the story; but the descriptions are very humorous and good” (GEL 2: 272). He specifies also that “the windup is perhaps the lamest part of the story” but that he considers this too the likely result of “specifications as to the fortunes of the parties of whom the reader has no previous knowledge and cannot consequently feel much interest” (GEL 2: 272). He concludes by saying that he expects to have “a more decided opinion as to the merits of the Story when [he has] looked at it again and thought over it” (GEL 2: 272), though he also insists that Lewes “congratulate” his friend, if he is a new writer, “on being worthy of the honors of print and pay” (GEL 2: 272). If Lewes sought Blackwood’s honest feedback when he admitted his own reservations about Eliot’s potential, he got his wish. Certainly one effect of the construction of Eliot’s personality as particularly sensitive, although there are other ways of evaluating it, is that it virtually guarantees Lewes’s position as Eliot’s representative, making him indispensable to the interactions between author and publisher, and reducing the likelihood that Blackwood might probe too aggressively for more information about who Eliot really was. By suggesting his own doubts about Eliot’s talents and her apparent nervousness about critical assessment, Lewes also constructs a safety net of sorts, inviting Blackwood to be cautious in how he offers criticism. Perhaps he invites Blackwood to share his more strenuous objections to Eliot’s work, with Lewes operating as an all-important filter. What remains certain, however, is 17 the idea that Lewes helped manage Eliot’s presentation as a male author and that his management affected the initial assessment of her work – even by her publisher. The general narrative about Eliot’s rise to fame represents that she was an immediate and unqualified literary success, but Blackwood’s initial response to “Amos Barton” suggests that the situation was far more complicated. That Blackwood thought Eliot’s work good enough for publication is clear, but he was never without reservations about the author’s narrative approach. As Carol Martin has demonstrated in George Eliot’s Serial Fiction

(1994), Blackwood would also have serious concerns about the subject matter of Eliot’s stories in the early days of their partnership. Lewes helped to manage these reservations, by acting as a go-between, but he also seems to have invited Blackwood to confess them, setting himself up as Blackwood’s confidant as much as Eliot’s. Whatever Lewes’s intentions and however much Eliot approved of his approach, evidence that she supported the initial strategy to conceal both her identity and gender emerges in her particularly active performance as male in her earliest works, through the guise of her narrative personae.

Critics have long accepted that the construction of George Eliot’s authorial identity was a joint venture, but few have considered how Eliot actively managed her pseudonymous identity through her writing. As Fionnuala Dillane argues in Before George

Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press (2013), evaluating Evans’s critical writing, her journalism, as part of George Eliot’s development is both limiting and problematic. Any such approach to the work Evans published in the periodical press overlooks a very particular context and multiple factors of influence. Eliot’s first readers did not know her as the author of “Silly Novels,” either. Nevertheless, Dillane’s work presents additional evidence to suggest how Evans managed her pseudonym. Examining the conventions of the periodical press in the mid-nineteenth century and exploring how writers developed texts to meet particular standards, Dillane argues that Evans became adept at adopting 18 different personae to suit the requirements of the various journals she wrote for. As the editor of the Westminster Review from 1851 to 1854, Evans would have learnt to identify and, as needed, modify the writing style of others to suit her preferences. In the three narratives that comprise Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life – “The Sad

Fortunes of Amos Barton,” “Mr Gilfil’s Love Story,” and “Janet’s Repentance” – although gender is never outright established, certain traits of the writing strongly imply that the narrator is male, using the “Blackwood’s voice” that Dillane identifies to forge “a calculated fusion of narrative and authorial personae” (107). As Dillane argues, the choice of Blackwood’s Magazine meant that the Scenes could target a particular readership with established preferences for authors who supported conservative values and more than likely male – the opposite of Evans on both counts. In the 1850s, Blackwood’s Magazine was

“family-orientated and popular” (104), offering a readership beyond the “intellectual, and therefore smaller, circles of the Westminster Review” (104) – no doubt also appealing to Evans. There were other benefits, too: as Dillaine points out, “it was cheaper than the

Westminster and had a wider distribution rate; there was also the potential for post-serial publication in volume form, and John Blackwood’s connections with Mudie and his lucrative circulating-library market” (105). That Eliot made some effort to conform to the expectations of the magazine’s readership is not only a reasonable assumption given her desire to be published and her knowledge of the periodical culture, but one that certain stylistic details of “The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton,” “Mr Gilfil’s Love Story,” and

“Janet’s Repentance” support.

