not relished. . . . Don’t allude to this hint of mine. He wouldn’t like my interfering" (363–64). Although the next letter from Blackwood expresses admiration for the ending of "Janet’s Repentance" (371), Eliot apparently still rankled from his earlier criticism. As she recorded in her journal, "I had meant to carry on the series beyond 'Janet’s Repentance,' . . . but my annoyance at Blackwood’s want of sympathy in the first two parts of 'Janet,' . . . determined me to close the series and republish them in two volumes" (410).
Despite their tentative beginnings, Eliot, Blackwood, and Lewes nonetheless developed a good working relationship over the years that followed. Blackwood was still Eliot’s editor, except for a short rift over the publication of Romola, when she wrote her last novel, Daniel Deronda.
George Eliot was paid generously for her fiction. After 1857, she and Lewes, who was also doing well with his publications, no longer had to worry about money, and Eliot was able to give up her article writing. Scenes of Clerical Life was well received in literary circles, and although there were only three reviews, they were encouraging (Laski 55). With the publication of Adam Bede, Eliot’s reputation was established. Her early fiction, which was drawn largely from a combination of various elements of memory and imagination, became less literally based on figures from the past after the Scenes as she began to make rapid progress in her artistic technique. Her early works were also rapidly composed. Scenes of Clerical Life was completed in only a little over a year, as was each of the long novels, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. The short novel, Silas Marner, proved to be a transitional work, written as Eliot was beginning to move toward the writing of her more complex novels, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarck, and Daniel Deronda. All of these later novels involved more research and took longer to complete.
In the chapters to come, I have limited myself to a discussion of George Eliot’s seven novels. These are her major works, and as such, the primary focus of her attention during the twenty years of her creative life. Any attempt to include every work of fiction would result in too ponderous a book, and would not add substantially to my argument. Besides the three Scenes and the seven novels, Eliot also published two short stories: "The Lifted Veil," in 1859, between the writing of Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, and "Brother Jacob," written in 1860 after the publication of The Mill on the Floss and before the writing of Silas Marner. She also wrote The Spanish Gypsy, begun as a play in 1864 after the publication of Romola and completed as a poem in 1868, after the publication of Felix Holt. She wrote other works of poetry, including the "Brother and Sister Sonnets" in 1869 and "The Legend of Jubal" in 1870, before the writing of Middlemarch; a collection of her poetry was published later, in 1874. After her last novel Daniel Deronda, her only published work was a collection of essays, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, published in 1878.
I have continued my presentation of Eliot’s development by placing my analysis of each novel in the context of the ongoing events of her life; I have also described briefly in each case some of the details of her writing process. In this way, I hope to show how Eliot’s pattern of extraordinary intellectual, creative, and emotional growth continued throughout her fiction-writing career. I have also placed my discussions in the context of each novel’s critical reception, both in Eliot’s time and ours. My purpose in so doing is to convey something of the scope of each work of fiction, and the extent of the author’s success, at the same time that I demonstrate the way in which my psychoanalytic interpretations can help to answer some of the questions raised by critics; I also want to stress that criticisms of George Eliot’s work should be seen in the light of her overall achievement.
I must also add that Eliot’s artistic and personal development did not go smoothly, even once she started on the path of fiction writing. Instead of a smooth ascent, her creative path sometimes seems more like a labyrinth. To many modern critics, Romola and Felix Holt present serious problems; some even consider one or both to be failures. Yet after attempting to work through the difficulties presented by those novels, Eliot was prepared to write her masterpiece, Middlemarch; and by the time she finished what some readers believe to be an even greater work, Daniel Deronda, she seems to have achieved, in addition to her eminent position as an English novelist, her own inner sense of completion.
I have tried to write this book in such a way that it will interest the general reader as much as the academic reader. Prior knowledge of George Eliot’s novels, or of psychoanalytic theory, although helpful, is not necessary. For those who may be unfamiliar with the variety of academic styles of documentation, I want to explain that instead of using footnotes, I have incorporated all references to the list of "Works Cited" in the body of the text, in order to make it easier for readers to locate my sources. In short, I have tried to write the kind of book that I would like to read myself. I hope my readers will find it useful.
ONE
Self-Disorder and Aggression in
Adam Bede
After the completion of "Janet’s Repentance," the third and last story in Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot wrote her editor, John Blackwood, on September 5, 1857, that "I have a subject in my mind which will not come under the limitations of the title 'Clerical Life,' and I am inclined to take a large canvas for it, and write a novel" (Letters 2:381). On October 17 she wrote, "My new story haunts me a good deal, and I shall set about it without delay. It will be a country story–full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay" (387). She began writing on October 22. After she had finished the novel in November 1858, she recorded in her journal her "History of Adam Bede,” where she explains the germ of her story: an anecdote told her in 1839 by her Methodist aunt, Mrs. Samuel Evans, of a visit to a "condemned criminal, a very ignorant girl who had murdered her child and refused to confess–how she had stayed with her praying, through the night and how the poor creature at last broke out into tears, and confessed her crime." Eliot had begun thinking, shortly after beginning to write the Scenes, of blending this story "and some other recollections of my aunt in one story with some points in my father’s early life and character" (502).
She carefully researched the background of her novel, which takes place in 1799 in the county of "Loamshire," a symbolic re-creation of Staffordshire, where her father had come from his childhood home in Derbyshire (re-created in the novel as "Stonyshire"), as a young man to begin his career as a carpenter. Eliot gleaned from Southey’s Life of Wesley the details she needed for her characterization of Dinah, her Methodist preacher, about women’s preaching, visions, the divination of God’s will, visits to prisons, and preaching in the open air. She also searched the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1799 for details of vegetation and weather for her setting. As Gordon Haight observes, "her concern for details helps explain the sense of authenticity, the remarkable density of background her realism achieves" (Biography 250). Yet she emphasized in her letters after the novel was published that the story had developed out of her imagination: "There is not a single portrait in Adam Bede. . . . The whole course of the story–the descriptions of scenery or houses–the characters–the dialogue—everything is a combination of widely sundered elements of experience" (3:155). Regarding her accurate rendering of the local dialect, she stresses that she "never knew any Derbyshire people, or Staffordshire either, except my father and his brothers," and that she had visited her paternal relatives only a few times while she was growing up (157).
It would be hard to overstate the success of Adam Bede. It was published on February 1, 1859; by the middle of March, Blackwood wrote to congratulate her upon being "a popular as well as a great author" (3:33); he added that "the sale is nothing to the ring of applause that I hear in all directions." In June, her friend Barbara Bodichon wrote, "I wish you could hear people talking about AB”(108). In July, Charles Dickens wrote to say that "Adam Bede has taken its place among the actual experiences of my life. . . . The conception of Hetty’s character is so extraordinarily subtle and true, that I laid the book down fifty times, to shut
