NANCY HENRY, The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography.

Abstract

REFLECTING on the widowed Cross’s biography of Eliot in her concluding paragraph, Professor Henry observes what she has been at pains to emphasize throughout her own ‘critical biography’, Cross’s realization that ‘life and fiction informed each other’ (269). None would disagree, not least, as Henry illustrates, Eliot and her contemporaries, but you do not have to be a new critic recidivist to maintain that life is one thing, the craft of fiction another. The nub lies in that word ‘informed’ (and ‘illuminate’ some few lines later), and a ‘critical biography’ surely promises more than the insistence that, by way of example, the familial entanglements of Eliot’s life are echoed in her fiction. To be sure, Henry does point out the pitfalls of a simple ‘searching out of originals’ (110), and she does have an impressive grasp of her subject, but the promise to ‘engage literary critical traditions of interpreting [Eliot’s] work within the broader context of theoretical approaches to studying literary texts generally’ (7) fails to materialize but for a brief nod in its direction in her review of her predecessors in her opening pages. Haight’s distinction in the field is confirmed as much by her pointing out of his perceived deficiencies as it is by her occasional reliance upon his researches.