Review of A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot. Edith J. Simcox\u27s Autobiography of a Shirtmaker

The intensity of Edith Jemima Simcox\u27s passion for George Eliot has been known to a twentieth- century reading public since the publication of K. A. McKenzie\u27s Edith Simcox and George Eliot in 1961. McKenzie\u27s book is a combination of summary and quotation of a manuscript acquired by the Bodleian Library in 1958, This manuscript, entitled The Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, is a journal kept by Simcox from 10 May 1876 until 29 January 1900. Gordon Haight wrote the introduction to McKenzie\u27s book, relied on the Simcox manuscript in his 1968 biography of Eliot, and printed lengthy passages from it in The George Eliot Letters, Vol. IX (1978). Yet, as Constance M. Fulmer notes, more than half of Simcox\u27s journal \u27has never been published in any form\u27 (ix). Fulmer and co-editor Margaret E. Barfield have produced a new annotated edition of this intriguing text which will be of interest to readers of George Eliot, scholars of late nineteenth-century culture, and to historians of women\u27s sexuality. Among the many advantages to the recovery of this unique work by two women scholars is its record of one nineteenth-century woman\u27s passion for another woman. While I wish that Fulmer and Barfield had done more in their introduction to suggest the implications of their own scholarship, the complete Autobiography is now available to be read through the lens of recent revelations about and interpretations of Victorian women\u27s sexuality as focused by historians like Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Lillian Faderman, Martha Vicinus, and Sheila Jeffreys among others. Writing before this important research, Haight cautioned readers against seeing the obvious: \u27The Victorians\u27 conception of love between those of the same sex cannot be fairly understood by an age steeped in Freud. Where they saw only beautiful friendship, the modern reader suspects perversion\u27 (McKenzie, xv). This defensive pronouncement is particularly curious when we consider that Simcox herself struggled with what she called her \u27unwholesome reveries\u27 (16) and \u27unhealthy dreams\u27 (45). Haight compares Simcox to fictional characters created by Henry James and George Meredith in The Bostonians and Diana of the Crossways. These male authors have dissected \u27the twisted psychological strands without apparent horror of what the schoolgirl today labels Lesbianism\u27 (xv). In fiction, as with Simcox, \u27we must avoid reading back interpretations that could never have been suspected when they were written\u27 (McKenzie, xvi)