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The Form and History of Eliot’s Essays The Form and History of Eliot’s Essays
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Structure, Argument, and Style Structure, Argument, and Style
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21 George Eliot’s Essays
Get accessMatthew Sussman is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, Australia, where he specialises in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. He is the author of Stylistic Virtue and Victorian Fiction: Form, Ethics, and the Novel (CUP, 2021), and co-editor, with Margaret Harris, of Antipodean George Eliot (Routledge, 2023). Other essays on Victorian authors and essayists have appeared in Modern Language Quarterly, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Prose, and Studies in English Literature.
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Published:20 March 2025
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Abstract
Interest in George Eliot’s essays has largely focused on the few that resemble artistic manifestos, such as ‘The Natural History of German Life’ and ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’. While our understanding of Victorian essays, articles, and reviews has benefited from the field of periodical studies, only recently has attention turned to the formal properties of a genre to which Eliot devoted considerable time. After defining what, exactly, is meant by ‘essay’, this chapter reflects upon Eliot’s distinctive style and approaches in essay-writing, less to locate the traces of an aesthetic creed that Eliot would later deploy in fiction than as a genre unto itself. Works considered include the rhetorically flamboyant ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ as well as lesser-known pieces such as ‘Poetry and Prose, from the Notebook of an Eccentric’ and ‘Woman in France: Madame de Sablé’.
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