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SHERRI CATHERINE SMITH (ESSAY DATE JUNE 1996)

SOURCE: Smith, Sherri Catherine. "George Eliot, Straight Drag and the Masculine Investments of Feminism." Women's Writing 3, no. 2 (June 1996): 97-111.

In the following essay, Smith discusses Eliot's "nuanced understanding of the binary that underwrites gender hierarchy" and reveals the function of misogyny in her feminist tendencies.

I

"There was clearly no suspicion that I was a woman"¹, George Eliot marvelled in 1858, no tell-tale sign that the mysterious and applauded author of "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton" was in fact Marian Evans, erstwhile translator, journalist, and editor of the Westminster Review. There might have been pleasure enough in knowing that one had hoodwinked a readership inclined to believe women the intellectual and aesthetic inferiors of men. But for...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Primary Sources
   1. (Review Date 14 April 1860)
4. General Commentary
   1. Virginia Woolf (Essay Date 1925)
   2. Sherri Catherine Smith (Essay Date June 1996)
5. Title Commentary
   1. Felix Holt, the Radical
   2. Middlemarch
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright

1. Feminism
2. George Eliot