The opening of “Amos Barton,” for instance, situates a first-person narrator within the Shepperton Church, looking at its “substantial stone tower” (“Amos Barton” 3), but recalling social and political developments – “the New Police, the Tithe Commutation Act, the penny-post, and all guarantees of human advancement” (4) – that, appealing to gender 19 stereotypes, imply an analytical and masculine perspective, keeping in line with stereotypes of the period. The narrator then insists that his is “not a well-regulated mind,” having instead “an occasional tenderness for old abuses” that “lingers with a certain fondness over the days of nasal clerks and top-booted parsons, and has a sigh for the departed shades of vulgar errors” (4). Recalling “with fond sadness Shepperton Church as it was in the old days” (4), Eliot’s narrator makes himself part of the story’s setting and narrative texture, telling the story of Amos Barton as something that he witnessed or learnt of because of his place within the community. Like the references to “the New Police,” nods to the period in which “Evangelicalism and the Catholic Question had begun to agitate the rustic mind with controversial debates” (7) suggest the narrator’s masculine authority as he begins to establish Barton’s time in Shepperton within the broader frame of the community’s religious history, foregrounding some details from the life of Mr. Gilfil, which comprises the Scenes second narrative. The emphasis on clerical history is again consistent with Lewes’s (mis)information that the author was a clergyman, as many readers assumed as well. In “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story,” published in installments between March and June, 1857, the narrator again alludes to his personal connection to and place within the community of Shepperton. This time, describing the reaction to Mr. Gilfil’s death and the reaction of the “farmers’ wives” (“Mr Gilfil” 127) in particular, the narrator admits that “[i]t was due to an event which had occurred some years back, and which, I am sorry to say, had left that grimy old lady [Dame Fripp] as indifferent to the means of grace as ever”

(128). Several paragraphs later, the narrator describes Mr. Gilfil laughing and adds, “I am obliged to admit that he said good-bye to Dame Fripp without asking her why she had not been to church, or making the slightest effort for her spiritual edification” (130), suggesting that the narrator directly observed this interaction. 20 In the final story of the Scenes, “Janet’s Repentance,” the narrator also seems to have borne witness to the events he describes. The persona is even less prominent in this story, but he still has an intimate knowledge of the characters and the community. He is able to observe, “Of [Mr. Dempster’s] nose I can only say that it was snuffy; and as Mr

Dempster was never caught in the act of looking at anything in particular, it would have been difficult to sear to the color of his eyes” (“Janet’s Repentance” 42), emphasizing a literal, physical proximity to the character. Because Eliot embeds this observation in dialogue that includes the use of the first-person, it is more difficult to tease out, but Eliot still emphasizes the narrator as storyteller with such observations as this one about Mr. Budd, who

had no other striking characteristic, except that he was a currier of choleric temperament, so that you might wonder why he had been chosen as clergyman’s church warden, if I did not tell you that he had recently been elected through Mr. Dempster’s exertions, in order that his zeal against the threatened evening lecture might be backed by the dignity of the office. (47) As one of only a handful of first-person statements from the narrator, this usage demonstrates why it is misguided to conflate him with Eliot. With Adam Bede, published in 1859, the representation of narratorial and authorial gender gets even more complex, perhaps because the stakes were that much higher. As

