George Eliot and Virginia Woolf - Special Edition
Organization: Virginia Woolf Miscellany
Spring/Summer 2025
Guest Editor: Charlotte Fiehn
Submissions should be no longer than 2,500 words.
Please send submissions to: charlotte.fiehn@yu.edu
Deadline: 30 May 2025
The special topic for Issue 103 of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany will focus on the literary, biographical, and critical intersections of Virginia Woolf and George Eliot. Woolf, in preparation for her article on the centenary of Eliot’s birth in November 1919, claims to have read all of Eliot’s works, and numerous critics noted Eliot’s influence on Woolf’s fiction. Although Woolf’s centenary article was largely scathing, suggesting that Eliot was old-fashioned and even somewhat ridiculous, Woolf insisted that she greatly admired Eliot. Her comment about Middlemarch as “one of the few novels written for grown-up people” remains a definitive assessment. Woolf receives credit for reviving Eliot’s reputation in the early 20th century.
Suggested topics include (but are by no means limited to) the influence of Eliot on Woolf’s work and Woolf’s role in shaping Eliot’s reputation in the early twentieth century; comparisons of Eliot and Woolf’s works (e.g., Middlemarch and Night and Day, The Mill on the Floss and To the Lighthouse, or “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” and A Room of One’s Own); biographical connections (e.g., familial relationships, experiences of education, and the respective roles of George Henry Lewes and Leonard Woolf); and Woolf’s and Eliot’s critical reception.
Charlotte Fiehn
