Book Reviews: Female Friendships and Communities; A Mid-Victorian Feminist, Barabara Leigh Smith Bodichon; George Eliot and Blackmail

Pauline Nestor\u27s book traces the prominence, the emergence of women writers by the mid-nineteenth century, and the making of a community available to themselves. As she puts it, they were banding together, for \u27women were no longer merely victims of the pen, but were wielding it themselves.\u27 She comments particularly on Mrs. Gaskell\u27s Life of Charlotte Bronte and the unifying power of maternity in her fiction. In the essays of the period there was a \u27prolonged discussion of women\u27s capacity for friendship\u27. Pauline Nestor is particularly strong on Mrs. Gaskell, tracing her modesty and grace, her ability to get on with Other women writers and, unlike Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, she asked for advice and judgment about her work. A sense of female solidarity is to be found in her fiction, and there is a fine social, moral and sexual analysis of Lennox\u27s proposal to Margaret in North and South. Even better is the tracing of Lois\u27s manipulation in Lois the Witch, and of Holdsworth\u27s intrusion upon Phillis in Cousin PhiIlis. With Charlotte Bronte she examines her \u27sisterly self-sufficiency\u27 and the collaboration of the sisters, goes on to look at Chariotte’s solitariness over Villette, her responses to Harriet Marineau and her falling out with the latter. She looks closely at Charlotte’s friendships with Mrs. Gaskell and Ellen Nussey and her deep respect for Mary Taylor. There is a very interesting focus on Miss Taylor’s novel Miss Miles (the reader feels moved to try and find a copy), while Ms. Nestor observes that ‘Bronte remained a defiant apologist for single women’ highlighting, of course, the plight of governesses in particular. There is an interesting analysis of Jane Eyre and its anti-maternal imagery, while she regards Shirley as the novel which best typifies friendship among women. The section on George Eliot is interesting but largely unsympathetic. She rightly stresses the importance of the move to London and the work on the Westminster Review and of the nature of her isolation (a) because of her liaison with Lewes and (b) his protection of her. She found \u27social obligations a torment\u27 (did she, later on, in view of those many Sunday afternoons?). George Eliot\u27s friendships from Sara Hennell and Cara Bray right through to the slobberings of Edith Simcox are traced, but I suggest that the stories have been told many times before. At the same time, there are some interesting analyses of the women in her fiction, the note on the ending of Romola in particular. This is a very worthwhile book, fiIIing a needful gap

A Tribute to Barbara Hardy

Barbara and I were close friends for over fifty years. She was the external examiner for my doctoral thesis in 1962, and from then on we met three or four times a year. I had previously reviewed The Novels of George Eliot and been impressed by the subtlety of the sustained investigation and the freshness of approach. It would be accurate to say that it was the major influence on my own studies in Victorian literature

A Forgotten Critic: Abba Goold Woolson\u27s George Eliot and Her Heroines: A Study

I feel that one should draw attention to the fact that in 1886 an American woman established certain emphases which succeeding critics followed, developed and extended in the twentieth century. This small book (published by Harper Brothers, New York) is a serious investigation of George Eliot\u27s art, even employing the kind of language (Data Necessary for an Estimate of her Mind and Works\u27) which links the scientific and the literary as a kind of consonance with George Eliot\u27s own practice. As early as the second page there is an unequivocal assertion of the nature of her greatness - \u27the name of George Eliot promises to hold, among the female novelists of England, that preeminent place which in France has long been conceded to that of George Sand\u27. In a succinct evaluation Abba Woolson attributes this to George Eliot\u27s characterization, her observations of life, her \u27searching analysis of motive\u27, her humour, her wide learning and her depth of thought. She then proceeds to a more detailed examination of these, noting growth and development in character and the considered - what today we might call formal or structural - use of contrast. Woolson believes that in the later novels there is notable development in the nature of George Eliot\u27s art. She praises the conception of Grand court and the maturity in the presentation of Gwendolen, which shows \u27a precision of touch, and a refined, delicate sympathy of appreciation which she has never surpassed\u27. Impressive too are the portraits of children throughout her work (she is superior to Shakespeare here), but in case we should feel that she is not evenhanded in her judgements she mounts an attack on the character of Savonarola as given by George Eliot: instead of an inspirational if flawed leader, she considers him \u27a petty, inconspicuous, intermeddling monk\u27, failing to see the subtlety and the psychological intensity of the portrayal