Carol Martin argues, “As Adam Bede took shape during the fall and winter of 1857-58, Eliot wrote with serial publication in mind” (95), but Blackwood’s “disappointing” reaction (96) lead to a change in direction: “Just as [Blackwood] had feared that readers would find alcoholism and wife abuse offensive in ‘Janet’s Repentance,’ he responded with apprehension to the sexual implications of Adam Bede” (96). The evidence of this hesitation, conveyed in Blackwood’s letters to Lewes most particularly, prompted Evans to take a risk and rethink her intended readership. Originally, Evans hoped to publish Adam

21 Bede in Blackwood’s Magazine. Although she defended her subject matter by comparing the plot of Adam Bede to that of Sir Walter Scott’s Heart of Midlothian (1818) – clearly one of Eliot’s sources – it gradually became clear that Adam Bede was ill-suited to serial publication. The alternative was “the standard Victorian three-volume format” (95).

Opting for publication in book form, with Adam Bede Eliot had a very broad audience to consider. With her identity still unknown when the first edition appeared on

February 1st, 1859, Eliot maintained a male narratorial persona, still akin to that of the

“Blackwood’s man.” She also crafted a heavily gendered commentary in certain sections of the book that reinforces her masculine authorial identity as her work appears in a new form, her pseudonym prominently featured. The most notable commentary appears in Chapter 17, when the narrator famously interrupts the story. In the first edition, Eliot’s narrator speaks of having a “fair critic” and refers to “one of my lady readers”:

Several paragraphs later, the narrator offers another gendered address: “But, my good friend, what will you do then with your fellow-parishioner who opposes your husband – with your newly appointed vicar, whose style of preaching you find painfully below that of his regretted predecessor?” (260). Although the more obvious gendering in both of these instances pertains to the identification of a female reader, the “fair critic” who has a “husband,” it remains implicit in this performance that the narrator is male.

Figure 1: Photograph of George Eliot's Proof Copy of Adam Bede (1861), pages 258 to 259. Harry Ransom Research Center.

Tempting as it might be to reduce this and the other moments of narratorial gendering to a continuation of Eliot’s practice in Scenes, though, the performance becomes even more complicated with the publication of Adam Bede’s second edition in 1861, when Eliot had cast off her disguise in certain circles and likely saw the potential for all of her readers to discover her true identity. Although she retains her pseudonym to this day and maintains a distinction between her narratorial and authorial personae, even in her later

23 works, the editorial changes to the 1861 edition of Adam Bede – most notably to Chapter

17 – show her adjusting her narratorial persona to coincide with the revelation of her true gender, if not her identity. The largest single emendation appears across pages 259 and 260 and is replicated below to show the extend of the changes. In the 1859 edition, the critical passage reads as follows:

Certainly I could, my fair critic, if I were a clever novelist, not obliged to creep servilely after nature and fact, but able to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, my characters would be entirely my own choosing, and I could select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman, and put my own admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But you must have perceived long ago that I have no such lofty vocation, and that I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath. (Adam Bede 259-60)

The first portion of the editing for the 1861 edition occurs to the 1859 print text, with Eliot making emendations directly to the print copy, with several edits marked in the margins and aligned to the relevant parts of the text by extended lines. The handwritten edits are italicized below to show how Eliot envisaged the text reading in what appears to be a first or at least early attempt at revision:

Certainly I could, my fair critic, if I held it the highest vocation of the were a clever novelist, not obliged to creep servilely after nature and fact, but able to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, I might refashion life and character entirely after my own liking; I might my characters would be entirely my own choosing, and I could select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman, and put my own admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, on the contrary, that my strongest desire is to avoid any such arbitrary picture you must have

24 perceived long ago that I have no such lofty vocation, and that I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath. (Adam Bede 259-60)

Unhappy with these changes made directly to the print text, the final version of this passage for the 1861 edition appears as a handwritten note on page 258, directly opposite the text portion:

Certainly, I could, if I held it the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, I might refashion life and character entirely after my own liking; I might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman, and put my own admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, on the contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they are mirrored in my mind. (Adam Bede 258)

