BOOK REVIEW: edited by George Levine.THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO GEORGE ELIOT. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001, and edited by John Rignall.Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Abstract

Of all the major Victorian figures, it may be most difficult to imagine George Eliot cozying up with any kind of literary "companion," and yet here are two such volumes devoted to her: The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, edited by George Levine, and the Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot, edited by John Rignall. What would she have made of them? They certainly do not seem to offer knowledge in the way she herself would have found congenial, for as we know, she was an inveterate independent scholar. She learned Hebrew from Isaac Deutsch, taught herself Greek, investigated seaweed under a microscope with George Henry Lewes, and she left us remarkable traces of her own learning. But even in this account, I find, I am relying on my new friends. Of course, I already knew all these things, but I did check them in the Oxford Reader's Companion, so I know that I'm right. How much less reassuring information, wisdom, and ideas all seem in the fictional world of George Eliot—and how much more doubtful the outcome of scholarly labor, whether it be Casaubon's fruitless assemblage of his "Key to All Mythologies" in Middlemarch (1871-72)or the hard-worked truths of Rufus Lyon's sermons in Felix Holt (1866). Much learning all too often comes to much frustration, and the fantasy of ready- to-hand, always-on-your-desk encyclopedic knowledge is far from Eliot's imaginary realm.