BOOK REVIEW: FREDERIC HARRISON: THE VOCATIONS OF A POSITIVIST

This book, the result of more than half a lifetime\u27s research, provides a much-needed insight into the nature of English Positivism and one of its leading disciples, Frederic Harrison. I t opens excitingly with the twenty-three-year-old Harrison meeting the ageing but wonderfully fluent Auguste Comte, and being so mesmerised that the interview changed the course of his life and gave him his major \u27vocation\u27, the spreading of the Positivist gospel. It is a fascinating story, not so much for the positivism but because of the sheer variety of the man and his interests and indestructible energy. Martha Vogeler\u27s great merit is that her narrative is fair; it has perspective, and never succumbs to the lure\u27 of idolatry. Harrison was always comfortably off, went to Oxford, got a First, studied law, literature, wrote reviews, was interested in politics, contemporary history and philosophy, and never ceased to give himself to the positivist cause. He was a\u27 prime mover in support of the trades union movement in the 1860\u27s, but had no wish to change the class system of this country; he encouraged the young George Gissing, and even made him tutor to his own children. He married a woman twenty years younger than himself, received her support in every way, and was a: happy family man; he was opposed to votes for women, and his wife dutifully undertook a poll in Kent which showed that both sexes were almost equally (and overwhelmingly) against women\u27s suffrage. Keeping to the positivist ban on second marriages, he deplored George Eliot\u27s to John Cross after her twenty-four years with Lewes. Yet he was full of inconsistencies, actually congratulating Hardy on his marriage to Florence Dugdale three years after the death of his first wife

George Eliot: A Biography

This is a massive study, what the author calls \u27a topic for a biography\u27 (x). It occupied four years of his time, during which he obviously saturated himself in his subject, her period, her circle, her letters and all the contiguous material requisite for a full investigation. The result in the mass is curiously unsatisfactory. To adapt Henry James\u27s celebrated dictum on Middlemarch, this is not a treasure house of detail but it is an indifferent whole. Undigested and indigestible, it reminds me of the Empress Messalina\u27s infamous innuendo (according to Juvenal) that after a night spent in the brothels of Rome she withdrew wearied but not satiated. In a modestly intellectual way I was wearied and satiated but not satisfied when I reached the haven of Appendix A of George Eliot: A Biography, and this despite the fact that the narrative generally follows a convincing, reasoned chronological line. Perhaps the inbuilt departures from it are too indulgent, as when Professor Karl draws an analogy between the relationship of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir with that of George Henry Lewes and George Eliot. Lewes, we are told, played \u27Beauvoir to her Sartre\u27 - \u27Like Beauvoir, he was on call, and while there was reciprocity - more than that between the French couple - the balance definitely tipped towards Eliot\u27 (538)

Debasing The Biographical Currency

Early in 1988 I was asked by a publisher in Bristol to write a book called George Eliot: The State of the Art. It was to be largely a survey of criticism, scholarship and biography ranging from contemporary responses to the novels as they appeared right through to the middle of last year (1989), the 170th anniversary of George Eliot\u27s birth. The joy was, however, that it took me back to the works themselves as I checked what had been said; and it took me back to the Letters in Haight\u27s edition. But some of the secondary literature - the \u27criticism\u27 which passes for evaluation, the \u27fiction\u27 which passes for biography surprised me: I came to realise that George Eliot, elevated into the great tradition from which she is unlikely to be displaced, was the victim of a continuing industry of sensational production. We are told that D.H. Lawrence, having great difficulty in finding a publisher for Women in Love, even tried to place it with Mills and Boon: no such difficulty has attended the stream of \u27biographers\u27 who have given Marian Evans the romantic treatment of which the romantic publishers would certainly approve. It is true that the outward facts of Marian\u27 s life read like a novel, since she lived unmarried with the man she loved for twenty-four years, he supported her in her ambitions and creativity to become a great writer, she attained eminence, was a literary lawgiver, her moral prescriptions accepted by society and, after her partner\u27s death, she married a friend twenty years younger than herself, only to die six months later. It is the stuff of romance, particularly when one bears in mind the fact that George Eliot was living within the confines and strictures of the Victorian period, which took its moral stance from \u27our little humbug of a Queen\u27, as Marian Evans described her in 1848. And after George Eliot\u27s death in 1880 biographers as well as critics were quick to discover that capital could be made out of George Eliot\u27s \u27marriage\u27; to use the current cliche, there is still plenty of mileage in her. Before the end of this century I have little doubt that there will be at least another 50 books on her, from the esoterically critical to the indulgently biographical. In the latter, the purveyors will claim to know her; but, to reverse Lewes\u27s phrase, to know her is to lose her. Marian Evans is to be found in her letters, and not in family or local gossip at the remove of three or four generations: George Eliot is to be found in her books. Marian Evans, writing anonymously for the Westminster Review in January 1852 on Carlyle\u27s Life of Sterling, defined her own attitude to biography, arguing for \u27a real Life , setting forth briefly and vividly the man\u27s inward and outward struggles, aims and achievements, so as to make clear the meaning which his experience has for his fellows .... But the conditions required for the perfection of life writing, - personal intimacy, a loving and poetic nature which sees the beauty and depth of familiar things, and the artistic power which seizes characteristic points and renders them with life-like effect, - are seldom found in combination.\u27 It ~ asking a lot, and most biographers fall well short of this ideal either in approach or practice. Publishers ask or are asked, and when we read some of what is printed we are reminded of another of George Eliot\u27s untender sayings (this time in a letter to Edward Burne Jones in March 1873), \u27A nasty mind makes nasty art, whether for art or any other sake. And a meagre mind will bring forth what is meagre.\u27 She could not know how she would be diminished by meagre minds. There are of course exceptions. Mathilde Blind\u27s appraisal (1883) pre-dates Cross and takes up astringent feminist position on some issues raised by George Eliot\u27s work. The neglected Mary Deakin wrote an excellent study of George Eliot\u27s early life (1913), while in 1936 Blanche Colton Williams produced a sensitive and responsible biography based on source material. But running parallel to these are the execrable The Inner Life of George Eliot (1911) the first \u27psycho-biography\u27 , by Charles Gardner: in 1932 Emilie and Georges Romieu produced The Life of George Eliot (translated by Brian Downs) and in 1939 Simon Dewes published Marian: The Life of George Eliot. This runs through to Ina Taylor\u27s George Eliot: Woman of Contradictions (1989)