In this second revision, Eliot removes the gender-specific qualifier “lady” from her address to the reader, she removes reference to “my fair critic,” and she also deletes much of the discourse about the objectives of the “clever novelist.” Since the 1861 edition appeared after the revelation of Eliot’s identity to John Blackwood, which occurred on

February 28th, 1858, and to growing numbers among her circle, these changes suggest a deliberate shift in authorial identity, anticipating that many readers would simply conflate the narrator and the author as was the case initially with other first-person texts like Jane

Eyre (1847), for which Charlotte Brontë, as Currer Bell, initially cast herself as an editor. Perhaps Eliot is no longer able to represent herself as male in such good faith; perhaps she does not want to play to the gender distinction she made in the original draft because it might expose her to ridicule.

25 Undoubtedly the edits suggest a concern about reception, something that Eliot speaks to in relation to gender in “Silly Novels,” and, more generally in relation to reader response, in “Notes on Form in Art” (1868). In this later text, looking back over her by then several years of experience in publishing, she laments the tendency of readers and critics to make judgments about form (presumably in literature) based on their understanding of preexisting categories: “to any but those who are under the dire necessity of using the word and cannot afford to wait for a meaning,” she says,

it must be more fruitful to ask, what relations of things can be properly included under the word ‘Form’ as applied to artistic composition, than to decide without any such previous inquiry that a particular work is wanting in form, or to take it for granted that the works of any one period or people are the examples of all that is admissible in artistic form. (“Notes on Form” 231)

She not only objects to the prejudgment of “artistic compositions,” but also to the notion that people judge form based on “works of any one period or people” (231), using what already exists to determine that which is acceptable, essentially denying the possibility for formal innovation. Returning to the edits on pages 259 and 260 of the 1861 Adam Bede, though, it is especially relevant to the development of Eliot’s authorial persona that she makes several edits that relate to a discourse on authorship and ideas about the novel, what it can do, and what her role as a novelist is. As Eliot edits the principal paragraph, she appears to make several false starts. The first addition, “held it the highest vocation of the novelist,” is a shift from hypothesizing what she would do if she “were a clever novelist, not obliged to creep servilely after nature and fact, but to represent things as they never have been and never will be” (Adam Bede 259). Here she appears to link the effort to be realistic in her representations with the “highest vocation of the novelist,” the aesthetic ideal of the novel, inviting the suggestion that she had a realist agenda. 26 Numerous critics, including George Levine, have used Chapter 17 of Adam Bede to identify Eliot’s fiction as realism, even as they point to its failure. For Levine, Chapter 17 is a “self-consciously awkward” (44) effort to express a realist agenda, with Eliot being realism’s “great exemplar” and “firmest propagandizer” (44), even as “her career is the clearest demonstration of its impossibility” (44). In the context of Eliot’s essays “The Natural History of German Life” (1856) and “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856), and with attention paid to her narratorial personae, however, Eliot’s association with realism becomes entirely unstable: Eliot objects to the unrealistic representation of characters and events, but she never suggests that fiction should espouse the kind of literalness and symbolic sparseness that some critics have come to associate with realism, nor does she embrace the totality that others like Georg Lukacs have associated it with.

Close scrutiny of her edits to Chapter 17 of Adam Bede also suggests that she was working to articulate her preference for realistic representation rather than realism as an aesthetic tradition. She still uses the language of symbolism, with “arbitrary picture,” for instance; and she registers her narrator’s perspective as highly subjective, employing the first-person “I” and retaining the statement, “I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind” (Adam Bede 259).

