Abstract
Inscribed on the doorpost of every biographer’s study might be this statement by Flaubert: ‘we have too many things and not enough forms’. In epigrammatic style, it expresses the problem I want to examine in this analysis of biographical strategies and approaches adopted by various writers in their treatment of George Eliot’ life. My concern is also with the formal aspects of biography, the elements of structure, narrative, and language. I begin with several general considerations of biography as a literary text.
Keywords
Literary Work Literary Text Logical Interpretation Figurative Language Letter Series
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Notes
- 1.Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, tr. Richard Howard (1971; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 135.Google Scholar
- 3.Richard Ellmann, ‘Literary Biography’, Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 15.Google Scholar
- 4.Mathilde Blind, George Eliot (London: W.H. Allen, 1883), endpaper [p. 219]. All further references are to this edition.Google Scholar
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- 7.Leslie Stephen, ‘ Biography’, Men, Books, and Mountains, Essays by Leslie Stephen, introd. S.O.A. Ullmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1956), pp. 132, 140–1. The essay originally appeared in the National Review, 22 (1893).Google Scholar
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- 10.Anne Fremantle, George Eliot (London: Duckworth, 1933), p. 65. All further references are to this edition. [Text reads ‘storm-tried’, p. 77. Ed.]Google Scholar
- 11.Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 22. All further references are to this edition.Google Scholar
- 12.Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot and John Chapman, 2nd edn. (1940; New Haven: Archon Books, 1969), p. vii.Google Scholar
- 13.Jerrold Seigel, Marx’s Fate, The Shape of A Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 4.Google Scholar
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- 15.George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–78), II, 315.Google Scholar
- 16.Leon Edel, ‘The Poetics of Biography’, Contemporary Approaches to English Studies, ed. Hilda Schiff (London: Heinemann, 1977), p. 42.Google Scholar
Copyright information
© Gordon S. Haight and Rosemary T. VanArsdel 1982