Act Natural: Dubious Proposals inThe Mill on the Floss,The Pastor’s Wife,VeraandRebecca

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 115-129
Author(s):  
Ann Herndon Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Pastor's Wife

George Eliot’s Promise of More

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Literary Description ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter recovers the aesthetic significance of a reader’s mediated relation to the objects and experiences represented in realist fiction. When George Eliot’s intrusive narrators in Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Middlemarch cue readers to form impressions that are as distinct as possible, they expose the indeterminacy that persists in the most concrete passages of literary description, alerting us to the limits of how much we can ever know about a fictional world. By drawing on the aesthetics of indeterminacy advanced by Edmund Burke, this chapter reveals that Eliot’s commitment to narratives of disillusionment exists in tension with a surprisingly Romantic aversion to finitude, and that literary realism enchants ordinary things by freeing them from the solidity and determinacy they possess in everyday life.

‘Shattering’ and ‘Violent’ Forces: Gender, Ecology, and Catastrophe in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-57
Author(s):  
Barbara Barrow
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Oliver Goldsmith ◽  
Human Presence ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
Natural Catastrophe ◽  
Ecological History ◽  
Georges Cuvier ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Planetary Processes

This article argues that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) aligns natural catastrophe with the image of the disastrous female body in order to challenge contemporary geological readings of nature as a balanced, self-regulating domain. Both incorporating and revising the work of Charles Lyell, Oliver Goldsmith, and Georges Cuvier, Eliot emphasises the interconnectedness of human and planetary processes, feminises environmental catastrophe, and blends human and ecological history. She does so in order to write the human presence back into geological histories that tended to evacuate the human, and to invite readers to account for the effects their lifestyles and industries have upon the supposedly balanced and orderly processes of nature.

Being torn:The mill on the floss

2001 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 359-379
Author(s):  
Annette R. Federico
Keyword(s):  
Mill On The Floss

The Pastor's Wife Considers Transparency

2005 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 422-422
Author(s):  
Nola Garrett
Keyword(s):  
Pastor's Wife

scholarly journals A Broadening of Prospects: Female Progression in Austen and Eliot

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lydia Verschaffelt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Development ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
National Importance ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Childhood Home ◽  
Landed Gentry

<p>Austen and Eliot register the turbulence and transformation of their respective historic moments in the portrayal of a young heroine on the cusp of adulthood with a number of potential paths ahead of her. The heroines, like their societies, are caught between old and new as they seek to acknowledge the ties that bind them to the past and simultaneously create a future of their own. This dilemma reveals the nineteenth-century novel’s concerns of the individual’s ability to grow while being enmeshed in a network of relationships, and the place of the past in an increasingly unstable future.  Beginning with Emma (1815) and The Mill on the Floss (1860), and concluding with a comparison of Persuasion (1817) and Middlemarch (1871), this thesis tracks Austen and Eliot’s depiction of female development which moves from a focus on the centrality of the childhood home, and in particular the heroine’s relationship with her father, to a narrative which ends on a more conscious note of ambiguity and broadening prospects. Emma and Mill both depict heroines who find their future in their past. Emma and Maggie develop and assert their own agency, but their circumstances and experiences of childhood bind them to their site of origin.  Conversely, both Austen and Eliot’s later works enact a deliberate loosening of the hold the heroine’s childhood has on her, and Anne and Dorothea end up in very different places to where they began. They both reject their position as part of the rural landed gentry to instead gain entry into a more dynamic and inclusive community. This personal transition is accompanied by a more explicit delineation of the evolving socio-political landscape, an increase in the heroine’s mobility and fluidity, and an ending that frustrates a sense of stable closure in preference for one of more open possibility. Thus, so far from being read simply as ‘marriage plots’ Austen and Eliot subversively depict the young woman’s changing position and prospects as a matter of national importance.</p>

„…ki találhat bölcs asszonyt?” Némi betekintés a 16–17. századi papnék műveltségébe

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-253
Author(s):  
Marianna Bátoriné Misák ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Group ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
The Family ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Wise Woman ◽  
Scarcity Of Resources ◽  
Pastor's Wife

Abstract. “Who Can Find a Wise Woman?” Some Insights into the Education of the Wives of 16th-17th-Century Calvinist Priests. The paper examines the literacy of pastors’ wives during the 16th-17th centuries. For a long time, the opportunity for women to acquire literacy was only the privilege of the upper social strata, but literacy was not widespread among them either. This trend came to an end in the 17th century, for which period we also found examples of the literacy of urban citizens. The daughters of the lower social strata were prepared primarily to be good wives, housewives, and good mothers in the family, especially next to their mothers. Examining the preachers’ wives as a well-defined social group is a problem due to the scarcity of resources. In most cases, we know nothing but the name of the preacher’s wife, and we do not have information about their origins and families; if we do, however, then their social situation and the occupation of their parents provide a basis for research into their education. The conclusion of the research is that even if they did not receive a formal education, the 16th-17th-century Calvinist pastors’ wives were educated women. In many cases, this knowledge – primarily wisdom, life experience, and piety – and the virtues necessary for the roles of housewife, mother, and wife were the main aspects of choice for their husband. Keywords: pastor’s wife, Protestantism, literacy, 16th-17th century

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