In Memoriam: Constance M. Fulmer (21 November 1938–17 March 2020)

Abstract

Celebrating the life of Constance Fulmer calls for celebration of her two favorite authors: George Eliot and Edith Simcox. Constance has received many tributes from grateful students and colleagues for her contributions as teacher and dean at Pepperdine University. But for those of us still working on Eliot and Simcox, two of her many, many publications will never go out of date: George Eliot: A Reference Guide (1977) and A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot: Edith J. Simcox's Autobiography of a Shirtmaker (1998).The early 1980s saw a peak in the number of George Eliot doctoral dissertations. In 1948, when F. R. Leavis installed her in his Great Tradition, he almost singlehandedly ended a fifty-year period during which her novels gained little interest. Afterward, with women's studies flourishing in the 1970s and 1980s, Eliot made an appealing subject: canonical enough to satisfy any dissertation director, yet with miles more to write no matter what literary theory came into fashion. Hence Constance's reference guide showed perfect timing. Not just a list, the guide inserts paragraphs summarizing books and articles of particular interest. By the early 1980s, she had done at least half the research chores needed no matter what approach an ABD working on Eliot was taking in a dissertation.Nor has the Guide lost its usefulness. As research on Eliot goes on, it guards against the real risk of writing things twice over. Hence it remains indispensable for younger scholars. Moreover, certain names recurring therein merit repeated reading: Barbara Hardy, U. C. Knoepflmacher, J. Hillis Miller, Reva Stump, and so many others. No teacher should overlook Jerome Beaty's Middlemarch: From Notebook to Novel (1960), which proves that even Eliot could tell a lie about her creativity—so useful in diverting students who believe in inspiration rather than revision. Beaty's study of the notes for chapter 82 in Middemarch proves that the climactic meeting between Dorothea and Rosamond came not from a fit of inspiration as Eliot claimed but through the less glamorous labor of revising.Meanwhile, Constance found the figure who probably engaged her heart as much as her mind: Edith Jemima Simcox. She and her coeditor Margaret Barfield traveled first to the Bodleian, which held the manuscript of what Simcox called The Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, not only a narrative of love for Eliot but an account of Simcox's incredibly various other interests: economics, journalism, fair labor, women's education and jobs, and, yes, manufacturing shirts. (Its misnaming as A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot, Constance confided, was down to the publisher, not herself and Barfield.) In the ninth volume of Gordon Haight's collection of letters (as supplemented by William Baker's ongoing ferreting out of still more letters), more than a hundred of the pages concerning Eliot's later life come from Simcox's Autobiography, of great value at the time (1978) but selected entirely for their references to Eliot rather than for such significant parts of Simcox's life as her service on the London School Board or her attendance as a delegate to trade unions meetings. Just as Haight's biography superseded John Cross's choice of excerpts for his Life in Letters, Fulmer and Barfield have superseded Haight's selections in the ninth volume of his Letters.Constance and Margaret well understood that online research, though wonderfully convenient, can never entirely replace on-site scholarship, including conferences. In Britain, they visited as many locations associated with Eliot and Simcox as possible and generously shared what they saw at countless meetings in photographs and paper readings. They participated enthusiastically in the George Eliot Fellowship, making friends, in particular, with Kathleen Adams. While her generosity of time and spirit reached Constance's students and colleagues at Pepperdine, for readers of this periodical I recommend the Reference Guide and the Simcox Autobiography as the greatest monuments to the scholarship of Constance Fulmer.