New Thinking: George Eliot

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 598 Ratings

🗓️ 22 November 2019

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Shahidha Bari discusses the state of scholarship on George Eliot at her bicentenary with Ruth Livesey and Helen O'Neill, both at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Gail Marshall at the University of Reading. Ruth Livesey's AHRC funded research project on George Eliot is ‘Provincialism: Literature and the Cultural Politics of Middleness in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ https://georgeeliotprovincialism.home.blog/ Gail Marshall's blog on reading Middlemarch is here https://middlemarchin2019.wordpress.com/ A Free Thinking discussion of Mill on the Floss with writer Rebecca Mead, actor Fiona Shaw and academics Philip Davis, Dafydd Daniel and Peggy Reynolds is here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07vsc2h

This episode is one of a series of conversations - New Thinking - produced in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research & Innovation. Producer: Luke Mulhall

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps
0:21.2	it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream
0:26.1	van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds.
0:32.1	This is the BBC.
0:37.0	Hello, her first novel was, she said, a country story full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay. What's not to love about that? George Elliot, who was born in 1819 and died in 1880, cared about the small stuff and her books like Middlemarch, Adam Bede and Mill on the Floss,
0:55.7	are devoted to the faithful representing of commonplace things.
1:00.1	In this episode of New Thinking, the BBC Radio 3 podcast that showcases the latest discoveries
1:05.1	and newest trends in academic research, we'll be talking about the history of the reception
1:09.7	of George Eliot's work and we'll be asking how the history of the reception of George Eliot's work,
1:11.6	and we'll be asking how contemporary scholars are thinking about her now as we mark the bicentenary of her birth.
1:17.6	Here to talk to me are my three guests. Ruth Livesey, hello.
1:21.6	Hi. You work on 19th century literature at Royal Holloway University of London,
1:25.6	and you're an AHRC research
1:28.2	leadership fellow on a project about provincialism and literature. We're going to find out more
1:32.9	about that, Ruth. Helen O'Neill, hello. Hello. You're Royal Holloway 2. You're a postdoctoral
1:38.2	research assistant on the same project, and you've been working specifically at Nuniton Library,
1:45.7	and you had a previous life as a librarian at the London Library which has a nice connection to Elliot absolutely yes well G.H. Lewis was a
1:53.5	committee member there and there's a wonderful piece of gossip actually about George Elliott written
1:58.2	in a notebook by the librarian in 1859 saying she'd obviously
2:03.4	he'd had a chat with Chapman from 142 the Strand and the librarian notes in his notebook that
2:11.2	Chapman had said she was just he'd had a conversation with Coombe the phrenologist who had
2:16.8	reported that he'd never seen a woman's head with so much power and very few men's heads.
	...

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