Last modified 20 September 2000

Critics who recognize Eliot's pictorialism

Hugh Witemeyer, Professor of English, University of New Mexico

Note 16 to Chapter 1 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

See Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, trans. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 319-83; Peter Conrad, The Victorian Treasure-House, pp. 39-40, 80-82, 105, 119; John Bayley, "The Pastoral of Intellect," in Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 200-04; Michael Squires, The Pastoral Novel: Studies in George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1974), pp. 68, 75-77; and Ann Ronald, "George Eliot's Florentine Museum," Papers on Langaage and Literature, 13 (1977), 260-69.

For more sympathetic treatments, see John Goode, "Adam Bede," in Hardy, ed., Critical Essays on George Eliot, p. 22; William J. Sullivan, "George Eliot and the Fine Arts," Diss. Wisconsin 1970; Norma Jean Davis, "Pictorialism in George Eliot's Art," Diss. Northwestern 1972; and Bernard A. Richards, "The Use of the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth-Century Novel," Diss. Oxford 1972. For excellent illustrations of Eliot's life and works, see Marghanita Laski, George Eliot and Her World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973).

Last modified 20 September 2000