History of the Project
The George Eliot Review Online is the digital repository for all issues of the peer-reviewed journal George Eliot Review, which has been in continuous publication since 1970. Before 1980, its title was George Eliot Fellowship Review. The journal was the first to focus specifically on the life and literature of the Victorian woman writer with a masculine pen name, and it continues to break new ground today as the only open-access journal publishing primarily about Eliot. The materials on the website are licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which means users are free to read and download full-text PDF files.
Dr. Beverley Park Rilett began the project in 2016 when she was a faculty member at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She moved to Auburn University in 2021, where she continues to direct this open-access digital project along with two sister sites, the George Eliot Archive and the George Eliot Scholars.
The George Eliot Review Online publishes the web version of the journal in partnership with the George Eliot Fellowship, a literary society in Nuneaton, England that has published the print version of the journal since 1970. Thanks to an agreement signed by Chair John Burton and approved by Fellowship members in 2016, the George Eliot Review Online team digitized and provided digital editing and infrastructure for all back issues and continues to add current issues in the same way. Co-editors, Drs. John Rignall and A. G. van den Broek, manage all the submissions, peer review, developmental editing, proofreading, and working with the printer.
History of the George Eliot Review Online project
This website you are visiting began in 2016, a year before we launched. Before we created this digital project, the George Eliot Review journal had been inconsistently available in the US, though many academic libraries and individuals subscribed. By 2015, US libraries had switched from print to digital subscriptions for periodicals. Print-only journals such as the George Eliot Review were being purged from collections at an alarming rate and several issues had already become impossible to obtain, even through the US inter-library loan program.
During a 2015 visit to England, Dr. Rilett explained the problem of the journal's increasing scarcity in the US and proposed a solution to facilitate free global access. With their enthusiastic support, she volunteered to digitize, host, and maintain the online journal to ensure it would be available for all future researchers without borders or barriers. No institutional database subscriptions would be required, so the independent researcher would not be excluded.
Dr. Rilett's vision could not have been implemented without the ongoing labor editorial staff of research assistants who maintain and update this project, but especially to the team of students who helped track down the entire span of issues and then helped digitize and describe every page.
The students' work was largely supported by grant funding awarded to then through UNL's Undergraduate Creativity and Research Experience (UCARE) program, funded by Pepsi Cola.
At Auburn University, Dr. Rilett and her research assistants are currently supported by the AU Libraries, the College of Liberal Arts (especially the English department), and the College of Engineering (especially the Computer Science and Software Engineering department).
The George Eliot Review Online also owes a debt of gratitude to Dr. Henry Alley, who donated his nearly complete collection of printed journals just as we were beginning to acquire them for scanning. Collecting the entire set of the Review was especially challenging because US libraries were unable to locate some issues anywhere in the country. At one point, a trans-Atlantic shipment from the Fellowship's own set represented the only known copies of three issues. Fortunately, they arrived safely, so that our team at UNL could digitize every George Eliot Review journal back to its 1970 inaugural issue.
On this site, you will find a digital republication of all the back issues of the George Eliot Review and the George Eliot Fellowship Review just as they appeared in print for more than fifty years. To make this information as useful as possible to visitors, our project team added metadata and tags to the issues as a whole and to each of the nearly nine hundred individual articles, reviews, and other documents. Our digitized version allows readers to browse journals by year, issue number, title, and author and to search the contents of the entire corpus for words or phrases of interest.
While the GE Review Online provides access to the most recent peer-reviewed work of George Eliot scholars as published in the George Eliot Review journal, visitor should also turn to the George Eliot Archive, a repository launched in December, 2018 just in time for the bicentenary celebrating Eliot's birth (1819). It holds several thousand documents written by and about George Eliot before 1926 (the public domain works). Browse hundreds of images including galleries of illustrations and portraits of the author, and explore born-digital tools and data visualizations, including interactive maps, chronologies, social networks, and text analysis applications.
A second sister site is the George Eliot Scholars digital commons (2021), where the editors are curating new articles published as open-access or Creative Commons-licensed documents. In addition, the Scholars commons is a meeting place for researchers may contribute their own work on the author in various forms and formats. We welcome your contributions, and, of course, your feedback, on our continuously developing websites.
Thank you for visiting!
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