Henry James ♥ George Eliot
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, the 19th Century English novelist who lived for years with the married critic George Henry Lewes and wrote seven novels, including the highly-praised Middlemarch.
I’ve never read it. In fact, I’m not sure whether I’ve ever read any of her books, although I have such a strong memory of Silas Marner that I might indeed have read it.
Or maybe it was just the classic comic, because that was my introduction to many of the classics, and my memory of Silas Marner is mostly pictorial:
There’s no way to say this nicely, but George Eliot was an exceedingly homely woman. However, it didn’t seem to have set her back much, if at all; she seems to have had a rich full emotional, sexual, and intellectual life. Over the years, I’ve sometimes wondered how she managed that feat, and yesterday I happened across this quote from Henry James about meeting Eliot/Evans. It offered a strong clue:
She had a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth and a chin and jawbone ‘qui n’en finissent pas’… Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end, as I ended, in falling in love with her. Yes, behold me in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking.
Eliot/Evans was by all accounts very happy in her scandalous yet stable liaison with Lewes (a complicated legal situation precluded him from divorcing his wife). After his death, she married a man 20 years her junior when she was 60, although she died just a few months later.
So here’s my question: have you read Middlemarch, and is there any point in trying to wade through it? It’s got 880 pages in the paperback edition. Whew!
Yes; it’s sort of along the lines of Jane Austen. Here is a quote from the end of the book: “Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
redbud:
Well, for some reason I’ve never been able to get past the first few pages of any Jane Austen book, despite the fact that they are so beloved by so many. I’ve tried and tried, and finally I’ve given up.
Neo,
My introduction to many of the classics was also the comic book version. In fact, I enjoyed “The Last of the Mohicans” so much that I bought the book during an airport layover, thinking I’d kill a few hours reading it. Bad choice, as it turned out. But I did read many of the old comics and recall them fondly.
Waidmann
Even better than Middlemarch is her last novel, Daniel Deronda. Eliot, a tried and true Englishwoman, wrote a pro-Zionist novel, without the usual Jewish stereotypes that plagued England for centuries. A modern commentary on Daniel Deronda called The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot,written by Gertrude Himmelfarb (Bill Kristol’s mother, and wife of the late Irving Kristol) brilliantly explains the backdrop in which Eliot wrote Daniel Deronda and how she educated herself on all things Jewish. I mention all of this because both the novel and Himmelfarb’s book are outstanding.
Have not read Middlemarch but did read Daniel Deronda and Mill on the Floss, and liked them both.
There is a pretty good movie version of Daniel Deronda as well.
Two quotes from Eliot that I like:
“The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.”
(from Silas Marner…I actually ran across this quote in an interview with a money manager at Barrons)
“Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessman had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary’s men, but a little uncertain also about your own . . . You would be especially likely to be beaten if you depneded arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.” (from Felix Holt the Radical, which I also read and liked–forgot to mention above)
Lots of political leaders and their academic advisors, and also more than a few business executives, fail to understand this point about the kind of “chess” that they are playing.
The PB of Anna Karenina I had ran near 1000 pages.
Maybe she compensated for her looks with great sex.
Have never read her, nor Jane Austen.
I’ve read Mill on the Floss, but that’s it. I read it as an adult because I thought I should read a least one work by the famous writer 😉 I vaguely recall the ending but struggle to reconstruct how things got to that point…
@Redbud: I liked that quotation so much I tried reading the whole book. I was doing OK until about a hundred pages in then it seemed to me that all the characters I was getting used to were replace by a bunch of new ones and that deflated me. Same thing happened with The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. I did enjoy Pride and Prejudice by Austen (though I knew the story from the Firth/Ehle version, so that helped).
JaneLK: I completely agree that Daniel Deronda is even better than Middlemarch, which is saying quite a lot in my opinion, as Middlemarch is also outstanding. Somehow the depths of human emotions and their expressions in life are revealed in Daniel Deronda in the most moving and satisfying way within the context of a complicated and fascinating plot. Yes, my favorite of George Eliot’s great novels.
Neoneocon, long time lurker here. I was never able to read Pride and Prejudice until I saw the Colin Firth miniseries. This particular miniseries is extremely faithful to the book. I think all the dialogue is the same. After seeing this it made the book so much easier to read. Now, I read the book once a year.
Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet is excellent, even though it’s not quite as faithful to the book. Sense and Sensibility is a wonderful book.
I’ve never had luck reading Brideshead Revisited. Tried many times.