The Manuscript of Daniel Deronda: A Change in Sequence?

The examination of a great writer\u27s manuscript carries its own fascinations and frustrations, for eyes and mind are intent on discovery, with might-have-been replacing is at the blink of an eyelid. Deletions hide something of significance, single-word alterations are evidence of a change of mind (or of heart), and commonplaces are elevated by a single deft stroke or slant into transcendent maxims or inscrutable morality. Re-shaped sentences take on a greater profundity of thought, while paragraphs collated with the first printing or a later corrected one, show either the wisdom of reflection or the author\u27s obstinacy, depending on the reader\u27s own critical and scholarly bias. The watermark of the paper, the colour of the author\u27s ink, whether bright or faded, interpolations or extensions verso, marginalia, teasing spaces or spacing, even to the thumbprints which might be hers, all these are at once the lure and the Iicense of the manuscript reader. He notes the half-pages added in at the beginning of a chapter, others numbered with an \u27a\u27 or \u27b\u27 to indicate that they are expansions of an idea or sequence; these Iight deletions - were they done at speed and meant to Iie there as alternatives for later consideration? Heavy deletions - must they obliterate beyond detection the blemishes of mind or style or both, first thoughts consigned to the easiest oblivion? Is this kind of close scrutiny a waste of time? A look at the manuscript of Daniel Deronda, George Eliot\u27s final novel, supplies some of the answers, but it must of necessity be a very long look; there are four bound volumes having 1,219 leaves·, inscribed “To My Dear Husband George Henry Lewes\u27 followed by nine lines from Shakespeare\u27s Sonnet XXIX beginning \u27When in disgrace with fortune and men\u27s eyes\u27. Spaces are left at the head of chapters for mottoes, many later inserted in brighter ink; names are altered (Mirah was originally Miriam, and thus she remains in unconcerned mutability on some pages), while leaves are scarred and ink-strewn with the re-shaping of ideas or the insistent urging in minute script of superior second-thoughts. But manuscripts are trying things, and the eye strays from the confines of the text to the names of compositors regularly appearing in pencil in the left-hand margin or at the top of the page; commonplace names, fittingly Scots as one might expect John Blackwood\u27s employees to be, like Watson, Robertson, McDonald, Blake or Ballantine (variously spelled), or unusual names like Dippie Peffers and Gebbie down to the mere English rusticity of Hodge... The eye strays to the right-hand top corner of the page, recording the British Library numbering in pencil, George Eliot\u27s own numbering behind in the violet-coloured ink with the deleting Iine always there. But back to the text; exhaustive use of the magnifying glass fails to show what was originally beneath ‘Sir Hugo\u27, the thickened letters and spread capitals being an impenetrable screen. Exhaustive use of the magnifying glass reveals that beneath ‘lily’ in much fainter ink is the outline of the word \u27arum’. The two numbers in the top righthand corner have now become three, not from fatigue or a post-lunch blur. Two of these are in violet ink. Both have been deleted

The Manuscript of Daniel Deronda: A Change in Sequence?

