Table of Contents

Introduction: Marian Evans and the periodical press; 1. 'The character of editress': Marian Evans at the Westminster Review; 2. 'Working for one's bread': Marian Evans the journalist; 3. Staging 'Scenes' in Blackwood's Magazine: melodrama, narrative voice and the Blackwood's Man; 4. After Marian Evans: the importance of being George Eliot; 5. Last impressions: Marian Evans takes on her audience.

Promotional Information

A revisionary study of the impact of Marian Evans's early periodical-press career on her later success as a novelist.

About the Author

Fionnuala Dillane researches and teaches at the School of English, Drama and Film Studies, University College Dublin.

Reviews

"… elucidate[s] the complexity of the networks that underpinned the periodical press and [is] an essential research resource for anyone embarking on their own study of the Victorian literary marketplace."
Clare Horrocks, Journal of Victorian Culture

"This remarkable and refreshing book challenges the conventional treatment of the early literary labors of Marian Evans in the 1850s as merely apprentice-work for George Eliot as a novelist of high Victorian literature."
Susan David Bernstein, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies

"In her extended portrait of Marian Evans as an astute and flexible professional in the periodical marketplace, Fionnuala Dillane offers a welcome corrective to the image of George Eliot as a reclusive sibyl … Dillane’s grounding of Evans’s many narrative personae in specific practices of her periodical culture also serves to dislodge the stubborn image of Eliot as the goddess of sympathy. Dillane is refreshingly skeptical about that image, creating in its stead a writer alert to what her public required and strategic about accommodating her variable styles to those needs."
Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Victorian Studies