Before George Eliot : Marian Evans and the mid-Victorian periodical press

Abstract

Before she became 'George Eliot,' Marian Evans worked for over ten years in the periodical press. This thesis clarifies the nature and the significance of that work from 1846-1857. Dismissed in critical and biographical accounts as relatively unimportant apprenticeship years, this period is always overshadowed by the later writings of the renowned novelist. When addressed at all, for instance, typically her journalism and her serial fiction are removed from their contexts in the contingent environment of the periodical and raided for articulations of the novelist's manifesto. This is to misrepresent fundamentally her periodical work : her use of popular modes such as melodrama have been suppressed and the novelist’s so-called realist credo has been over-emphasised ; the full extent of Evans' contributions to nineteenth-century literary culture, namely her work as an editor, has remained obscure ; and the significant influence of the periodical press on the construction of her narrative and public personae has mostly gone unnoticed.