The examination of a great writer\u27s manuscript carries its own fascinations and frustrations, for eyes and mind are intent on discovery, with might-have-been replacing is at the blink of an eyelid. Deletions hide something of significance, single-word alterations are evidence of a change of mind (or of heart), and commonplaces are elevated by a single deft stroke or slant into transcendent maxims or inscrutable morality. Re-shaped sentences take on a greater profundity of thought, while paragraphs collated with the first printing or a later corrected one, show either the wisdom of reflection or the author\u27s obstinacy, depending on the reader\u27s own critical and scholarly bias. The watermark of the paper, the colour of the author\u27s ink, whether bright or faded, interpolations or extensions verso, marginalia, teasing spaces or spacing, even to the thumbprints which might be hers, all these are at once the lure and the Iicense of the manuscript reader. He notes the half-pages added in at the beginning of a chapter, others numbered with an \u27a\u27 or \u27b\u27 to indicate that they are expansions of an idea or sequence; these Iight deletions - were they done at speed and meant to Iie there as alternatives for later consideration? Heavy deletions - must they obliterate beyond detection the blemishes of mind or style or both, first thoughts consigned to the easiest oblivion? Is this kind of close scrutiny a waste of time? A look at the manuscript of Daniel Deronda, George Eliot\u27s final novel, supplies some of the answers, but it must of necessity be a very long look; there are four bound volumes having 1,219 leaves·, inscribed “To My Dear Husband George Henry Lewes\u27 followed by nine lines from Shakespeare\u27s Sonnet XXIX beginning \u27When in disgrace with fortune and men\u27s eyes\u27. Spaces are left at the head of chapters for mottoes, many later inserted in brighter ink; names are altered (Mirah was originally Miriam, and thus she remains in unconcerned mutability on some pages), while leaves are scarred and ink-strewn with the re-shaping of ideas or the insistent urging in minute script of superior second-thoughts. But manuscripts are trying things, and the eye strays from the confines of the text to the names of compositors regularly appearing in pencil in the left-hand margin or at the top of the page; commonplace names, fittingly Scots as one might expect John Blackwood\u27s employees to be, like Watson, Robertson, McDonald, Blake or Ballantine (variously spelled), or unusual names like Dippie Peffers and Gebbie down to the mere English rusticity of Hodge... The eye strays to the right-hand top corner of the page, recording the British Library numbering in pencil, George Eliot\u27s own numbering behind in the violet-coloured ink with the deleting Iine always there. But back to the text; exhaustive use of the magnifying glass fails to show what was originally beneath ‘Sir Hugo\u27, the thickened letters and spread capitals being an impenetrable screen. Exhaustive use of the magnifying glass reveals that beneath ‘lily’ in much fainter ink is the outline of the word \u27arum’. The two numbers in the top righthand corner have now become three, not from fatigue or a post-lunch blur. Two of these are in violet ink. Both have been deleted

