The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot

Abstract

The first edition of this Cambridge Companion came out in 2001. Now, almost two decades later, on the occasion of the bicentenary of George Eliot's birth, we have a second edition, which shows us the vitality of George Eliot Studies.Nancy Henry has been invited to join George Levine for editing the second edition of this volume, and most of the previous contributors are still here. When looking at the list of editors and contributors we notice that ten are Americans, the other four being from different parts of the English-speaking world (Ireland, England, Canada, and Australia). This reveals the growing importance of American scholars in the field of George Eliot studies.The previous cover illustration after Frith representing gamblers in Homburg, a scene that reminded readers of the early chapters of Daniel Deronda, has now been replaced by a portrait of Mary Ann Evans in her twenties (years before she became George Eliot), attributed to George Barker Jr. The introduction justifies this choice: “The portrait featured on the cover of this volume represents one new discovery. A convincing case has been made on the grounds of likeness and historical context for its being a portrait of Mary Ann Evans in the 1840s (17). If indeed this is a portrait of the future novelist, it fully justifies Henry James's famous comment when he met her many years later in 1869: “To begin with she is magnificently ugly—deliciously hideous” (237).Among the thirteen articles we have here, only four are completely new. The others, which have been taken up from the first edition, are more or less revised.The introduction written by Nancy Henry and George Levine deals with “George Eliot and the Art of Realism,” a favorite theme of George Levine. We start with a decisive statement: “By the time George Eliot died on December 22, 1880, she was celebrated as the greatest contemporary English novelist.” She was indeed, “despite the massive energy and genius of Dickens” (1). And we now recognize that Middlemarch is the greatest of Victorian novels.In the next article, “A Woman of Many Names,” Rosemarie Bodenheimer reminds us of the essential landmarks in George Eliot's life, which often correspond to changes in her Christian name or surname. Then Fionnuala Dillane's new article covers the period of “Marian Evans's Journalism.” Her references to the author as “Evans” are unusual, yet fully justified here, simply because there was no other name for her then, and she had not thought yet of writing fiction. We realize the gap between her income for her journalism (about £120) and what she earned for her first work of fiction in 1857 (£443). This new career brought her “more financial security, more control over her future, and a sense of something permanent in that future” (51). Donald Gray studies the relationship between “George Eliot and her Publishers.” Except for Chapman, who published her early translations of Strauss and Feuerbach and a short episode with Smith at the time of Romola, for which she was offered very comfortable rights, George Eliot remained with John Blackwood and this cooperation, largely based on understanding and friendship, proved profitable both to the firm and herself.The next two articles deal with the traditional distinction between “The Early Novels” (by Josephine McDonagh) and “The Later Novels” (by Alexander Welsh). Such a division fails to account for the continuity we can observe between the two parts of her career as a novelist. Yet, it is true that Romola marked a decisive turn for her. Many Victorians preferred the early novels: “the early Eliot was praised by her contemporaries as the custodian of old England, the treasurer of traditional, rural life” (92–93). Alexander Welsh considers Felix Holt as a preliminary exercise for the writing of Middlemarch, both set in the time of the First Reform Bill, and sees in the latter novel George Eliot's commitment to “the incipient study of sociology” (100). As for Daniel Deronda, it is the only novel of the corpus set in the present, with scenes in London and also on the Continent (after the precedent of Romola).In a new article, “George Eliot and Money,” Dermot Coleman shows us the novelist's sense of investment, her prudent use of money in her own life, and the financial support she gave to her sister Chrissey, her niece Emily, and other members of the family or friends. In “George Eliot and Gender,” Kate Flint examines gender characteristics formed by society in her novels and pays special attention to her notion of motherhood, “representing the highest form of duty of which most women were capable” (141). She emphasizes the importance of Daniel Deronda, “the most eloquent, and radical, of all her treatments of gender” (148). In “George Eliot and Politics,” Nancy Henry studies Felix Holt, quite naturally, but she concentrates on Daniel Deronda, which combines the novelist's researches into Jewish history and her interpretation of nineteenth-century nationalism. She makes a valuable remark, which can serve as an answer to Edward Said, who is dissatisfied with what he sees as George Eliot's Zionism: “Critics tend to forget that Deronda does not actually do anything political at the end of the novel” (171).Amy King's new article, “George Eliot and Science,” shows that the novelist's interest in science, encouraged by Lewes's own research, is responsible for the integration of science into her fiction, which affects the nature of her realism. Contrary to Zola, who believed in the scientific principle of determinism, she was antideterministic. “She wanted not only to understand the world but to change it—to ameliorate the conditions that realism had revealed” (192).Barry Qualls, in “George Eliot and Religion,” starts with the importance of her translations of Strauss and Feuerbach, then examines biblical typology in her novels, an original method of representation. George Eliot takes Deronda's plot from the Bible, from the story of Israel's exile and its desire to secure the Promised Land.When dealing with “George Eliot and Philosophy,” Suzy Anger keeps in mind that Eliot was a novelist, not a philosopher, but she shows different areas of philosophical concern in her fiction: ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind (215–16). And she dwells on the importance of the notion of sympathy, which the novelist derived from Feuerbach.In a new article, “George Eliot's Reputation,” which is also the last of this collection, Margaret Harris does not examine George Eliot's Critical Heritage, but different aspects of her work, which have interested recent critics (say of the last thirty years)—science, art, religion, feminism, the literary marketplace, biography, poetry, economics, her European consciousness, and her cosmopolitanism. She ends her superb panorama with what she calls “Afterlife”—dramatic adaptations either for the stage or for film and television. The whole book ends with a rich bibliography, the work of Allison Clymer.This new Cambridge Companion will be useful to all those who want a brief introduction to different aspects of George Eliot's works, set in their proper historical, aesthetic, and ideological context. It will soon prove essential both to her new readers and to those who are already familiar with her.