The Myth of George Eliot: How Marian Evans Invented the Victorian Novelist [Hardcover]

The Myth of George Eliot shows how Marian Evans understood the power of collective stories to change society, and suggests that her turn to fiction, after ten years as a professional translator, editor and journalist, was motivated by the desire to participate in an ethical revolution to imagine a broader future for the nation.

Alessandra Grego is Associate Professor of English Literature at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. She has published The Spectacle of Monstrosity in the Ballad of the Sad Caf?. Carson McCullers Centenary Collection, ed. by Carlos Dews and Sue B. Walker. 2022. George Eliots Use of Scriptural Typology: Incarnation of Ideas, in Myths of Europe, ed. by Richard Littlejohns and Sara Soncini, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 123 132. The Dual Form of Daniel Deronda, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani, vol. 10 (2000): 93113. With Gabriel Pihas and Daniel Seidel, translation of Orlando, Francesco. Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination: Ruins, Relics, Rarities, Rubbish, Uninhabited Places, and Hidden Treasures, Yale University Press, 2006.

George Eliot is a myth rather than a pseudonym. The writer Marian Evans invented the Victorian novelist as a character with a personality, a political view and a style that was received enthusiastically by the expanding mid-century readership, and just as enthusiastically rejected by the new generation of writers who considered her the last Victorian novelist. The Myth of George Eliot proposes that the narrative style and structure of Evanss fiction is the result of her studies, of her reflection on the role of literature in the political and ethical life of a nation, and on the novel as the site of a cooperation between writer and reader in the continuous work on inherited traditions. Neither the last Victorian nor the first Modernist, Evans emerges as an author reflecting on the plӅ