Conventional wisdom holds that the great Victorian novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880) lost her religious faith in her twenties, remained an agnostic (if not an atheist) for the rest of her life, and embodied in her fiction a secular humanism roughly equivalzent to Christian ethics cleansed of Christian belief. In Identifying the Remains, K. K. Collins challenges this commonly accepted view by exploring what the London religious press said about George Eliot when she died. With the entire secular coverage as background, Collins surveys over seventy-five obituaries, commemorative essays, critical articles, letters and notes from forty-eight religious papers and journals — Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, Nonconformist, non-sectarian, Presbyterian, Primitive Methodist, Swedenborgian, Unitarian, and Wesleyan. He argues that the absence of a known “personality” for George Eliot, who carefully guarded her private life from public scrutiny, forced even hostile religious journalists to try to come to terms with the essential mystery of her beliefs, a process suggesting that her heterodoxy was not nearly so definable in her own time as we have come to suppose it is in ours.

Identifying the Remains: George Eliot's Death in the London Religious Press (E L S MONOGRAPH SERIES)

Literature & Fiction

Collins, K.K.

History & Criticism

ELS Editions

In pursuing Susan Howe s own writing through words of her literary predecessors, Collis ranges deep in and beyond the American archive s wilderness, catching sight of various elusive quarry: Charles Olson and Herman Melville; Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, and Margaret Fuller; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, James Clarence Mangan and William Shakespeare. At the heart of this are the simple literary exchanges embodied here in a selection of correspondence between Howe and Olson editor George Butterick that remind us that poets invariably find their poetry in other poets poetry, that the future is waiting for us in the past, and that no original or origin is ultimately possible.

Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (E L S MONOGRAPH SERIES)

Collis, Stephen

Laplanche's study of Hoelderlin is not only the early work of one of Lacan's most brilliant students, one who, in contrast to the large majority of students of such a powerful master, was able to work through the unavoidable transference to gain his own stature and independence, it is also a response to a text that pursued in the most rigorous manner the dissociation of life and work, the work as the most radical consummation of the life from which it emerges. from the Introduction by Rainer Naegele

Hölderlin and the Question of the Father (E L S Editions)

LaPlanche, Jean

Biographies & Memoirs

This edition of the poems Marianne Moore published between 1932 to 1936 is an argument for the uniqueness of her achievement during these years, and the importance of reading her poetry from those years in its earliest published form. In particular it advocates for the hitherto-overlooked importance of Marianne Moore's 1936 The Pangolin and Other Verse. This limited-edition volume, containing only five poems, represents the culmination of the work she produced in the four years preceding its publication, and as such marks the high-water mark of Moore's entire poetic career.

A-Quiver with Significance: Marianne Moore, 1932-1936 (E L S Monograph Series)

Heather Cass White

First published in 1937, two years after Durrell took up residence on the Greek island Kerkyra, Panic Spring broke with the realist tradition in 1930s novels and shows the young author's first attempts to extend High Modernist innovations in rural and personal landscapes. Cubist, surrealist, and imagist techniques merge with rural life and the peasant village that an international group of expatriates are led to by a curiously Pan-like boatman. Unavailable for seven decades, this new edition of Panic Spring shows Durrell's emerging passion for Mediterranean life and the Greek world as well as his first attempts to articulate a political-aesthetic direction distinct from his peers, George Orwell and W.H. Auden. Under the shadow of financial and political ruin, on the verge of revolution and war, the one chance summer depicted in Panic Spring will make readers reconsider the impetus and interests behind Durrell's late modernist masterpieces, The Alexandria Quartet, The Black Book, and Prospero's Cell.

Panic Spring: A Romance (E L S MONOGRAPH SERIES, 99)

DURRELL, LAWRENCE

Gifford, James

Literary

Durrell's first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, was published in 1935, shortly after he left England to live abroad until his death in 1990. As an autobiographical Künstlerroman, it traces Walsh Clifton's Anglo-Indian childhood and his struggles to negotiate a life between mother India and father England. The trauma of leaving India for an alien home propels the novels concerns with colonial life and its wounds, transitioning from an idyllic rural world to London and Bloomsbury in the 1920s. Pied Piper of Lovers draws keenly from Durrell's own life and charts the emotional experiences that would drive the rest of his career. For these reasons, Durrell never allowed republication, and the novel was largely lost in the London Blitz. Pied Piper of Lovers prompts significant reconsideration of the impetus and political tensions behind Durrell's late modernist masterpieces, The Alexandria Quartet, The Avignon Quintet, and Bitter Lemons. This new edition allows readers to reevaluate Durrell's complex role as a colonial writer in a postcolonial world by emphasizing his irony, privileges, and bitterness for a life always lived in-between.

