Introduction: George Eliot and the poetics of disbelief

This introduction is for the special issue edited by Hadjiafxendi entitled 'The cultural place of George Eliot's poetry'. This issue tries to reclaim Eliot's place in the literary canon as a poet by exploring the challenges that her poetry posed and still poses to its readers today. All its contributors experiment with different ways of reading Eliot's poems in their own right rather than as narratives that happen to be in poetic form. In so doing, the aim is to sketch out 'an Eliot who is barely visible in her novels'

Science at the seaside: pleasure hunts in North Devon (2014-2017) [REF2021 collection]

Science at the Seaside is a collaboration between Ilfracombe Museum, Bath Spa University and the University of Exeter, which proposes a new and original understanding of the interlinked growth of popular science and coastal tourism during the Victorian period, with the different outputs producing original insights into the Victorian fascination with natural history. This multi-component output Collection provides evidence of a co-authored chapter, a co-curated permanent exhibition with a written guide, workshops, an educational activities programme, and the digitization of c.2000 museum objects, which derive from research undertaken as part of a North Devon FLAG-funded project, ‘Science at the Seaside: Pleasure Hunts in Victorian Devon’ (October 2013-August 2015). Contextualising information includes a 300 word statement, Research Timeline and Research Questions, and documentation of research dissemination through conference papers and public talks

Becoming George Eliot: female authorship in the nineteenth century

This chapter aims to explore through the case study of George Eliot the complexity of nineteenth-century female authorship by focussing on the way in which its history was written through the choices that individual women made in relation to their professionalization. The story of “Becoming George Eliot” is a parable of female development that placed struggle with ambition at the centre of woman’s career progression as an author, within which Eliot’s route to professionalism is traced as a move from private to public spheres, from “feminine” to “masculine” work (hence the use of the male pseudonym), and from writing as a leisure activity to the world of remunerative labour. My aim though is to complicate this narrative of women’s efforts to move from amateur to professional status by exploring the boundaries between Eliot’s journalism and fiction and the respective modes of authorship they embodied, revealing how fluid they were and how often they shifted during the course of her career

Discoveries on the shore

The 'Science of the Seaside' project takes children to the Devon coast to ramble in rockpools and explore seaside objects. It is all about the joys of experiential learning

Negotiating fame: mid-Victorian women writers and the romantic myth of the gentlemanly reviewer

This chapter analyses the self-fashioning of George Eliot and Mary Elizabeth Braddon as they sought to forge identities as professional women writers in the face of the difficulties caused by their long-term unmarried relationships; revealingly, both authors looked back to Romantic models of authorship from the 1820s in order to legitimate their professional status. Yet, the 'gentlemanly' authorship they evoked signified an opposition to the more commercial models of authorship that were becoming increasingly prevalent in the contemporary literary market-place; this chapter explores the paradoxes created by Braddon's and Eliot's use of pseudonyms, which, while seeking to secure and protect their professional identities, nonetheless opened them up to charges of treating their art as if it were no more than an industry