"George Eliot: A Life" by Rosemary Ashton

An interesting and comprehensive biography of one of the great English novelists of the Victorian era. She wrote, among other things, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, the last often regarded as the greatest novel by an English writer. Her forte was the realistic depiction of ordinary people.

Marian Evans probably used a pen-name because of the scandal of her private life: she lived in unmarried bliss with George Henry Lewes, himself married to a woman and supporting a number of children fathered by the lover of that lady. In those (even more sexist) days, whilst Lewes as a man could enter society, Evans would have been shunned. It was not until the phenomenal of her first novel, Adam Bede, that she allowed her true identity to become known.

It was particularly interesting in explaining her religious views: she was extremely religious in her young days before becoming agnostic. We would probably describe her as humanist today.

She believed in show don't tell. She had “a view of fiction which takes it for granted that literature should have a morally beneficial effect, be utile as well as dulce, but which requires that the message be subservient to the medium.” (Ch 6) In her words: “We don’t want a man with a wand, going about the gallery and haranguing us. Art is art and tells its own story.” (Ch 6) 

Furthermore, she objected to poetic justice on moral grounds. If we have the knowledge or the expectation of reward for being good, or for doing our duty, she argued, than we are doing good from self-interested motives.On the other hand, “though the plots in her novels are complex and open to different possibilities, the endings are, like any other writer’s, single.” (Ch 6) “Either Maggie lives or she dies. ,,, It is difficult for the author to avoid seeming to reward of punish characters by choosing a particular ending for them. It was a dilemma faced by all nineteenth-century novelists (many twentieth-century novels get found it by ending in flux, as it were).” (Ch 6)

She liked eg Goethe precisely because he was tolerant of human weakness and showed his characters with both bad traits and good. “In novels by writers such as Goethe ... good and evil are not so easy to distinguish as in much fiction. ... Not that Goethe does not preach ... He does, but he lets his characters be, airing his principles generally... George Eliot’s would be a different way. For her the organic unity of purpose and practice was important. ... Her belief in a kind of determinism by which character carries its own consequences, or Nemesis, leads her in effect often to punish such characters by withholding happiness from them while seeing and sympathizing with the mitigating circumstances of their cases.” (Ch 6)

She was politically conservative (despite her radicalism in morality): “She accepted the slow pace of psychological and social change, understanding and even cherishing her characters’ clinging to traditional beliefs and customs in the face of sometimes rapid political and industrial progress. ... though her conservatism was, of course, in tension with her personal history of rebellion against convention in the matter of religious belief and her defiance - albeit reluctant - of society’s expectations about ... the relations between men and women.” (Ch 6)

Selected quotes:

• “Her protagonists struggle against limiting social conditions, the stifling effect of the practical rule that ‘sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them’.” (Introduction)
• “All her novels ... trace the fate of individuals caught up in a process of change, sometimes momentous change, which finds them in some way out of step with their immediate surroundings.” (Introduction)
• “All ages ... embrace change. Discoveries are made, inventions patented, laws passed. Wars change boundaries, travel opens up trade routes ...” (Introduction)
• “A man (or woman) who breaks the code of, say, monogamy, may be conformist in other ways, such as voting and church-going.” (Introduction)
• “Her religious views required her to distrust imaginative literature, particularly fiction, as frivolous and even dangerous, being a form of lying.” (Ch 1)
• “I think him wrong, as every man must be in working out in detail an idea which has general truth, but is only one element in a perfect theory, not a perfect theory in itself.” (letter of George Eliot, March 1846) (Ch 2)
• “While science teaches us that we are profoundly ignorant of causes and realities it becomes us not to dogmatise upon what we cannot know.” (Ch 3)
• “In such novels the heroine is typically an heiress with a lord, a clergyman, and a poet vying for her love. She is a paragon ... ‘the ideal woman in feelings, faculties, and flounces’, she nevertheless marries the wrong man, but he soon dies, requesting his wife to marry the man she loves” (Ch 6) 
• “It is quite reasonable to suppose that a simple beauty might be self-centred and uncaring of others.” (Ch 8)
• “Greek tragedy inspired the symbolic, tragic structure of the novel, its ironic twists of plot, its compelling use of coincidence” (Ch 9)
• “Marian even knelt to be blessed by the Pope, remembering ... ‘what Pius VII said to the soldier - that he would never be the worse for the blessing of an old man’.” (Ch 9)
• “There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.” (Ch 11)
• “Inevitably the honeymoon put strains on two people who had comfortably filled the roles of aunt and nephew to one another, of genius and admirer, of teacher and pupil. ... He jumped from their hotel room into the Grand Canal.” (Ch 14)

This biography is worthy and very comprehensive, although for an interaction with the novels themselves, I preferred The Road to Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead.

March 2022; 382 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God