2015 was my George Eliot year. Having re-read Middlemarch 35 years after sitting in
front of it for hours during the summer of 1979 in preparation for the
Victorian Literature course of B.A. (Hons) English Lancaster 1981, I was
impressed ten times more than that first experience of it when I was more
overwhelmed than unconvinced and so I moved on to Daniel Deronda. Keeping a wary eye out for bargains, I was lucky
enough to find Scenes from Clerical Life,
Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss on
a bookstall for 50p each and, when they didn’t have change for my two pound
coin, waved away the 50p in lordly fashion. I can’t remember where my Felix Holt came from but remember
reading it on a train in September and I finally finished Romola late on New Year’s Eve.
In trying to draw some conclusions about Eliot’s novels,
with their various moral, political and intellectual themes, I first want to
bring together a blueprint in which a virtuous, sometimes scholarly, and
sometimes apparently based on Marian Evans herself, central character has their
ostensible destiny compromised and re-routed to an alternate fate. This might
be the sub-text to the whole body of work that one’s end is not in one’s
beginning but is decided more by what happens than what was seemingly meant to
be, that ‘nurture’, or something like it, is always going to modify ‘nature’
decisively. To simplify seven novels, and some of them very big ones, to such a
glib paraphrase is absurd but I’m not involved in a dissertation here, only a note.
Middlemarch on its own would reveal
ten times more on a third reading and I will make a point of reading it every
thirty five years to allow it to disclose more each time.
But Silas Marner’s carefully hoarded savings are cruelly
stolen only to eventually bring him a greater reward in bringing up a child;
Adam Bede stoically misses out on the girl he adores but finds a life of contentment
with the girl one might not have expected; Romola, somewhat misguidedly
perhaps, devotes herself to the wrong man more than once before becoming
fulfilled without being attached to a man; Dorothea Brooke idealizes the
academic work of Casaubon but discovers too late in marriage to him quite how desiccated
such a bookish life can be, and Daniel Deronda pursues the vain, spoilt but, of
course, beguiling Gwendolen but it is Gwendolen’s loss when she marries the
dreadful, manipulative Grandcourt and Deronda finds discovers his inheritance
in Jewish culture.
If I left out The Mill
on the Floss there, it is not because it doesn’t fit the vague template of
an Eliot plot but because it does it differently. Maggie Tulliver is a wonderful,
signature creation, an ardent learner full of possibility and promise. Her relationship
with the sensitive Philip is valuable and she cares less about his disability
but her father is in dispute with his and it causes a rift in the family,
particularly with her much-loved brother.
Her destiny, appallingly, is to be re-united with her brother in
drowning in the pre-Lawrentian. Although
one must regard Middlemarch as
Eliot’s greatest achievement, it is difficult not to like The Mill on the Floss, in a very competitive field, as much as any
of her books.
But that is not to say they are perfect. Each novel has had
its critics, on points of credibility within the plot or other technical
objections. But disbelief has to be suspended and Eliot’s prose is glorious
enough to be enjoyed for its own sake and overcomes any such prescriptive
requirements. It is not only how she can write a sentence but how she will pass
comment with informed liberalism and, more often than one might expect, with
knowing humour.
In The Mill on the
Floss, Mr. Tulliver winks and smiles,
With the natural pride
of a man who has a buxom wife conspicuously his inferior in intellect.
And in Silas Marner,
A dull mind, once
arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the
impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely
problematic.
Her biographers mention how Herbert Spencer decided against
marrying her because she was too intellectual- that might have been his loss,
not hers- and it was unfortunate that
while I was reading Romola Giles
Coren, the well-known acerbic columnist in The
Times, expressed ironic surprise that anybody read George Eliot for
pleasure. Romola is certainly a
challenge at times but comes to life in its climactic second half and it did
take three years of research into Florence in the 1490’s to make into quite
such a dense account of Savaranola, the Bonfire of the Vanities and Romola’s
story woven into it. But I wouldn’t have spent a year reading almost no other
fiction than hers if it hadn’t been for pleasure. And Giles is noted for being
less reluctant than his more dignified sister in reaching for the unnecessarily
cheap shot whenever he’s run out of ideas for anything more witty to write.
Coming historically, and thematically, between Jane Austen
and Thomas Hardy, it’s easy to see George Eliot as a novelist that brings
together elements of both but is surely more satisfying than either. Dickens
has been given more attention as a writer, possibly as a more populist story
teller but not necessarily as such a sophisticated writer. It is inevitable
that she is something of an icon for feminists but hers is not the sort of
feminism than regards the masculine as a tyranny that needs to be subverted by replacing
it with the reverence of everything female instead. Many of Eliot’s male
characters are sensitive, benign and well-meaning and the female can be as
selfish and deplorable as any man, and so her attitude appreciated the more
noble aspirations of diversity before such an idea became a vehicle for the use
of any perceived minority to make inordinate claims for their victim status. As
Jenny Uglow says,
Part of George Eliot’s
aim is, in contrast, to celebrate diversity, to pick out the cygnet among the
ducks, and to deny the existence of a norm.
And that, alongside the consummate prose, the profound
portraits of humanity and the sheer intelligence is what makes her not only the
greatest of C19th novelists but of any period. It is not Eliot, it is Jenny
Uglow, that is disrespecting ducks there. Unfortunately, Jenny has rather
missed the point. In a George Eliot book, a duck would have lived some sort of
happy life, paddling about in a pond whereas a cygnet would have always been in
danger of growing up into a self-regarding, graceful but potentially aggressive
swan.