The New Lifetime Reading Plan

In many ways, however, she is a most interesting figure. Born Mary Ann Evans, of a middle-class commercial family in Warwickshire (her father was a carpenter who rose to be estate agent), she early evidenced the passion for learning that was to mark her career. In her teens she was deeply and narrowly pious; but wide reading, plus conversations with minds less evangelically committed, soon stripped her of dogmatic faith. Her rejection of a conventional God and of Immortality was, however, balanced by her devotion to Duty, an abstraction that seems to have taken on for her some of the attributes of the Deity.

After her fathers death she moved to London, engaging successfully in highly intellectual journalism and meeting some of the best minds of her time, including Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill [72]. In 1854 she decided the shape of her life. She formed a permanent, illegitimate but not covert con- nection with the learned journalist and biographer George Henry Lewes. Lewes's wife had already had two children by another man (ah, those proper Victorians), was mentally unbal- anced, and was not living with Lewes at the time. The relation- ship between Eliot and Lewes, lasting till Lewes's death in 1878, was both happy and eminently respectable. A year and a half after Lewes died, Eliot married an American banker, John W. Cross, she being sixty to his forty. Obviously a strong- minded lady.

The strength of her mind is apparent not only in her coura- geous, laborious life but in her novйis. To us they may seem rather prosy, supersaturated with reflection and moralizing, and, especially in Romola, smelling somewhat of the lamp. Yet they quietly blazed wide trails without which the modern novel would have been impeded in its evolution. D. H. Lawrence [113] summed it up: "It was really George Eliot who started it ali. It was she who started putting action inside." Perhaps in this respect Sterne [58] preceded her, but the eccentricity of Tristram Shandy put it outside the mainstream of English fic- tion, whereas George Eliot navigated its very center. She depicted the interior life of human beings, and particularly their moral stresses and strains, in a way then quite new to fic- tion. She also deliberately departed from other conventions such as the Dickensian happy ending and the standardized conception of romance. Finally, she poured into her stories something few previous novelists had possessed: the resources of a first-class intellect. She included ideas in her view of life. She even dared to portray intellectuals—a commonplace pro- ceeding since Joyce [110] but one not to be found in Jane Austen [66] or Fielding [55] or Dickens [77].

The partly autobiographical early chapters of The Mill on the Floss recreate the special atmosphere of childhood with an insight, tenderness, and charm unsurpassed until we reach Huckleberry Finn [92]. The minor characters, particularly Aunts Glegg and Pullet, are so solidly conceived that the pass- ing of the society in which they are rooted has not diminished their vitality. The struggle of poor Maggie to express her genius for love in a world that is too much for her is still poignant. And finally The Mill on the Floss, like ali Eliot's fic- tion, is suffused with a moral seriousness—neither prissy nor narrow, but rather the effluence of a large, powerful, ponder- ing, humane mind. In current novйis such moral seriousness is rarely found. But a few hours with George Eliot may serve to suggest that, for ali her didacticism, this novel must always be one of the staples of major fiction.

Middlemarch is today considered not only her masterpiece but one centrally located in the tradition of the English novel. In an essay written as long ago as 1919 Virginia Woolf [111] called it "one of the few English novйis written for grownup people." In accord with the taste of its period it is intricately, even densely, plotted, tracing the careers of several pairs of lovers and spouses. One of its themes turns on the political and social controversy preceding the passage in 1832 of the first Reform Bill. We are more likely to respond to the broad pic­ture of provincial society displayed on ali leveis, as well as to the sexual and intellectual frustrations of its heroine, Dorothea Brooke. As a study in unhappy marriage it made Victorian readers uncomfortable, and so thorough and compassionate is its psychology that it still moves us today.

Each great novel requires its own reading tempo. This one must be read slowly. It does not march. It unfolds.

C.F.

85

WALT WHITMAN

1819-1892

Selected Poems, Democratic Vistas, Preface to the first issue of Leaves of Grass (1855), A Backward Glance 0⁹er Travelled Roads