George Eliot: A Critic's Biography, by Barbara Hardy

Abstract

Reviewed by: George Eliot: A Critic's Biography George Levine (bio) George Eliot: A Critic's Biography, by Barbara Hardy; pp. xxvi + 170. London and New York: Continuum, 2006, £55.00, £12.99 paper, $110.00, $19.95 paper. It is almost fifty years since Barbara Hardy published The Novels of George Eliot (1959), certainly then and probably still the finest critical study of George Eliot. A crucial event in the history of Eliot studies, it taught a generation of critics, before the blossoming of feminist studies, cultural studies, poststructural analysis, and ideological criticism, how to recognize and read the art of her novels. While it rescued Eliot from modernist critiques, The Novels of George Eliot was itself an important modernist achievement, demonstrating that there was form where critics had seen none, making clear that the texture of her language, the organization of her materials, and the realism of her method (and sensibility) were as complex, intricate, and satisfying as anything in Henry James, James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf. Things have changed a lot since 1959, but unfortunately, form remains, as Hardy put it, a "relatively disregarded aspect" of Eliot's work. "Formalist criticism" fell out of favor after the 1960s; consequently, The Novels of George Eliot has not, in recent decades, received the attention it deserves. One of the most distinguished critics of our time, Hardy continues to have much to teach us about both literary art and Eliot. No critic is more alert to the way art signifies than Hardy. Her long distinguished career, with almost absolute independence, has proceeded outside the language of cultural study and poststructuralist critique. We can be grateful that with this biography she has gathered together all that her lifelong study of Eliot has taught her and teaches us yet more. Well, not exactly biography. Certainly not a conventional one. Given Hardy's persistent engagement with the formal qualities of literature, biography is not what one might expect from her. She calls this book "a kind of anti-biography." "Biographers," she claims, "since they are biographers and not critics—often treat [the novels] as mere sources of information about life, or treat them too generally, saying little about language, form and originality, and neglecting critics even if they mention them" (xi). This biography is "anti" because it is first and foremost criticism, investigating the novels' language with intensity and precision while recognizing the relations between art and life as intimate, complex, and revelatory. Extraordinarily attentive to particularities, Hardy shows the details to be loaded with significance, saturated in feeling, usually to be recognized as part of a larger pattern, but sometimes—here Hardy was particularly fine in The Novels of George Eliot—not part of the dominant shaping patterns of the books. In this life-reading, Hardy shows us literary patterns and connects them to biographical ones. By her scrupulous attention to details of a lived life, Hardy allays any worry that this book will be [End Page 99] lit-crit rather than biography. Everything Eliot wrote—letters, essays, journals, poems, and novels—becomes evidence for a full and decidedly fresh "life." But this book is an anti-biography, even in its principle of organization. Although it moves from childhood to death, it is largely driven by language, theme, and a determination to dispel the misreadings of Eliot that, Hardy believes, previous biographies have imposed on our understanding of what sort of person she was. The anti-biography aspires, through critical attention to art and language, to be better biography. The facts are here. The apparently conventional chronology that seems dutifully to introduce the book is not conventional at all, but, while precise and detailed, also interpretative: as the chronology moves into the years of Eliot's flourishing, for instance, the entries get longer and more interpretative, explaining the significance of Feuerbach, marking alterations in narrative mode, or describing instances of "striking symbolism" in Adam Bede (1859), or patterns of imagery, or the novels' biographical relevance. Hardy moves from writings and events to the novels and then back again. She picks up single words that appear in letters, as well as large ideas and feelings, and pursues them tenaciously. The words are alive...