Abstract
Henry James first met George Eliot in 1869, before he had published any fiction, and he did not see her again until 1878, by which time she was the universally admired author of Middlemarch (1871–72) and he had at last begun to make his name as a novelist, with Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1876–77), and The Europeans (1878). There are two accounts of the first meeting, one written the following day, 10 May 1869, the other shortly before James’s death in 1916. The later account is a much embellished version of the earlier; interestingly, both are striking for their writerliness. Both accounts reward close scrutiny, especially the later account, which has been neglected by scholars. Such scrutiny offers a fresh insight into the relationship between the two writers, and in particular makes it possible to revisit and re-evaluate James’s criticisms of George Eliot’s fiction.
Highlights
Though James wrote only seven reviews or notices of George Eliot’s works, beginning with Felix Holt in 1866, when he was 23 years old, many of the phrases from his discriminating appraisals have become almost as famous as the works themselves
Henry James first met George Eliot in 1869, before he had published any fiction, and he did not see her again until 1878, by which time she was the universally admired author of Middlemarch (1871–72) and he had at last begun to make his name as a novelist, with Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1876–77), and The Europeans (1878)
About Daniel Deronda James was famously hilarious; in his critical essay ‘Daniel Deronda: A Conversation’ he puts into the mouth of a hostile reader of the novel, Pulcheria, the unfeeling remark that ‘there are some places’ in the novel ‘as amusing as anything in Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss: for instance, where, at the last, Deronda wipes Gwendolen’s tears and Gwendolen wipes his’
Summary
Henry James first met George Eliot in 1869, before he had published any fiction, and he did not see her again until 1878, by which time she was the universally admired author of Middlemarch (1871–72) and he had at last begun to make his name as a novelist, with Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1876–77), and The Europeans (1878). Many agree with James that there is ‘nothing more powerfully real’ or ‘more intelligent’ in English fiction than the ‘painful fireside scenes’ between Lydgate and Rosamond in Middlemarch His comment that the novel ‘sets a limit’ to ‘the development of the old-fashioned English novel’ seems predictive, both of George Eliot’s own narrative adventurousness in. Her and final novel Daniel Deronda and of James’s own contributions, a few years later, to the house of fiction.[2]. That remark in the Middlemarch review about the work setting a ‘limit to the development of the old-fashioned English novel’ is characteristic of James’s studiedly ambivalent attitude towards George Eliot. It was vital for him to absorb every impression, and he vowed to ‘hang on to a place till it has yielded me its drop of life-blood’.4 His account of his meeting with George Eliot shows that this intense desire applied to the people he met as well as the places he visited
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