George Eliot Review Online

 

Authors

Rosemary Ashton

Date of this Version

2009

Document Type

Article

Citation

George Eliot Review 40 (Special Issue, 2009)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

We are celebrating one hundred and fifty years since the publication in volume form of George Eliot's first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, three stories printed first in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine between January and November 1857, and then in two volumes in January 1858. I will tell the story of how George Eliot came to write fiction by moving backwards from the Scenes themselves, via George Eliot's journal entry of 6 December 1857, 'How I Came to Write Fiction', to her literary criticism in the Westminster Review in the earlier 1850s, and finally to two letters, of 1849 and 1846, in order to demonstrate, with the benefit of hindsight, how we can observe her writing talent appearing more than a decade before she dared to try her hand at fiction, and what we can conclude about her attitude towards identifying herself as a writer of fiction, particularly with reference to the decision to write under a male pseudonym.

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