Selected Critical Writings

by George Eliot, Rosemary Ashton (Editor)

Famous for her powerful and popular fiction, George Eliot was also a remarkable critic, translator, and editor. This volume presents Eliot's views on science, religion, positivism, feminism, and politics, as well as her literary critical work on a range of authors and forms, including Tennyson, Browning, Goethe, Heine, German historical criticism of the Bible, classical drama, and popular contemporary novels. Most of the pieces in this volume were written before Eliot began to write fiction in 1856. They are a vivid representation of the analogical mind, the wit, and the sympathy which also characterize the narrators of her novels.

Genres: Essays

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 14, 1993

About the author

Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.
Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.

Reviews

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eliot is perhaps more famous nowadays for her novels, but before she started to write fiction, she was a well-known translator and critic. This is a collection of her non-fiction writings, including excerpts from the works she translated, articles and reviews from various publications, and even an excerpt from her diary on "How I Came to Write Fiction". I must admit that I skipped freely during some of the weightier pieces, on philosophy and religion (not exactly my areas of interest), but I quite enjoyed the literary reviews and the article on Richard Wagner. Perhaps my favorite piece was "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" (reading this was actually why I bought the book), a scathingly witty indictment of the vapid, poorly written novels popular at that time.