The Authority of the Past in George Eliot's Novels

Abstract

HERE ARE VARIOUS WAYS of dividing George Eliot's work and of judging the parts it falls into. It was once the fashion to separate the novels based on recollected personal experienceScenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner-from the more labored Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, and to call the first group novels of feeling and therefore good, the second, novels of and, therefore, inferior. Later comment, following the lead of F.R. Leavis especially, has silently accepted these lines of division but reversed the judgment: the novels of feeling, it is said, are flawed by sentimental indulgence, the novels of intellect alone are mature. Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda now receive more admiring attention than all the other novels together. Recently, Miriam Allott has suggested a kind of three-part division between the fresh and spontaneous novels through Silas Marner, the arid Romola and Felix Holt, and the mature Mliddlemarch and Deronda.' Then there are the patterns that can be constructed by following out any one of an indefinite number of developing tendencies in her novels. Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, Silas Marner-perhaps The Mill on the Floss-are distinguished from the others by their use of unheroic character. In the rest, George Eliot abandons the effort to construct tragedy around an inarticulate and imperfectly selfconscious character and turns instead to studies of greater complexity, culminating in the figures of Dorothea and Gwendolen. Or, the line may be drawn according to the attitude towards evil shown in the novels: the optimistic assumptions of Adam Bede and