"George Eliot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they had driven with Mrs. Douglas through some of the oldest parts of Florence. They were reading together George Eliot's "Romola," and were connecting all its events with this city in which the scenes are laid. Read in this way, it seemed like a new book to them, and possessed an air of reality that awakened their enthusiasm as nothing else could have ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... confidential one. Du Maurier's Trilby was a confidence. But he adds, "It wants the last respect for the reader's intelligence—it wants whatever is the very greatest thing in the very greatest novelists—the thing that convinces in Hawthorne, George Eliot, Tourgenief, Tolstoy. But short of this supreme truth, it has every grace, every beauty, every charm." The word "Every" here seems to us an American exaggeration. We should ask ourselves whether in spite of all its ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... perhaps a little less susceptible to this appeal than the Teutonic or the Slavonic, and the impassive contempt of Flaubert and of Maupassant toward the creatures of their imaginative observation is more characteristic of the French attitude than the genial compassion of Daudet. In Hawthorne and in George Eliot there is no aristocratic remoteness; and Turgenieff and Tolstoi are innocent of haughty condescension. Everywhere now in the new century can we perceive the working of the democratic spirit, making literature more ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... successful in the character-sketch. One is reminded of Johnson's phrase about Milton's inability "to carve heads upon cherry stones" when one thinks of "Theophrastus Such" on the one hand, and the almost unique position of George Eliot as a novelist on the other. Less successful as she often is in lightness of touch when she has to pause and interpret her story, she had not prepared us for such a complete exhaustion of power as her attempt in this branch of literature (apparently of the same ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... describes some husbands whom she could not marry. See what she expects in a lover! Have we not here some local squires hit off to the life? Could George Eliot herself have done more for us in ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... the dominant character, Piney Woods is, I think, the central character. She is central in this story just as little Aglaia is central in Tennyson's "Princess," or Eppie in George Eliot's "Silas Marner," or the baby offspring of Cherokee Sal in "The Luck of Roaring Camp." Bret Harte had just written the last-named story when he began the composition of "The Outcasts of Poker Flat." The same ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... self-restraint which, next to the power of thought and expression, is the happiest gift an author's fairy godmother can bestow upon him, saves Kielland from saying too much—from enforcing his lesson by marginal comments, a la George Eliot. But he must be obtuse, indeed, to whom this reticence is not more eloquent and effective than a ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... face the public. I soon received an answer, the result of which was that I went, on Lewes's invitation, to the Priory, North Bank, Regent's Park, and met my friend and his partner, better known as "George Eliot." ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... education would not change women; that women are illogical by nature. At this I cited an example showing that women can be exceedingly logical and close in argument, but he still adhered to his opinion. On my mentioning the name of George Eliot, he expressed a ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... and others, equally well drawn, are figures in the background. Standing out in front of them, and in lurid relief, is the central figure of the miser, represented with the same mobility of temperament noticeable in George Eliot's creations—a thing exceptional in Balzac's work. Grandet, as long as his wife lives is reclaimable—just reclaimable. Subsequently, he is an automaton responsive only to the sight and touch ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... respect a little disappointment and a great failure in apprehension. Those who were not rude enough to suggest that a cobbler should stick to his last, reminded one another that many novelists had sought relaxation by trifling with the Muses. Thackeray had published Ballads, and George Eliot had expatiated in a Legend of Jubal. No one thought the worse of Coningsby because its author had produced a Revolutionary Epic. It took some time for even intelligent criticism to see that the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... the early Victorian apostle of Yuletide "wassail", can be derived from his having "powlert up and down" in a county abounding with comfortable manor houses and cosy inns. It is a ripe and mellow tradition of good cheer, that is quite distinct from the bovine stolidity of a harvest home in George Eliot's Loamshire or the crude animalism of Meredith's Gaffer Gammon. For Kent, even from the time of Caesar's Commentaries, has been "the civil'st place of ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... to its coarse fellow, the event-plot (which I positively do not believe),—even then I still hold that sloppiness in the fabrication of the event-plot amounts to a grave iniquity. In this connection I have in mind, among English novels, chiefly the work of "Mark Rutherford," George Eliot, the Brontes, and ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... seeks to prove that woman is man's equal because Rosa Bonheur and Lady Butler have painted, Sappho and George Eliot have written, and so forth; in other words, that woman is man's equal because she can do what he can do: any capacities of hers which he does not share being tacitly regarded as ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... fancy, reads with the sense of the days when people read in private, and not in public, as we do. She believes that your serious books are all true; and she knows that my novels are all lies—that's what some excellent Christians would call the fiction even of George Eliot or of Hawthorne; she would be ashamed to discuss the lives and loves of heroes and heroines who never existed. I think that's first-rate. She must wonder at your distempered interest in them. If one could get at it, I suppose ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... hire for a few weeks. Verena told him afterwards that Olive had taken her cottage furnished, but that the paucity of chairs and tables and bedsteads was such that their little party used almost to sit down, to lie down, in turn. On the other hand they had all George Eliot's writings, and two photographs of the Sistine Madonna. Ransom rapped with his stick on the lintel of the door, but no one came to receive him; so he made his way into the parlour, where he observed that his cousin Olive had as many German books as ever lying about. He dipped into this literature, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... criticism and grace of style, stops short at Miss Austen, and only glances, by a sort of anticipation, at Scott. The late Mr. Sidney Lanier's English Novel and the Principle of its Development is really nothing but a laudatory study of "George Eliot," with glances at other writers, including violent denunciations of the great eighteenth-century men. There are numerous monographs on parts of the subject: but nothing else that I know even attempting the whole. I should, of course, have liked to deal with so large a matter in a larger ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... subordinate statesman, earning credit for finance, Dickens was writing Hard Times, Carlyle was beginning his Frederick, Ruskin was at work on Modern Painters, Browning composing his Men and Women, Thackeray publishing The Newcomes, George Eliot wondering whether she was capable of imagination. It all seems very long ago since that October night when that woman sailed for Boulogne with her thirty-eight chosen nurses on the way to Scutari. I suppose that never in the ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... Jews a belief in human development and progress, with the Jews filling the role of the Messianic people, but only as primus inter pares. It is the expression of a genuine optimism. 'Character, no less than Career,' said George Eliot, 'is a process and an unfolding.' So with the Character of mankind as a whole. But this idea of development, unfolding, is quite modern in the real sense of the terms; it is something outside the range even of the second Isaiah. Judaism was never quite sure whether to join the ranks of the 'laudatores ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams |
