by Rebecca Mead
But among her familiar novels there was one book I hadn’t seen before: a volume with the dismaying title “The Mill on the Floss”: In Half the Time. It turned out to be one of a series of abridgements of Victorian heavyweights, designed for readers unwilling to countenance the five-hundred-page version of the novel. I flicked through it, trying to see what the editors had deemed dispensable. I could understand the impulse to make the novel more accessible—I want as many people as possible to read The Mill on the Floss, too—but, like paperback editions of classic novels issued with updated covers resembling those of Twilight, it seemed a pandering and misbegotten effort, as if no young reader today might possibly pick up a novel written 150 years ago unless the book were in sexy, neo-Gothic drag.
As I left the bookstore I wondered idly if I would be alone in welcoming a volume called “Middlemarch”: In Twice the Time. “What’s your favorite book?” is a question that is usually only asked by children and banking identity-verification services—and favorite isn’t, anyway, the right word to describe the relationship a reader has with a particularly cherished book. Most serious readers can point to one book that has a place in their life like the one that Middlemarch has in mine. I chose Middlemarch—or Middlemarch chose me—and I cannot imagine life without it. My husband, the most avid reader I know, would choose In Search of Lost Time as his most treasured work. One friend insists on the primacy of David Copperfield, while another goes back to The Portrait of a Lady, and I know them better for knowing that about them.
I continued my walk through Coventry, and discovered a more enticing bookseller in the city’s covered market. There, past the displays of halal meat, lemongrass, eddoes, and chow-chows—the foodstuffs of today’s Midlands table—I found a stall selling secondhand volumes. Among the well-worn paperback and obsolete celebrity biographies was a prize: Five Victorians, by Lytton Strachey. This volume contains Strachey’s most famous work, Eminent Victorians, a collection of scathing, satirical portraits of four nineteenth-century worthies—they are General Gordon, Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning, and Thomas Arnold—which was published in 1918, six months before the end of the Great War. Five Victorians also contains Strachey’s short biography of Queen Victoria, which was first published as a separate volume in 1921.
If you describe people for a living, as I do, Eminent Victorians is an instructive volume as well as an entertaining one, illustrating how an individual can be characterized in a few pointed words or by a telling anecdote. Flicking through the book, I smiled with admiration as I read this passage, in which Strachey recounts the distress of Florence Nightingale’s mother after Florence insisted upon becoming a nurse instead of a society wife. “At times, indeed, among her intimates, Mrs. Nightingale almost wept. ‘We are ducks,’ she said with tears in her eyes, ‘who have hatched a wild swan.’ But the poor lady was wrong; it was not a swan that they had hatched; it was an eagle.”
Strachey didn’t include Eliot—or any novelists—among the twelve candidates whom he originally considered to serve as representatives of the Victorian age. But she had moved easily among members of his long list. In her thirties, she had encountered Florence Nightingale; later, Charles Darwin was a visitor at the Priory. She went to the studio of George Watts, the portrait painter. She knew the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol College, regarded her as “a kind of saint without a definite creed.” She was an object of fascination to Thomas Carlyle (and to his wife, Jane), and she was editing the Westminster Review when John Stuart Mill appeared in its pages.
If anybody came to be regarded as an eminent Victorian by the Victorians themselves, it was George Eliot. The success that came in her later years displaced the scandal that had been attached to her name. No less an establishment figure than Victoria herself was an admirer: she sought out the novelist’s autograph for her collection. (The queen’s oldest son, later King Edward VII, was a devoted fan: by 1886, he had read Middlemarch fifteen times, or once a year since its publication.) Upon her death, in 1880, Eliot was acclaimed as a voice of the age. Lord Acton, the historian, compared her with Shakespeare, to Shakespeare’s disadvantage. “In problems of life and thought, which baffled Shakespeare disgracefully, her touch was unfailing,” Acton wrote in a letter a few days after she died. Five years later, in a review of Cross’s Life, he wrote, “As the emblem of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief, [her books] will live to the last syllable of recorded time.”
Obituaries and recollections of Eliot dwelled upon her wisdom and her moral seriousness. Frederic W. H. Myers, who taught at Trinity College, Cambridge, gave memorable voice to the sentiment of veneration she inspired. “I remember how, at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the Fellows’ Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May,” Myers wrote in the Century. “She, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men—the words God, Immortality, Duty—pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.” Myers continued in a similarly awestruck vein: “I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned towards me like a sibyl’s in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates. And when we stood at length and parted, amid that columnar circuit of the forest-trees, beneath the last twilight of starless skies, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on vacant seats and empty halls—on a sanctuary with no Presence to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God.”
Lytton Strachey was born only a few months before Eliot’s death, and by the time he was a young man an anecdote like this one, told in such elevated language, would have been considered utterly risible. By then, Eliot’s earnestness was considered not just terrible, but ludicrous. Eliot herself had become a byword for obsolescence: in a letter Strachey wrote in his twenties he dismissively summed up an older woman of his acquaintance by calling her “incredibly affected, queer, stupid and intelligent. She flowed with reflections on life, and reminiscences of George Eliot, and criticisms of obscure French poetesses who flourished in 1850.”
