Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf

by Alison Booth

Overview

The egotism that fuels the desire for greatness has been associated exclusively with men, according to one feminist view; yet many women cannot suppress the need to strive for greatness. In this forceful and compelling book, Alison Booth traces through the novels, essays, and other writings of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf radically conflicting attitudes on the part of each toward the possibility of feminine greatness. Examining the achievements of Eliot and Woolf in their social contexts, she provides a challenging model of feminist historical criticism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501727771
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2018
Series:	Reading Women Writing
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Alison Booth is Professor of English at the University of Virginia and Director of the Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia Library. She is the author of How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present, winner of the Barbara Penny Kanner Award.

Editorial Reviews

Greatness Engendered takes its place appropriately in Cornell’s Reading Women Writing series. It provides a useful examination of how two major authors both read and wrote the problem of greatness.

South Atlantic Review - Caroline Webb

Booth successfully demonstrates how Eliot and Woolf challenged gender prescriptions by the very act of writing history as well as by the kind of history they wrote. She is careful to point out that Eliot and Woolf were not the first to shift the focus of history to common life, but she persuasively argues that they pushed it further by explicitly addressing what patriarchal discourses had silenced or obscured: the issue of gender and historical interpretation.

Modern Philology - Suzanne Graver

Greatness Engendered takes its place appropriately in Cornell's Reading Women Writing series. It provides a useful examination of how two major authors both read and wrote the problem of greatness.

--Caroline Webb "South Atlantic Review"

Booth successfully demonstrates how Eliot and Woolf challenged gender prescriptions by the very act of writing history as well as by the kind of history they wrote. She is careful to point out that Eliot and Woolf were not the first to shift the focus of history to common life, but she persuasively argues that they pushed it further by explicitly addressing what patriarchal discourses had silenced or obscured: the issue of gender and historical interpretation.

--Suzanne Graver "Modern Philology"

From the Publisher