Sunday, October 12, 2008

Mrs. Gaskell and her purposefully transgressive younger sisters

This is just one of those things that comes to puzzle my brain from time to time. If Elizabeth Gaskell could be a successful novelist, writing under her own name and frequently being known only as "Mrs. Gaskell" -- why did her two successors, Marianne Evans and Aurore Dupin, need to take on the name of "George" in order to succeed as novelists. You will know the former better as George Eliot and the latter as George Sand. I wonder about that.

What you should not wonder about, however, is whether or not to read Eliot's Middlemarch. That is a given -- if you want to understand how women think and feel about men.

Just call me Dorothea.

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