About FDU Press

As an Englishwoman, Eliot (i.e., Mary Ann Evans) was more conscious of origin and class than her American cohorts. She never visited the US, but she met Henry James, corresponded with Harriet Beecher Stowe, and lived a life with many parallels to Margaret Fuller’s. In this first book-length study of George Eliot in relation to her contemporaries in the US, Mueller (Univ. of Cologne) looks at constructions of gender, religion, and social organicism. Using the methods of ethnic and postcolonial studies to approach her topic and drawing on such works as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (CH, Jan ’80), this speculative discussion first takes up Fuller, Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne; chapter 2 looks at alternative treatments of Italy, and chapter 3 discusses race in Eliot’s influence on 20th-century American writers. The discussion of cosmopolitan social and literary tropes is particularly interesting. Includes extensive notes and works cited.