"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

"Oscar Wilde" by Richard Elliman

 A definitive biography.

I wanted to read it after watching The Happy Prince, the 2018 film starring Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde, Colin Morgan as Bosie and Edwin Thomas as Robbie Ross. A great film, with much that is fictional and much that is authentic.

One of the things about biographies is how many celebrated connections a celebrity always seems to have. Wilde's ancestors included Revd Charles Maturin author of Melmoth the Wanderer. His father was a celebrated surgeon; the mastoid is known as ‘Wilde’s incision’. His father's friends included Maria Edgeworth. At Oxford Wilde knew John Ruskin and Walter Pater. A later girlfriend married Bram Stoker. He knew Whistler and Walter Sickert. He helped Lily Langtry enter London society. He met Yeats at the house of William Ernest Henley and Proust in Paris. Even in exile in Paris, after his disgrace, he still rubbed shoulders with Esterhazy, the man who actually did the spying which Dreyfus went to Devil’s Island for.

Much of this biography traces the development of Wilde's art: he went from poetry to novels and then top plays.

• “Though both Ruskin and Pater welcomed beauty, for Ruskin it had to be allied with good, with Pater it might have just a touch of evil. ... Ruskin spoke of faith, Pater of mysticism, as if for him religion became bearable only when it overflowed into excess. Ruskin appealed to conscience, Pater to imagination. Ruskin invoked disciplined restraint, Pater allowed for a pleasant drift. What Ruskin reviled as vice, Pater caressed as wantonness.” (Ch 2)
• “Pater argued that just as physical life was now known to be a concurrence of forces rather than a group of objects, so the mind must be regarded as a fluid process rather than an adhesion to fixities and definites. William James and Henri Bergson were soon to depict consciousness as a river or stream; for Pater it is, more intensely, a whirlpool. There is nothing ‘but the race of the mid-stream, a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought’.” (Ch 5)
• “Wilde lingers like Keats over sweets, and like Swinburne over sours.” (Ch 5)
• “His insincerity was the result of his representing difficult hesitations instead of pleasantly easy certainties. His indecency was a calculated risk, to portray his sensuality as frankly he could.” (Ch 5)
• “Wilde said later that he had made literature out of brilliant triviality, but it was triviality of a special kind, subversive of established modes ... destructive of hypocrisy.” (400)

A compelling feature of the Wilde tale is the classic tragedy in which a man, at the height of his success, flies too close to the sun and is destroyed. Wilde first experienced homosexual intercourse when he was 31, seduced by a 17 year old Robbie Ross. “He was not attracted to anal coition, so Ross presumably introduced him to the oral and intercrural intercourse he practised later.” (259) Wilde was already married with two sons. But having first tasted those fruits, Wilde went wild. He began to explore the delights of young rent boys, who often doubled as blackmailers. He and Lord Allfred 'Bosie' Douglas, youngest son of the Marquess of Queensberry, fell in love, though it was never a sexually exclusive relationship and one might wonder whether the utterly selfish Bosie had any real concept of what love involved. “What Douglas called love was the opposite of wishing the beloved well.” (460) When Queensberry became outraged and insulted Wilde, Wilde sued him for libel (the QC against him was Edward Carson with whom he had played on the beach in Ireland when they were little bots). Wilde lost that case, was put on trial for gross indecency twice (because the first trial resulted in a hung jury) and went to jail. He had to live the rest of his life in disgraced exile in France and Italy. 

Wilde was a master of succinctly putting over a point of view:

• Education: “Children should not be drilled in that calendar of infamy, European history, but learn in a workshop how art might offer a new history of the world.” (Ch 6)
• “The essence of good dialogue is interruption.” (Ch 9)
• “A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so unbearable that we feel compelled to alter it every six months.” (Ch 10)
• “Mr Whistler always spelt art, and I believe still spells it, with a capital ‘I’.” (Ch 11)

Other memorable moments included:

• “Man makes an end for himself out of himself: no mend is imposed by external considerations, he must realize his true nature, must be what nature orders, so must discover what his nature is.” (Ch 3)
• “Wilde acknowledged a division in himself ... it might be thought that he had a double nature, but he actually claimed to have a triple one” (Ch 5) Catholic, pagan and Freemason.
• “The mitre and the rose come together; Catholicism blends with paganism in the same sense of mutual suffering and sin, with the promise [page break] of eventual unity of being, when opposites will be joined. Insofar as Wilde had a creed, this was it.” (Ch 5)
• “The claims of action over art were challenged by the idea that artistic creation, related to that contemplative life celebrated by Plato, was the highest form of action.” (Ch 12)
• “There was news about the Queensberrys. The Marquess was dying in January 1900 ... his son, Percy, heir to the title, came to see his father, who gathered himself to spit at him.” (542)

This is a thorough and well-written biography; I found it fascinating. If you think Oscar Wilde's story is just about the homosexuality, think again. 

January 2021; 554 pages

This review was written
by the author of 
Motherdarling

"Charles Dickens, a life" by Claire Tomalin

This is a full scale biography of Dickens, warts and all. As well as the traditional story of his rise from rags to riches, from working in the blacking factory with a father imprisoned for debt, ashamed, his intelligence and ambition seemingly frustrated, to national institution, Tomalin shows how his boundless drive led him to dominate his family, to destroy his marriage and tempted him into bitter enmities with those he once had loved.

It is also the story of his books. He published serials, often writing the next installment only days before the deadline, sometimes writing two at once. Because of this he could not reflect upon the work and revise it. He was stuck with where he'd got to. Perhaps because of this, each book is flawed. His plots are (necessarily because of the need to keep people purchasing the next installment) very complicated and usually flawed. Most of them veer close to melodrama. When he is sentimental he can go over the top, certainly by the standards of today but even for some of the contemporary critics.His characters are often caricatures. But his energy is overpowering and the wonderful grotesques and the sense of place and the comic dialogue and the rampant fight for the common man. As Tomalin points out, he writes about ordinary people as if they are important. Dwarfs and cripples are not always villains; villains are often villains for a reason. Although no book is unflawed and his heroines are often soppy, every book has moments of brilliance.

Unlike many of his contemporary authors, such as Wilkie Collins who kept two mistresses by one of whom he fathered children but who never married, Dickens attempted respectability. It was only after his poor wife,   never really loved and grown enormous after ten pregnancies, was ditched in favour of Ellen Ternan that Dickens flouted convention and even then he kept Nelly hidden and secret and was never open about her. Even in the famous railway disaster when he was travelling with Nelly and her mum (back from the continent where Nelly had given birth to and lost his child) Dickens ensured that they were away from the scene before  rendering the help for which he took a hero's credit.

But Dickens was remarkable simply because of his industry. A monthly novel required him to write 7,500 words each month. Some novels, such as Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, overlapped so he was writing 15,000 words per month then. He also did journalism, edited magazines and read aloud on public tours. He worked because he was so afraid of poverty: these were the days before and social welfare safety net. Later, when he had enough money for himself, he wrote because he needed to pay for an ever-larger army of dependents, from his extravagant father to his feckless sons, his unmarried daughters, his brothers and sisters and their broods once orphaned, his mistress and her family etc. At the same time he organised charitable funds for friends and acquaintances who had fallen upon hard times. He was a driven whirlwind.

This book pays a remarkable tribute to a remarkable man. May 2013; 417 pages.