Edith Simcox as Biographer of George Eliot in the Periodical Press

Abstract

Since Gordon S. Haight published his biography of George Eliot in 1968, Eliot's biographers have assumed that Edith Simcox wanted to write Eliot's biography and was jealous that John Walter Cross undertook the task. However, I suggest that Edith Simcox actually wrote her own biography of Eliot through the articles she published in the Academy and the Nineteenth Century, as well as in her personal journal, Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, and in her fictional Episodes in the Lives of Men, Women, and Lovers (1882). Notably, five of these episodes were published in Fraser's Magazine in 1881.