Before Scenes of Clerical Life

Abstract

Responding to the early criticism which saw a clear divide between the pre-novel-writing Marian Evans and the novelist George Eliot, later critics have highlighted Eliot’s journals, letters, reviews, and other journalistic piece as early signs of her writing talent and important preparatory work for her career in fiction. This chapter continues this line of enquiry into the shaping forces of Eliot’s writing as it focuses on her largely ignored travel writing—published and unpublished—in the formative years between 1854 and 1857. It rejects the notion that the Scenes of Clerical Life are Eliot’s ‘prentice-work’, reading the travel memoirs about Germany and North Devon alongside the Scenes to argue that preparatory work for Eliot’s novels is done in these travel pieces. Here, she not only reworks her diary entries into extended prose narratives and a publishable format but also experiments with place and character writing, the narrator’s voice and persona, and with the possibilities of realism. Drawing on her review articles of the period, I argue that Eliot’s early travelogues elaborate on what will emerge as the dual focus of her realism: the truthful documentation of reality and the creation of sympathy for characters and issues hitherto disregarded in fiction.