SCHOLARLINESS IN GEORGE ELIOT CRITICISM

• Published in: The George Eliot review no. 49; pp. 31 - 6
• Main Author: Szirotny, June Skye
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Coventry George Eliot Fellowship 01.01.2018
• Subjects: Austen, Jane (1775-1817); Bildungsroman; Biographies; British & Irish literature; Dictionaries; Editing; Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) (1819-1880); English literature; Essays; Historical text analysis; Names; Poetry; Rhetoric; Scholars; Victorian period; Women; Writers; New York; United States > US
• ISSN: 1358-345X

[...]there are other possible endings more tragic than the actual ending of the poem, but less tragic than the death of both lovers. [...]Browning does not share Haight's conclusion; Browning thinks George Eliot's original intention was 'to make the catastrophe turn upon the death of Don Silva'-the death of only one of the lovers.52 Haight says that Frau Münderloh, the sister-in-law of the confectioner Münderloh,53 presumably the original of the confectioner in 'Brother Jacob', is 'the widow of a confectioner',54 but there is no evidence that she is a widow, as Haight concedes in a letter to me of October 21, 1984. While modern technology makes it easier to produce an accurate text now than in the nineteenth century, there may be new reasons for inaccuracy. Since authors usually no longer receive galley proofs, writers may not do enough checking of their work. [...]every work needs editing by another person, as Jacques Barzun suggests when he declines to have a work of his published unless the editor of the University of Chicago Press edits it.61 As Barzun says in his excellent rhetoric: 'When you have learned to look at your own words with critical detachment, you will find that rereading a piece five or six times in a row will each time bring to light fresh spots of trouble.' According to Lew David Feldman,.A Hundred Years After 'Middlemarch': Offering the Corrected Proofs of George Eliot from the Archives of the Publishers William Blackwood and Sons, 1857-1880 (New York: House of El Dieff, [1972]), 11, GE's proofs of the work are not extant. 43 Beer, George Eliot, Key Women Writers Series (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana UP, 1986), Virago Press, 1987), 142; Flint, 'George Eliot and Gender', in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, ed.