THERE ARE several useful introductory studies of George Eliot’s work, although only Gillian Beer’s George Eliot (Brighton, 1986) and Rosemary Ashton’s George Eliot (Oxford, 1983) venture much beyond her work as a novelist. Jennifer Uglow’s study, also called George Eliot, in the Virago Pioneers series, examines her feminist credentials, and discusses her critical and journalistic work in relation to her fiction.
The best sources of information about Eliot’s life remain Gordon S. Haight’s George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford and New York, 1968, cited as Life in the notes and elsewhere) and his edition of The George Eliot Letters (nine volumes, New Haven and London; Vols. I–VII, 1955; Vols. VIII–IX, 1978; cited as Letters). J. W. Cross’s George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (London, 1885; cited as Cross) is also worth consulting. Haight’s George Eliot and John Chapman (London and New Haven, 1940, second edition 1969) is a good source of material about her career as an editor and critic. Readers wishing to know more about the reception of her work should consult Haight’s A Century of George Eliot Criticism (London, 1966) and David Carroll’s George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (London, 1971).
Other editions of Eliot’s non-fictional work, apart from the Essays volume of the Cabinet Edition (London, 1884), are Thomas Pinney’s Essays of George Eliot (London, 1963), to which we are heavily indebted, particularly for his very helpful bibliography of Eliot’s reviews, and George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook 1854–79 and Uncollected Writings, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth (Charlottesville, 1981). No modern scholar of the Victorian period can get very far without the assistance of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (London and Toronto, 1979 onwards), to which we are indebted for help in the attribution of certain reviews.
Critical studies of Eliot’s non-fictional work are rare. Probably the best is William Myers’s ‘George Eliot’s Essays and Reviews 1849–57’ in Prose Studies 1800–1900, vol. 1 (1978), pp. 5–20. Less densely analytical is G. Robert Stange’s ‘The Voices of the Essayist’ in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 35 (1980), pp. 312–30. Carol Martin’s ‘George Eliot: Feminist Critic’ in Victorian Newsletter, vol. 65 (1984), pp. 22–5, along with the books by Beer and Uglow, is evidence of the growing interest of feminists in Eliot’s career.
Eliot’s poetry has also been neglected by critics. There is presently no modern edition available, although determined students might hunt out Cynthia Ann Secor’s unpublished doctoral dissertation ‘The Poems of George Eliot’ (Cornell University, Ithaca, 1969). The journal Victorian Poetry has published a number of articles on her poetry in recent years, including Kathleen Blake’s ‘Armgart – George Eliot on the Woman Artist’, vol. 18 (1980), pp. 75–80; S. K. Marks’s The Spanish Gypsy, vol. 21 (1983), pp. 184–90; and Bonnie Lisle’s ‘Art and Egoism in George Eliot’s Poetry’, vol. 22 (1984), pp. 263–78.
Readers wishing to understand the full context of the Eliot-Harrison correspondence in this volume and to assess the extent of Eliot’s devotion to Positivism should consult Martha Vogeler’s ‘George Eliot and the Positivists’ in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 35 (1980), pp. 406–31 and T. R. Wright’s ‘George Eliot and Positivism’ in Modern Language Review, vol. 76 (1981), pp. 257–72.
Elinor Shaffer’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Fall of Jerusalem’: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (Cambridge, 1975), especially Chapter 6 on Daniel Deronda, William Myers’s The Teaching of George Eliot (Leicester, 1984) and Rosemary Ashton’s The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought (Cambridge, 1980) are helpful in placing her work in its intellectual and cultural context.