Review of Reclaimed

When Middlemarch was being issued in Eight Parts from December 1871 until December 1872, there was a strong readership interest in the fact that Dorothea and Lydgate had made, in each instance, a wrong choice of marriage mate. It went farther than this, some readers even expressing the view that Dorothea and Lydgate would have been ideally suited. With Daniel Deronda, which was also issued in parts from February to September 1876, readership sympathy was also involved. There was much dissatisfaction in Daniel\u27s forsaking of Gwendolen at the end (\u27I said I should be forsaken: says Gwendolen in her anguish) and going off to marry Mirah, embrace Judaism, and perhaps come back \u27some time: Indeed, so strong was this sense of frustration in one reader, that het she wrote a sequel to Daniel Deronda. It was published in 1878. The title-page has Gwendolen: A Sequel to George Eliot\u27s Daniel Deronda. library Edition. Ira Bradley and Company. 1878, but the first page of the novel has the word RECLAIMED at the top, followed by the first chapter, the latter headed by a motto in the George Eliot manner. The binding of the volume, incidentally, is exactly the same as that of the two-volume American edition of Daniel Deronda published by Harper and Brothers in 1876. I had heard about the sequel vaguely some years ago, and was excited when I found this copy in Coventry Central library during my visit last October. The notorious Newby did not issue his sequel Adam Bede Inr, either because of the threat of legal proceedings or because it didn\u27t get written. Unhappily, Reclaimed got written and my excitement on opening it quickly cooled. The opening is sensational enough, the author\u27s wish-fulfilment being quickly translated into fictional fact. Daniel is initially happy with Mirah, but abandons his Jewish views \u27consequent upon his observing Jewish life in reality: We are told that \u27the East was growing irksome to him\u27. He goes on a journey (the journeys in this novel are always fraught with crisis and discovery), having left Mirah in Cairo. He is summoned back: Mirah\u27s child dies, followed shortly afterwards by Mirah herself, at the end of the first chapter. Daniel, whose memory extends back to his first meeting with Mirah on the Thames at Richmond, recites the words he was then singing. The author\u27s translation of these words is given in a footnote, just like the original footnote in Daniel Deronda. An eerie feeling comes over the reader (or perhaps I should say this reader) at this stage. Imagine all the sequels that could have been written after certain novels, and I don\u27t mean sequels like Jean Rhys\u27s to lane Eyre, for Wide Sargasso Sea has its own fasdnations and a particularised artistic independence. But think of a sequel to Tess of the D\u27Urbervilles. What kind of domestic life did Angel Gare and Liza Lu have? Was she always throwing his love for Tess in his face? Or suppose there was a sequel to Women in Love. Who else did Gudrun help to destroy? Is it possible that she might have an affair with Birkin? I remember in the 1960\u27s a romantic novelist called, I think, Patricia Robins, producing a sequel to the most discussed novel of that decade. She called it Lady Chatterley\u27s DauKhter. It was salacious and almost permissive. Reclaimed is dull and Gothic. Gwendolen (unrecognisably dull, conscience-stricken, unvibrant despite the author\u27s use of the word \u27elasticity\u27) is brooding

The Thirty-sixth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2007: Scenes and After

The Folio Society\u27s cosmetic edition of George Eliot\u27s fiction, which was published in 1999, has no place on any spine of its seven-volume set for Scenes of Clerical Life. A search of the actual texts, however, reveals George Eliot\u27s first published fiction bedded together with Silas Marner, the pair sharing a neat introduction by Jill Paton-Walsh. I pondered at the time if spine exclusion meant that Scenes was just too minor for remark, or whether, as is the way with publishers, getting things wrong can be ignored once the books are on the shelves or, as with the Folio edition, part of the decor. No furniture so charming as books, observed Sydney Smith, a thought echoed by Anthony Powell as a novel-heading in his Books Do Furnish a Room. You who are here today will know, of course, that Scenes is much more than a minor work, since you have lived through most of 2007 and have enjoyed constant association with those three stories. Merely reading the pamphlet on Scenes Revisited was quite an education for me, since I hadn\u27t realized that Marian Evans shared a location, though not of course in time, with Larry Grayson. But today I must be serious and shut that door on frivolity. And I hope that you will forgive me for staying in Scenes for a while before I move on to \u27After Scenes\u27, because the correspondence of Lewes and Marian Evans with John Blackwood provides interesting pointers to what is to come. Lewes \u27s summary of the series says that it \u27will consist of tales and sketches illustrative of the actual life of our country clergy about a quarter of a century ago; but solely in its human and not at all in its theological aspect\u27 .1 He goes on to say that it will represent them \u27like any other class with the humours, sorrows, and troubles of other men\u27 (II, 269). And of the author he observes \u27He [note that He, since it is George preparing the way, so to speak, for George] \u27begged me particularly to add that . . . the tone throughout will be sympathetic and not at all antagonistic\u27 (II, 269). Lewes, business manager, initiator, fully supportive, always adroit, mentions his \u27clerical friend\u27 and then has to correct the implication later by telling Blackwood \u27I am not at liberty to remove the veil of anonymity - even as regards social position\u27 (II, 277), this, ironically, on Marian\u27s thirty-seventh birthday, 22 November 1856. Just over a couple of months later, on 4 February 1857, Marian writes to Blackwood naively suggesting that \u27a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation. Perhaps, therefore, it will be well to give you my prospective name, as a tub to throw to the whale in case of curious inquiries\u27 (II, 292). She signs herself George Eliot, unaware that the whale of the press, the sharpness of local memory and the crude derivations of gossip would destroy the privacy she sought to guard. The important thing is that dialogue directly with John Blackwood has begun, and it is my contention that this influences one of two aspects of \u27After Scenes\u27 that I want to examine today. The first has to do with a structure used in much of her following fiction: the second with the clerical scenes in that fiction and their particular significance