Yes, and yes. I’ve read all of Eliot’s novels, and I found Middlemarch to be one of the more appealing works in the canon. It reads a little like Trollope’s Barchester novels. I’m afraid this won’t mean much if you haven’t read them, but Eliot and Lewes were friends of Trollope and she was inspired by the Barchester series (which I wholeheartedly recommend). Trollope wrote about Eliot in his autobiography and had mixed opinions of her writing. He complained that there were sentences in Daniel Deronda that he had to read several times before he understood them.
The biography of Eliot by Gordon Haight is also worth reading. She had a formidable intellect and knew German, Latin, ancient Greek, and (I think) Hebrew and probably other languages.
One of her earliest works which was published anonymously was “Scenes of Clerical Life”. Charles Dickens, ever astute, read the book and identified the author as being female in a rather charming little article.
For long classics (like the ones mentioned here), try the free volunteer-recorded audiobooks from Librivox.org. Sometime picking up an 800 page book seems too daunting, but if you’ve got a daily car commute, you can just listen, and it doesn’t matter how long it takes. Even the parts of Moby-Dick that most people find boring become entertaining during a commute.
I can’t resist giving Dickens’ letter to Eliot, as I mentioned in my previous posting. Who can read this and not be moved by Dickens’ words when he explains why he believes the author to be a woman?
My Dear Sir
I have been so strongly affected by the two first tales in the book you have had the kindness to send me through Messrs. Blackwood, that I hope you will excuse my writing to you to express my admiration of their extraordinary merit. The exquisite truth and delicacy, both of the humour and the pathos of those stories, I have never seen the like of; and they have impressed me in a manner that I should find it very difficult to describe to you, if I had the impertinence to try.
In addressing these few words of thankfulness, to the creator of the sad fortunes of Mr. Amos Barton, and the sad love-story of Mr. Gilfil, I am (I presume) bound to adopt the name that it pleases that excellent writer to assume. I can suggest no better one; but I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman. I have observed what seem to me to be such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me, even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself, mentally, so like a woman, since the world began.
You will not suppose that I have any vulgar wish to fathom your secret. I mention the point as one of great interest to me – not of mere curiosity. If it should ever suit your convenience and inclination, to shew me the face of the man or woman who has written so charmingly, it will be a very memorable occasion to me. If otherwise, I shall always hold that impalpable personage in loving attachment and respect, and shall yield myself up to all future utterances from the same source, with a perfect confidence in their making me wiser and better.
Your obliged and faithful Servant, and admirer
CHARLES DICKENS.
From the Dickens letter quoted above:
“If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself, mentally, so like a woman, since the world began.”
Yet male authors create female characters all the time, and even do so in the first person….and vice versa. It would actually be interesting for someone to study what male imaginers of a female character get wrong, and, what female imaginers of a male character get wrong.
Neo,
Please, give ‘Persuasion’ a try.
David Foster Says:
May 4th, 2016 at 9:57 pm
From the Dickens letter quoted above:
“If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself, mentally, so like a woman, since the world began.”
Yet male authors create female characters all the time, and even do so in the first person….and vice versa. It would actually be interesting for someone to study what male imaginers of a female character get wrong, and, what female imaginers of a male character get wrong.
***
(1) As an interesting side-light to sf readers on the board, the much-admired James Tiptree jr maintained an unpierced anonymity for decades, and the eminent Robert Silverberg, in an introduction to a collection of Tiptree’s short stories, declared in no uncertain terms that the writer absolutely had to be male because of the way in which issues were presented etc etc etc (you can read it on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warm_Worlds_and_Otherwise)
Within a short time, Tiptree was “outed” as the very female Alice Sheldon.
(2) I attended college with a gentleman who put much more time into the theatrical performances than into his studies as an English major, but he boasted that he had never read “Hamlet” until the end of his doctoral studies, and then only in the Classic Comics.
They are a sorely missed appurtenance from the Golden Age of Our Past.
Now we have graphic novels.
Quite agree with all those who loved Daniel Deronda…Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard, placed the novel on her short list of works essential to understanding Judaism! The psychological depths of D.D. are simply astounding.
Well read audiobooks are especially good for all those Victorian era novels where your eyes glaze over after a few paragraphs.
Maybe because they were written during a time when families sat in the parlor in the evening by the fire, listening to someone reading a book, but wow, they come alive, sound almost contemporary, when read aloud. My theory is they were meant to be read that way.