A quirky coincidence links Strachey and Eliot: three days before Eliot died she attempted to write a letter to Jane Strachey, mother of the infant Lytton, with whom she was acquainted, but being ill, she left the letter unfinished in her writing case. “The pen which had delighted and comforted so many minds and hearts here made its last mark,” Cross wrote in his Life, using language that would also have caused the grown-up Lytton to snicker. To Strachey, as well as to other intellectuals of the early part of the twentieth century, Eliot was part of a bygone era that was the better for being gone.
The falling-off of regard was precipitous. Almost immediately after Eliot’s death critics vied with each other to demonstrate their own vitality by thinking up new ways to characterize her deadliness. “It is doubtful whether they are novels disguised as treatises, or treatises disguised as novels,” one critic wrote of her works. Another delivered the verdict that her books “seem to have been dictated to a plain woman of genius by the ghost of David Hume.” In 1895 George Saintsbury was able to note that while her novels might still be read, they were not admired by anyone whose opinion counted for anything. (Saintsbury was a well-known literary critic, whom no one now reads.)
Eliot’s reputation was not helped by the publication of Cross’s Life in 1886. In editing her letters and journals, Cross discarded the mundane or indiscreet and retained the oracular. This was an editorial choice that emphasized Eliot’s own undeniable inclinations. Even in the unexpurgated editions of her private documents, published much later, she is sometimes unappealingly ponderous. The priggish, judgmental adolescent was not entirely displaced by the broad-minded, empathetic intellectual.
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e writers are as vividly engaging in their correspondence as they are in their published works—think of D. H. Lawrence. But if you were to read George Eliot’s letters and journals to the exclusion of her novels, it would be easy to see her as pedantic, humorless—even unimaginative. Her observations about the places she visits are often surprisingly banal. “We walked through the Museum this morning and were struck with the beauty of the interior and the excellent arrangement of the works of art,” she wrote while in Berlin; the museum had, she observed, “an interesting collection.” She was sometimes snappishly misanthropic, as when she complained about the “disgustingly coarse Belgians with baboonish children” with whom she was obliged to share a railway carriage.
Everyone is entitled to resort to banality or misanthropy on occasion, especially in a private diary or correspondence, and noisy children on trains can be incredibly grating on the nerves, particularly when you are not their mother. But, still, it is surprising and difficult to find Eliot so unappealing in moments like these. Her letters and journals are fascinating for the light they shed on her struggles and her achievements, and she is often admirable and almost always inspiring in them. But it is much harder to be in her company there, at length, than it is when reading her novels. Her humor, on the occasions when it is expressed, is often labored. Once, after making note of the many comments she has received about Adam Bede and its “influence for good on individual minds,” she added, “The merely egoistic satisfactions of fame are easily nullified by toothache, and that has made my chief consciousness for the last week.” That’s about as much fun as she gets.
Some who encountered her found her unbearable. Fellow novelist Eliza Lynn Linton wrote in her memoir of “the pretentious assumption of superior morality” that she detected in Eliot’s self-presentation in her later years. “Not a line of spontaneity was left in her; not an impulse beyond the reach of self-conscious philosophy,” Linton wrote. “She was always the goddess on her pedestal.” Linton was jealous and her remarks were mean-spirited, but the characteristics she described were merely those that Myers admired, seen from a different angle.
By the time Eliot’s centenary came around, in 1919, knocking the goddess from the pedestal was irresistible. When in that year the critic Edmund Gosse wrote an essay about Eliot he began it not with reference to her works but to her appearance, having once glimpsed her in a carriage on a London street, “a large, thick-set sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose massive features, somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously bordered by a hat, always in the height of the Paris fashion, which in those days commonly included an immense ostrich feather.” Gosse added, “The contrast between the solemnity of the face and the frivolity of the headgear had something pathetic and provincial about it.” She had become, as Virginia Woolf wrote in her own centennial reevaluation, “one of the butts for youth to laugh at”—an overly serious woman once taken overly seriously by a coterie of adoring, deluded admirers.
Woolf’s essay was crucial in beginning the rehabilitation of Eliot, which culminated in her inclusion in The Great Tradition, by the critic F. R. Leavis, in 1948. But even Woolf could not resist a crack at Eliot’s expense. She cited a scrap of Eliot’s conversation that had been preserved in another person’s reminiscence: “We know by our own experience how very much others affect our lives, and we must remember that we in turn must have the same effect on others,” Eliot had said. About this remembered quotation, Woolf remarked: “Jealously treasured, committed to memory, one can imagine recalling the scene, repeating the words, thirty years later and suddenly, for the first time, bursting into laughter.”
