The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

she had been deeply attached since childhood. Isaac never spoke to her again after

her elopement. It is reasonable to conjecture that this experience affects the stress,

in all of her novels, on incidents involving choice. All of her characters are tested by

situations in which they must choose, and the choices, as in The Mill on the Floss

(1860), are often agonizingly painful. Although she had occasionally tried her hand at fiction earlier in life, it was only

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1336 / GEORGE ELIOT

after her relationship with Lewes became established that she turned her full atten

tion to this form. Scenes from Clerical Life appeared in magazine installments in 1857

under the pen name that misled most of her readers (Dickens excepted) into believing

the author to be a man�a "university man," it was commonly said, to Eliot's amuse

ment and satisfaction. This work was followed by seven full-length novels in the 1860s

and 1870s, most of which repeated the success of Adam Bede with the Victorian

reading public and which, after a period of being out of favor in the early twentieth

century, are now once more deeply admired by readers and critics. Virginia Woolf

praised Middlemarch (1871�72) as "one of the few English novels written for grown-

up people," and later readers have found a similar maturity combined with a powerful

creative energy in other novels by Eliot such as The Mill on the Floss and Daniel

Deronda (1876).

When Eliot began writing fiction, she and Lewes were reading to each other the novels of Jane Austen. Eliot's fiction owes much to Austen's with its concern with provincial society, its satire of human motives, its focus on courtship. But Eliot brings to these subjects a philosophical and psychological depth very different in character from that of the novel of manners. Eliot's fiction typically combines expansive philosophic meditation with an acute dissection of her characters' motives and feelings. In a famous passage from Middlemarch, Eliot compares herself with the great

eighteenth-century novelist Henry Fielding: A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to

be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the

colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in

his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work. . . .

But Fielding lived when the days were longer. . . . We belated historians must

not linger after his example; I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain

human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light

I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed

over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. Despite her ironic disclaimer Eliot too prides herself on her remarks and digressions�

as this passage, itself a digression, suggests. As a "belated historian," however, she

focuses on the intersection of a few human lives at a particular time and place in her

country's history. She frequently likened herself not only to a historian but to a sci

entist who, with a microscope, observes and analyzes the tangled web of character

and circumstance that determines human history. As both comparisons imply, Eliot

strives to present her fiction as a mirror that reflects without distortion our experience

of life. But her insistence on art's transparency is often troubled both by her con

sciousness of its fictions and by her sense of the way in which the egoism we all share

distorts our perceptions. Hence she portrays this egoism with a combination of acuity

and compassion. It is this distinctive compounding of realism and sympathy that

makes her, according to the French critic Ferdinand Brunetiere, a better realist than

her famous French contemporary Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary

(1857). Often compared with Leo Tolstoy, she is, perhaps, the greatest English realist. Eliot's definition of herself as a historian leads us to expect her novels to offer

considerable insight into contemporary issues. The Woman Question, as her essay

"Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft" suggests, held particular interest for her.

She typically chooses for her heroine a young woman, like Maggie Tulliver of The

Mill on the Floss or Dorothea Brooke of Middlemarch, with a powerful imagination

and a yearning to be more than her society allows her to be. The prelude to Middle-

march speaks of the modern-day Saint Teresa, with the ardor and vision to found a

religious order, caught at a historical moment that gives no outlet for her ambition.

In her portrayal of the frustrations and yearnings of such a heroine, Eliot seems

sympathetic to a feminist point of view. Yet her stress on the values of loyalty to one's

past; of adherence to duty, despite personal desire; and of what William Wordsworth

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MARGARET FULLER AND MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT / 133 7

calls "little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love" suggests that her

attitude toward the Woman Question is complex.