There are four different narrations of Middlemarch on Audible. The narrator Kate Reading is one of my favorites, she’s very comprehensible and assessable.
I going to listen to Daniel Deronda soon, based on the book recommendation here.
@ Waidman:
Read Mark Twain on Cooper’s the Deerslayer (http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html)
I remember that as a kid I tried a couple of different times to wade through the Mohican but though the subject was very interesting to me and should have made wonderful read for a 16 year old kid, the writing was far too florid for me to stick with it.
Esther, I believe you’re right that many of those long, complex Victorian novels were written to be read out loud. Just last night, I read aloud the first paragraph of “Bleak House” to Mr Whatsit (we were about to watch the first episode of the PBS miniseries, and I was setting the mood.) What a pleasure — the words rolled off my tongue so satisfactorily that I backed up and made poor Mr Whatsit listen to most of it all over again.
I love “Middlemarch” and have read it repeatedly. Dorothea’s a character who’s worth getting to know as she slowly grows into her full self, not remotely in the way she expected. But Neo, if you don’t love Jane Austen, you aren’t likely to love George Eliot either. Eliot’s tougher, Austen’s more precise, but both dealt with the same wry, understated humor, complicated explorations of character and social commentary expressed through a few people’s lives rather than sweeping societal events. All very small and inconsequential, even petty, in its outer appearance, but containing multitudes. Doesn’t work unless that’s the kind of story you like.
I don’t know “Daniel Deronda,” but clearly I need to. Thanks to all the commenters who mentioned it!
I apprehend that other people like such novels and enjoy admiring turns of phrase and contemplating layered characters. I am unconvinced. I am fairly suspicious of character depth, as it resides so entirely under the control of the author that there is nothing compelling that it responds to any reality. It always seems to record no more than the fantasies of the author’s tribe of what other people are like. Admittedly, I have no interest in prose that doesn’t move right along. So I may be unable to appreciate this form of good writing.
The reader of fantasy and science-fiction knows that the author is speculating on how humans would act in particular circumstances. The more “realistic” novel pretends to more certainty. I imagine some authors may succeed and get humanity right. More often, they are attempting to impose their opinion of what they believe humanity to be.
1. Yes, read Middlemarch. Started while auditing a class at PU, couldn’t finish it because of time constraints, picked it up while 8 months pregnant, finished, read parts of it out loud to my newborn son. (He seemed to enjoy it)
(No, I don’t finish books I don’t like. Life is too short.)
2. Is it worth it? Depends.
I’m a huge fan of Trollope and have read some 3 dozen of Trollope’s novels. but only Middlemarch.
Just from the size of the book, Middlemarch does feel as a slog.
I much more enjoyed Trollope’s Barset novels, which give a full universe of characters in a comparable setting. The Last Chronicle Of Barset is a complex, psychological novel rivaling anything by Dosto or Tolstoy.
For the marriage game in a milieu of politics, Trollope’s Palliser novels are very good.
3. If you dislike Austen, your better bet is Trollope rather than Middlemarch.
I dislike most of Dickens, too.
Middlemarch is long. The 2007 DVD version did a pretty good job (they have it on Amazon, BTW) of it. Watching it might help decide if you want to read the book or not.
Mill on the Floss is an interesting novel (if dark) by George Eliot, too.
A slight curve being thrown. “North and South” by Elizabeth Gaskell may prove to be interesting because its perspective is that of a mill owner (capitalist). Not that she was in favor of capitalism, but her prior novel was criticized as being too slanted towards labor and this was written as a result.
There is also a movie of ‘North and South,’ available on Netflix streaming.
After a century or so, understanding the stories requires the reader know what the reader of a century back was expected to know.
For example, the original difficulties in Downton Abbey were a result of a law that women couldn’t inherit. It had to be explained by characters talking to each other about it.
Kipling’s intro to his fantastical child’s history of England includes the lines,
See youi the track that dimpled runs
All hollow through the wheat?
O that was where they hauled the guns
That smote King Phillip’s fleet.
The reader would be expected to know about the Armada.
Rosemay Sutcliff’s admirable YA historical novels may as well be scifi if you don’t know the history.
My wife read a fictionalized life of Hemingway’s wife in Paris. There was talk of how much effort the Parisian women put into looking good. The competition would be more explicable if you knew the French had just lost a million eligible young men dead and huge numbers more crippled just a few years earlier.
To put it another way, reading the novels addressed in neo’s piece and by the commenters would, these days, be more work than, I suspect, the authors intended.