"George Eliot" by Jenny Uglow

Although biographically arranged, and giving details of Eliot's life, this is more of a literary criticism of Eliot's works written from a predominantly feminist perspective. I therefore found it most interesting when it dealt with one of the novels I have read (Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, Silas Marner) and somewhat obscure when dealing with a book I have yet to read. 

Selected quotes:

• “Evangelical teaching often linked two ideas, which one can trace in Eliot's fiction - that women were the more sensitive, emotional sex and that their ‘natural’ maternal Instincts were inseparably linked to an ethic of self-renunciation.” (Ch 1)
• “The still lingering mistake, that an unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition.” (Ch 3)
• “She took a male pseudonym ... to avoid being caught in a net of critical prescriptions and sanctions - no one laid down rules about ‘men's novels’.” (Ch 5)
• “It is important to notice that Eliot does not wish to banish the Madonna altogether, she merely demands that she be balanced by the old women scraping carrots.” (Ch 6)
• "The law of consequences in fact increases personal responsibility, for our actions can set off a chain of reactions as inexorable as those described by a law of physics, and this chain stretches far beyond our own lives because society is a complex interlinked body and not a random collection of individuals.” (Ch 11)
• “We feel the current of great events running through the novel like the main stream of a river, but what we experience are the eddies near the bank on which we are placed as readers.” (Ch 12)
• “Marian became increasingly irritated by the arrogance of the English upper classes, so evident in the growing concentration on Empire. Her dismay was fostered ... by her long-standing championship of European culture.” (Ch 13)
• “how can it be, when space and time make the individual as insignificant as a dot on a page, that a personal event like an unhappy marriage can be so overwhelming as to blot out the sun?” (Ch 13)
• “Gambling ... is one way ... that people feel they can fling aside the overt rules which govern their existence.” (Ch 13)
• “The impulse to surrender ... so destructive when turned inwards, is closely akin to the artist’s abnegation of self.” (Ch 13)

Other biographies of George Eliot reviewed in this blog:

George Eliot: A Life by Rosemary Ashton

April 2022; 305 pages

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