VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Victorian literature is the literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria (18371901) (the Victorian era). It forms a link and transition between the writers of the romantic period and the very different literature of the 20th century. The novel became the leading form of literature and popular works opened a market among the public. Various novelists include Charles Dickens, the prime exemplar of Victorian novelist, William Thackeray, the Bronte Sisters and George Eliot. Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrongdoers are suitably punished. They tended to be of an improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart. While this formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian fiction, the situation became more complex as the century progressed.

GEORGE ELIOT
Mary Anne (Mary Ann, Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing romances. Throughout her career, Eliot wrote with a politically astute pen. Her famous works include The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede and Silas Marner. The Victorians, on the whole, were instructive and they wrote what they wanted to write. Eliot, on the other hand, was an intellectual and she wrote what she should have written. She is known as the first intellectual novelist. Her novels are the embodiment of her ideas. In Eliot, our interest is kept up in the way she analyses and diagnoses problems. She rejects dogma and wants to analyze the causes of every problem she comes across. Her realism is not only documentary but also psychological. She fused together comic irony and mild satire to create humour and her end was to moralize. Her humour had a serious message underlying it. This kind of humour is employed by the modern novelists. The insight into human nature makes Eliots picture of human nature more homogeneous than that of Dickens, etc. She shows that saints and sinners are made of the same clay; however, the latter lack the necessary strength of mind. She has ardent sincerity which compensates for many of the feelings of her aesthetic judgment,exclusively orthodox and Victorian in her ideas and modern in her approach. Though Eliot lived in the Victorian era yet she is a modern novelist since she wrote in the modern fashion