‘Strips of Essayism’

On Essays ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 258-276
Author(s):  
Bharat Tandon
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Periodical Essays

Taking its cue from James Wood’s now famous critique of the fetishizing of ‘information’ in British fiction (‘always breaking in to speak over their characters and tell us what to think, mummifying them somewhat in strips of essayism’), this essay takes a close look at two Victorian novelists famous for their creative deployment of what might be called an ‘essayistic’ narrative voice: George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Tracing the roots of this voice in Victorian periodical culture—in particular, the tenure of Marian Evans/George Eliot at the helm of the Westminster Review—the essay explores the ways in which two contending senses of the ‘essayistic’, one based on contingency, the other on prescriptiveness, may often occupy the same space in both periodical essays and the fictions which dramatize and draw on them.

The Greeks, the Germans, and George Eliot

1982 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 91-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Wiesenfarth
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
The Other ◽  
The One

In 1947–48 Vernon Rendall wrote the first essays on George Eliot's use of the classics in her novels and supplied the first tentative list of authors she was acquainted with: Aeschylus, Aristotle, Epictetus, Homer, Nonnus, Pausanias, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Xenophon in Greek; Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Livy, Persius, Plautus, Quintilian, Tacitus, and Virgil in Latin. Rendall pointed to Sophocles and Horace as Eliot's favorites in each language. She is like the tragedian in that “Sophocles does not let himself go” in “the delineation of the passions”; and she “never lets herself go.” Horace is not only the Latin poet she most persistently alludes to but also the one she most nearly assimilates in the wit and point of her style. Of the other Greek writers, Aeschylus provided George Eliot with that concept of Nemesis which pervades her novels. The Latin writers supplied her with happy tag phrases diat punctuate the speech of feckless gentlemen – “A quotation or two adorns the whole man,” according to Heine – like Arthur Donnithorne and Arthur Brooke; in addition, they allowed George Eliot to give Politian and Scala ammunition for academic warfare in Romola. In his comments on Sophoclean control, Horatian wit, Aeschylean Nemesis, and classical allusion, Rendall initiated the study of George Eliot's use of the classics. He broke ground for others to excavate.

2. Global apprenticeship

2021 ◽  
pp. 30-44
Author(s):  
Susan L. Mizruchi
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Henry James ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Emile Zola ◽  
Honore De Balzac ◽  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Washington Square

‘Global apprenticeship’ discusses how Henry James pursued a global apprenticeship, during which he produced formidable reviews of European and American writers. He schooled himself deliberately in the methods of an international array of masters, including Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Ivan Turgenev. James’s early heroines from this apprenticeship period include Eugenia Münster, Daisy Miller, and Catherine Sloper, of, respectively, The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1879), and Washington Square (1880). By making complexly imagined young women the engines of these stories, these narratives show how riveting the question of what the young woman will do, and why, can be.

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