as the heroine shares Eliot’s intellectual aspirations but is trapped in a provincial life that is isolating and restrictive. The novel ends with a double tragedy as the river Floss overflows, drowning the protagonist and her brother. Silas Marner, on the other hand, has a thematic resemblance to Les Misérables which was published only a year later. The protagonist, falsely accused of stealing, is forced to relocate to a different village where he is saved from a life of bitterness by his adoption of a young girl. Unlike Les Misérables, however, Silas Marner puts everything right at the end and concludes the story on an optimistic note.
After making a name for herself as an author of realist novels, Eliot decided to experiment, writing Romola—a historical novel set in fifteenth century Florence. Eliot researched the time period and locale intensely in an effort to make the novel accurate, but her own preoccupations, especially those having to do with religion, shine through, making this very much a fifteenth century novel written by a nineteenth century novelist. The book did not do quite as well as Eliot’s previous writing, possibly because of her tendency to, as Anthony Trollope put it, “fire too much over the heads of her readers”. Romola was followed by The Spanish Gypsy, a long blank verse poem which exhausted Eliot so much that Lewes insisted she take a break from it for a couple of years, during which time she wrote the realistic but highly politically-oriented Felix Holt.
Eliot endured a difficult period in her life after the deaths of her two stepsons in the South African colonies. But these tragedies only added to her literary luster, as she soon produced Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch, which is generally acknowledged as her masterpiece. The vast scope of Middlemarch is what separates it from its predecessors; it has a large cast of characters which is tenuously but gracefully held together. A wide range of issues are invoked and commented upon with an underlying delicacy. Often, Eliot simply poses a question, allowing the reader to draw his/her own conclusions. For example, she writes that Celia, the protagonist’s younger sister, “had always worn a yoke” and then goes on to ask, “but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?” (Middlemarch). It is George Eliot’s ability to enter into the minds of all her characters without subordinating the lesser ones like Celia that makes Middlemarch such a great work of art. Virginia Woolf wrote that Middlemarch was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” but Florence Nightingale challenged the novel’s premise, saying “This author now can find no better outlet for [Dorothea Brooke]—also an Idealist—because she cannot be a St. Teresa or an ‘Antigone,’ than to marry an elderly sort of literary imposter, and, quickly after him, his relation, a baby sort of itinerant Cluricaune (see Irish Fairies) or inferior faun (see Hawthorne’s matchless Transformation)” (qtd. in Judd 123).
Despite having disclosed her true identity as a woman, and a “fallen” woman at that, Eliot had secured her right as a successful novelist and gained respect of her peers and readers. She and Lewes now received visitors at their home in London, many of them young, aspiring writers who looked up to her for her liberal views and on whom she lavished almost a maternal kind of affection. Emanuel Deutsch furnished Eliot with the information about Jewish history and customs that she needed to write Daniel Deronda, one of the few books in its time to present a favorable view of Jewish religion and culture. Daniel Deronda, however, was Eliot’s last great work and she died four years after writing it, in 1880.
Eliot’s last four years were anything but dull. After the death of George Lewes in 1878, she entered into a period of intense mourning. At the same time, one of her younger friends, John Cross, had also lost his mother and was grieving. An intimacy developed between the two and in the last year of her life, they were married. Upon her death, efforts were made by her friend Herbert Spencer to have her buried in Westminster Abbey. Unsurprisingly, his efforts were in vain, as it was impossible for the church to overlook Eliot’s adulterous life and her self-proclaimed agnosticism. And yet, the very things that might have rendered Eliot anathema to the society of her time are what make her appealing to us today. As Lisa Appignanesi recently put it in The Guardian, “Though she comes to us wrapped in swaths of Victoriana, Eliot was a radical of the boldest kind.”
Ruhi Jiwani.
2011.
Prelude.
Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed.
Book I.
Miss Brooke
Chapter I.
“Since I can do no good because a woman,
Reach constantly at something that is near it.
—The Maid’s Tragedy: BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper. She was usually