The Pied Piper of Lovers (E L S MONOGRAPH SERIES)

Margot Kathleen Louis (1954–2007) published largely as a scholar of Victorian poetry, but medieval literature was her first love, and an abiding passion she shared enthusiastically with students, audiences and colleagues throughout her entire career. But medieval English literature, as it was studied in 1976, included as yet no women authors, and virtually no dissenting or religiously radical writing – in short, none of the kinds of texts that she most valued. In Victorian literature she found more of what she would later call the “anguished and passionate debate that mediated the shift from various forms of Christianity to a far greater spiritual diversity.” Focusing on the role of allegory, myth, visionary experience, and the feminine divine in the medieval imagination, this volume seeks to pay tribute to Louis’ fascination with the rise of literary studies involving early women writers, which brought with it an opening up of the pre-1700 canon to both gender and religious pluralism. The present volume seeks to marry her love of early women writers with her other great passion, women’s literary and pedagogical challenges to male-dominated religious traditions.

Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis (E L S MONOGRAPH SERIES)

Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn

The first edition of Gissing's New Grub Street appeared in three volumes in 1891, and all of the many subsequent English-language editions have been based on this text. Gissing wanted to revise and abridge it, but never found a publisher willing to issue a revised text. However, when his companion Gabrielle Fleury translated the novel into French, Gissing made extensive cuts in the copy from which she worked. He approved the final translation, which was published in 1901 under the title La Rue des Meurt-de-Faim. That year, Gissing wrote to Henry Davray, who had reviewed New Grub Street and Born in Exile in the Mercure de France: "Of course you are right about the superfluities to be found in both of them. The fault is partly due to their having been written when English fiction was subjected to the three-volume system; but also in a measure to the haste in which all my early work was done. As the Oxford undergraduate said about his essay I had not time to make the things shorter. However, in the case of New Grub Street, this defect is remedied in the French translation; almost a third of the novel has been cut out. If ever I get the opportunity, I shall give all my books a vigorous revision, & cut them down." Gissing eliminated various minor characters and sub-plots, and cut some passages of autobiography and personal opinion that were not relevant to the main themes of the novel. Altogether, the revised New Grub Street is a more unified work, with a stronger narrative drive.

New Grub Street: The 1901 Revised Text (English Literary Studies Monograph)

GISSING, GEORGE

Eleven years after it was first published in 1884, George Gissing spoke of The Unclassed as "the work of a very young man, who dealt in a romantic spirit with the gloomier facts of life." When it was first published in 1884, it drew criticism from all quarters. When Gissing later revised the book, he felt ashamed of his youthful enthusiasms; he may have turned The Unclassed into a more accomplished novel, but also a less interesting one. The present edition makes the original text available for the first time since the four hundred copies printed in 1884. Only this text does justice to all four aspects of the novel: the romance, the realist experiment, the sociological tract, and the autobiographical testament.

The Unclassed: The 1884 Text (E L S Monograph Series)

Magic Mirror is H.D.'s unpublished roman à clef of her eight-year "strange relationship" with Dr. Erich Heydt, a psychiatrist in Zürich with whom she formed a bond which often oscillated between professional consultation and a sort of analyst-analysand intimacy accompanied by much inner conflict and resistance. Relatively short, and written in three drafts between 1955 and 1956, Magic Mirror is autobiography in disguise: "Everything is true there… I had a hard time finding names for my people. They are real people; everything is real except the build-up of Eric's enigmatic German background." Magic Mirror sheds abundant light on her relationship with Heydt, who played a role much like Freud did in H.D.'s life twenty years earlier. The work also offers insights into her relationship with Ezra Pound; her unresolved bond with her half-brother, Eric Doolittle; Pieter Rodeck; as well as the sinking of the Lusitania and the still-birth of her first child on May 21, 1915. Further, the memoir is significant as a textual alembic which casts into sharp relief issues manifested in her other postwar works, for example, the occult, spiritualism, and how they both relate to psychoanalysis and her vocation as a writer. Magic Mirror contains material that is further expanded in her memoirs Compassionate Friendship (1955) and Thorn Thicket (1960).

Magic Mirror, Compassionate Friendship, and Thorn Thicket: A Tribute to Erich Heydt (ELS Monograph)

H.D.

Christodoulides, Nephie

United States

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