"Epigrams are at best half-truths that look like whole ones. Here is a handful about George Eliot. It has been said of her books—('on several occasions')—that 'it is doubtful whether they are novels disguised as treatises, or treatises disguised as novels'; that, 'while less romantic than Euclid's Elements, they are on the whole a great deal less improving reading'; and that 'they seem to have been dictated to a plain woman of genius by the ghost of David Hume.' Herself, too, has been variously described: as 'An Apotheosis of Pupil-Teachery'; as 'George Sand plus Science and minus Sex'; as 'Pallas with prejudices and a corset'; as 'the fruit of a caprice of Apollo for the Differential Calculus.' The comparison of her admirable talent to 'not the imperial violin but the grand ducal violoncello' seems suggestive and is not unkind."
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Novelists from EnglandEssayists from EnglandPoets from EnglandPhilosophers from EnglandTranslators from England
Original Language: English
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Sources
William Ernest Henley, Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation (1890), pp. 131-132
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Eliot
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