Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth Century Studies: 'George Eliot Where She Lived: Illustration and Topo-Biography.'

When: 5 February 2020, 18:00 — 20:00
Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

No booking required

A close reading of illustrations of George Eliot’s complete works after her death reveals a discourse of literary topo-biography (see Booth’s Homes and Haunts [Oxford UP 2016]) that encodes gender, class, and national heritage as well as tourism. We can connect such textual and cultural studies with the findings of mid-range reading, as practiced in Collective Biographies of Women. Short biographies of George Eliot circulated in twenty-seven volumes of assorted female lives, such as Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign and Lives of Girls Who Became Famous. With the varied methods of textual criticism and digital analysis, this talk draws out spatial and collective dimensions of life narrative, standing back from ostensibly objective geolocation and biographical facts and challenging genre distinctions of fiction and nonfiction. Versions of one woman’s life reveal the circulation of anecdotes and tropes as well as reliance on punctuating moves to new houses, cities, countries, and social circles. In particular, the great woman writer may be placed in the typical provincial cottage or a specific middle-class country house; Dorothea Brooke’s ordeal in Rome may be illustrated with a photograph captioned “A View of Middlemarch (Coventry).” If the Complete Works try to preserve an English Midland, biographies of Eliot among many women can point us toward a cosmopolitan, intersectional reading of representations of mobility and change in women’s lives.

Contact name: David Mcallister