Is this still laughable? It seems to me that this reflex of embarrassment has diminished as our distance from Eliot has grown. In fact, turning Eliot’s pronouncements—or what are taken to be Eliot’s pronouncements—into inspirational mottoes has become a small industry, although when her words are used this way they inevitably seem more portentous or saccharine than in their original context. At the Nuneaton museum you can buy a pocket mirror on the reverse of which are words spoken by Mirah Lapidoth, a character in Daniel Deronda: “I think my life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.” (This, from a novelist whose fictional mothers, almost without exception, are far from idealized.) A quotation attributed to Eliot, “It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” crops up endlessly on Twitter and on the websites of motivational consultants—although, after all my reading and all my questioning of scholars, I have yet to find it in her works. Its message, proposing the endless possibility of self-reinvention, seems precisely counter to what is implied by Middlemarch, which shows how it can grow altogether too late for lots of things.
Such quotations—even ones that Eliot actually wrote—are reductive, and not at all helpful to her contemporary reputation. Why read even “The Mill on the Floss”: In Half the Time if you can get all the Eliot you need on a magnet? They eliminate the subtlety of her books and the pleasure they provide—including the pleasure of wondering whether there might be a simple, motto-like moral to her stories, as in a fable, and then discovering that there isn’t. As a child Eliot had owned and adored an illustrated volume of Aesop’s fables, but her novels were not intended to be didactic morality tales. Certainly some early readers thought her books alarmingly immoral, with their sympathetic depiction of alcoholics and child murderers and other supposedly lost souls.
Still, it’s not difficult to see why Eliot’s novels seem to invite this kind of excerpting. Eliot was absolutely convinced of her duty to instruct and enlighten. She thought a great deal about the moral effect of her works upon her readers, even if she rarely articulated her intentions in 140 characters or fewer. She said that the “inspiring principle” that gave her courage to write was that of “so presenting our human life as to help my readers in getting a clearer conception and a more active admiration of those vital elements which bind men together and give a higher worthiness to their existence.” She took satisfaction in having produced work that would “gladden and chasten human hearts,” an aspiration with a distinctly religious resonance.
To the extent that she had a faith, it was in what she called “meliorism”—the conviction that, through the small, beneficent actions and intentions of individuals, the world might gradually grow to be a better place. By the time that Woolf and Gosse were writing, in the terrible wake of the Great War, the world of Eliot’s novels seemed far distant, as did the problem of wavering between faith and disbelief to which Lord Acton had alluded. “We happen to live, fortunately or unfortunately for ourselves, in a generation which is ‘distracted’ by quite other problems,” Gosse observed. In 1919, with Europe ravaged and eight and a half million young men dead, a meliorist view of history would have been especially hard to sustain.
Even for Eliot, her slender, secular faith in the betterment of the world seems to have been willed—born of intellectual exertion, not received like a gift of grace. Critics called Middlemarch melancholy. She disputed that. “My book will not present my own feelings about human life if it produces on readers whose minds are really receptive the impression of blank melancholy and despair,” she wrote to one correspondent. But her protest rings only partially true. Middlemarch is not a despairing book, but it is a melancholy one. Eliot is the great artist of disappointment. Her characters, even the good ones, stumble, fall, and fail—not into inexorable tragedy, for the most part, but into limited, mortal resignation.
Some among her admirers protested that her perspective was too bleak. Bessie Rayner Parkes, at one time Eliot’s close friend, insisted in her own tribute that Eliot’s Dorothea had set her ambitions too low, given the number of women of the time, including Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale, who had made their mark. The example of the latter real-life heroine, born in 1820—about a decade after Eliot places the birth of Dorothea Brooke—might seem to belie Eliot’s concluding observation that the world now cannot accommodate a new Saint Teresa because “the medium in whi
ch [her] ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone.” Nightingale was no saint, as Strachey took delight in showing, but she was certainly more than the “foundress of nothing” Eliot put at the center of her story.
But in Middlemarch, Eliot was not concerned with showing the effects of large, heroic acts, particularly those performed by extraordinary individuals. The gradual betterment with which she was concerned in this novel was not the good work of charity, or of grand, noble gestures of sacrifice. Eliot took it as a given that she should contribute to good causes, do good works, and help needier relations, however bizarre the relationship might be. (It was mostly with her earnings that Lewes continued to provide for his estranged wife Agnes and her offspring with Thornton Hunt.) But she was more concerned with changing her reader’s perspective than she was in encouraging that reader to contribute to soup kitchens. Her credo might be expressed this way: If I really care for you—if I try to think myself into your position and orientation—then the world is bettered by my effort at understanding and comprehension. If you respond to my effort by trying to extend the same sympathy and understanding to others in turn, then the betterment of the world has been minutely but significantly extended. “We want people to feel with us, more than to act for us,” she once wrote to a friend.
In order to do as Eliot urges her readers—to feel with you, and care for you—I must take you seriously. And to do that, it follows that I must first take myself seriously. Eliot took herself very seriously, and in the backlash that followed her death that seriousness was sometimes taken to be sanctimony. It may be tempting to laugh at her remembered pronouncements, as even so sympathetic a reader as Virginia Woolf did. To Woolf’s generation, Eliot’s earnestness was an embarrassment. From the perspective of the youth of the immediate post-Victorian era, Eliot had committed the unforgivable offense of being old. A hundred years later, though, Eliot’s melancholy, willed seriousness resonates. It suggests that we, her readers, should take ourselves as seriously as she took us.