‘Solitude in any wide scene impressed her with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her' (George Eliot, Daniel Deronda)

Billington, Josie (2023) ‘Solitude in any wide scene impressed her with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her' (George Eliot, Daniel Deronda). In: A Space of Their Own. Among the Victorians and Modernists . Routledge,London, pp. 129-142. ISBN 978-1-032-21809-0

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Abstract

Lyric is typically defined by its departure from, or rejection or transcendence of, temporal sequence, narrative history and finite identity (Barbara Hardy, The Advantage of Lyric, 1977; Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time, 1979). This chapter opens by demonstrating Christina Rossetti’s maximal technical exploitation of lyric time-out in two sonnets, which thereby provide a model from nineteenth-century female poetry against which the lyric moment in women’s fiction of the period can be tested and compared. While the lyric mode apparently opposes, and is seemingly incompatible with, the prosaic literary medium of realist fiction, this chapter argues that the lyric instant is a frequently-used resource for women novelists of ‘domestic’ realism, particularly in exploring and expressing female characters’ experience of trauma. Such instances are most visible in the work of George Eliot where – from her first novella, Janet’s Repentance (1859), to her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876) - they foreshadow the epiphanic tendencies of modernist writing. But they are integral, too, to the mid-Victorian fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell where, this chapter contends (in relation to Ruth, 1853 and Wives and Daughters, 1865-6), lyric is uniquely incorporated into the (faithfully reproduced) temporal continuity which customarily banishes the lyric mode.

Item Type:	Book Section
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of the Arts
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	26 Apr 2023 08:29
Last Modified:	17 Mar 2024 14:31
DOI:	10.4324/9781003270102-14
Related URLs:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3169966