George Eliot English
George Eliot
1819~1880. An English female novelist. Her real name is Mary Anne Evans. The representative works of hers are Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871~72） and others.
Like Vernon Lee, she employed the male name as a pen name. However, most of Lee’s remarks on George Eliot are negative. Though she praised Eliot as a great writer, she made a remark that Eliot wrote no great books from the standpoint of art. In a letter to one of her friends in 1884, Lee mentioned the fact that some point out the similarity between her works and those of Eliot and wrote on that as "perfectly abashes me." （Complete Letters Volume 1, P. 608.）
In Handling of Words, Lee expatiated on the style of Eliot. Lee thought of The Mill on the Floss (1860), a autobiographical novel of Eliot, as her masterpiece, and considering this novel as an exception, she analyzed the styles of Adam Bede (1859)、Daniel Deronda (1876） and other works. Lee called them as the style of novel constructed of “scenes” and called them as English “three decker” style novels. And she wrote: “It represents a compromise with that difficult thing, straightforward narrative; and the autobiographical, the epistolary, the narration-within-narration dodges have merely been replaced by another dodge for making things easier for the Writer and less efficacious for the Reader.” These styles give theatrical effects, but disturb the action and changes the conception towards the action.
Furthermore, Lee wrote: "no one, I am sure, would care to live with Romola or daniel Deronda."（P.69）
In the same book, Lee classified Eliot as ‘analytic novelist.”
In ‘On Novels’ contained in Baldwin, one of the characters Dorothy Orme says on Middlemarch that she dislikes the novel because the story of Dorothea and Casaubon is not farcical but tragic.
In a short story 'Lady Tal' in which a character modeled after Henry James appears, Lady, who is a would-be novelist modeled after Vernon Lee herself, said on her own work Christina: "On the whole, my one interest in life is evidently destined to be Christina, and the solution of all my doubts will be the appearance of the 'new George Eliot of fashionable life."
In ‘Gospel of Anarchy’ in Gospels of Anarchy, Lee referred to Maggie Tulliver of The Mill on the Floss.
