George Eliot’s Literary Legacy: Poetic Perception and Self-Fashioning in the 1870s

Abstract

The essay urges scholars to view Eliot not only as a novelist but also as a poet. It focuses upon her poetry writing in the mid-1870s and in her collection of poems, The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1874). Understanding Eliot as a self-fashioned poetess who ultimately sought literary eminence through poetry in her career will offer greater insight into the sensibility of one of the nineteenth-century’s greatest writers. Eliot turned to poetry because the cultural prestige of poetry offered her a chance to secure a literary legacy beyond that of a popular novelist. Known in her day as the “female Shakespeare” (Collins, Interviews 104, 140), Eliot consciously used her celebrity to promote her poetry and fashion an image of herself as a living sage.