Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Before George Eliot
  • Cited by 36
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2013
Print publication year:
2013
Online ISBN:
9781139565158
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139565158
Subjects:
Literature, English Literature 1830-1900
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (88)
Information

Book description

Fionnuala Dillane revisits the first decade of Marian Evans's working life to explore the influence of the periodical press on her emergence as George Eliot and on her subsequent responses to fame. This interdisciplinary study discusses the significance of Evans's work as a journalist, editor and serial-fiction writer in the periodical press from the late 1840s to the late 1850s and positions this early career against critical responses to Evans's later literary persona, George Eliot. Dillane argues that Evans's association with the nineteenth-century periodical industry, that dominant cultural force of the age, is important for its illumination of Evans's understanding of the formation of reading audiences, the development of literary genres and the cultivation of literary celebrity.

Awards

Joint winner of the 2014 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize

Reviews

"… elucidate[s] the complexity of the networks that underpinned the periodical press and [is] an essential research resource for anyone embarking on their own study of the Victorian literary marketplace."
Clare Horrocks, Journal of Victorian Culture

"This remarkable and refreshing book challenges the conventional treatment of the early literary labors of Marian Evans in the 1850s as merely apprentice-work for George Eliot as a novelist of high Victorian literature."
Susan David Bernstein, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies

"In her extended portrait of Marian Evans as an astute and flexible professional in the periodical marketplace, Fionnuala Dillane offers a welcome corrective to the image of George Eliot as a reclusive sibyl … Dillane’s grounding of Evans’s many narrative personae in specific practices of her periodical culture also serves to dislodge the stubborn image of Eliot as the goddess of sympathy. Dillane is refreshingly skeptical about that image, creating in its stead a writer alert to what her public required and strategic about accommodating her variable styles to those needs."
Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Victorian Studies

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.