21st Century Perspectives on British Literature and Society The Myth of George Eliot

“The Myth of George Eliot” shows how Marian Evans understood the power of collective stories to change society, and suggests that her turn to fiction, after ten years as a professional translator, editor and journalist, was motivated by the desire to participate in an ethical revolution to imagine a broader future for the nation. George Eliot is a myth rather than a pseudonym. The writer Marian Evans invented the Victorian novelist as a character with a personality, a political view and a style that was received enthusiastically by the expanding mid-century readership, and just as enthusiastically rejected by the new generation of writers who considered her the last Victorian novelist. "The Myth of George Eliot" proposes that the narrative style and structure of Evans’s fiction is the result of her studies, of her reflection on the role of literature in the political and ethical life of a nation, and on the novel as the site of a cooperation between writer and reader in the continuous work on inherited traditions. Neither the last Victorian nor the first Modernist, Evans emerges as an author reflecting on the power of collective narratives in an age of democracy.