Following this is yet another acknowledgment of the narrator’s subjectivity through metaphor: “The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath” (Adam

Bede 259-60). Situating the simile of the mirror alongside that of “the witness-box,” Eliot suggests the instability of the narrator’s perspective. Just as the mirror is “doubtless defective” in its reflection of reality, sometimes “faint” or “confused,” with the structural representations, the “outlines” likewise “disturbed,” so too a witness giving testimony 27 about what he observed, even with the incentive for veracity, being “on oath,” will also give a somewhat “defective,” “faint,” “confused,” and at times “disturbed” impression of experiences. The handwritten note reflects the final edit within this section and shows that Eliot took several attempts to produce the final wording. The extent of the corrections shows the attention paid to these passages, reinforcing their importance to the rest of the novel and the broader relevance of Eliot’s expression about representation. Comparing this final version – the handwritten note – to the earlier correction attempts reveals Eliot’s shift to a more confident and succinct mode of expression. The diction is likewise elevated, the tone less conversational, less self-deprecating, avoiding the imbedded self-criticism of the initial published version. Much of the shift likely has to do with the confidence Eliot must have enjoyed after Adam Bede’s success. For her all her anxieties about popularity, she knew as she made these edits that she had an admiring readership. But there is a further explanation for the new confidence and evidence of a refined performance of her male narratorial identity. She certainly does not discard the persona entirely – she is, even today, George Eliot and she continued to use a male narratorial voice in several of her later texts. What changes is the way she embodies both her narratorial and her authorial personae after this point. Her embodiment become more fluid and experimental, with male narratorial personae becoming that much more a part of her art, and less a mechanism to protect her work.

28 Works Cited and Consulted

Ashton, Rosemary. G. H. Lewes: An Unconventional Victorian. Random House, 2000. Bodenheimer, Rosemary. “A Woman of Many Names,” in The Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot. Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 76-97. ---. The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction. Cornell University Press, 1996. Dillane, Fionnuala. Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press, Cambridge University Press, 2013. Eliot, George. 1859. Adam Bede. Vol. 1 of 2. Printed copy with handwritten corrections, 1861. Harry Ransom Research Center. ---. Daniel Deronda. 1876. William Blackwood and Sons, 1878. George Eliot Archive. ---. George Eliot’s Letters (GEL), vol. 1 and 2, edited by Gordon Haight. Yale University Press, 1954. ---. “How I came to write fiction.” Scenes of Clerical Life, edited by Jennifer Gribble. Penguin Classics, 1998, pp. 351-354. ---. 1857. “Janet’s Repentance.” Scenes of Clerical Life, vol. 2. William Blackwood and Sons, 1878, pp. 39-317. George Eliot Archive. ---. 1871-72. Middlemarch. William Blackwood and Sons, 1878. George Eliot Archive. ---. 1857. “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story.” Scenes of Clerical Life, vol 1 and 2. William Blackwood and Sons, 1878, pp. 127-300, 1-38. George Eliot Archive. ---. “Notes on Form in Art.” Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings, edited by A.S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren. Penguin, 1990, pp. 231-238. ---. 1863. Romola. William Blackwood and Sons, 1878. George Eliot Archive. ---. 1856. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings, edited by A.S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren. Penguin, 1990, pp. 140- 163. ---. 1860. The Mill on the Floss, vol. 1. William Blackwood and Sons, 1878. George Eliot Archive. ---. 1856. “The Natural History of German Life.” Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings, edited by A.S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren. Penguin, 1990, pp. 107-139. ---. 1857. “The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton.” Scenes of Clerical Life, vol. 2. William Blackwood and Sons, 1878, pp. 1-124. George Eliot Archive. Haight, Gordon S. George Eliot: A Biography. Penguin, 1985. Henry, Nancy. The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

29 Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley. University of Chicago Press, 1981. Lukács, George. The Historical Novel. University of Nebraska Press, 1983. ---. The Theory of the Novel, translated by Anna Bostock. Merlin Press, 2006. Martin, Carol. George Eliot’s Serial Fiction. Ohio State University Press, 1994.

30 Vita

Charlotte Anne Damaris Fiehn specializes in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century British and American literature, particularly the writings of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Cambridge. She has published articles on Shakespeare, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Katherine Mansfield. She has also contributed book chapters on Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and George Eliot. Her doctoral dissertation addresses questions of form and gender in the works of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. In 2019, she won the George Eliot Fellowship Essay Prize for her essay on water symbolism in Romola.

Permanent email: [email protected]

This report was typed by Charlotte Anne Damaris Fiehn