Eliot's Life Research Articles

Coming and Going: The Women of T.S. Eliot

There were four influential women in Eliot's life: two wives, two women who believed that one day he would marry them, and a brief affair of which he was deeply ashamed. New evidence of some 1,131 letters sent by Eliot to one of the women, Emily Hale, available to scholars after a fifty-year embargo imposed by Eliot, throws dramatic new light on T.S. Eliot the man, and also major insights into his poetry.[i] Eliot destroyed her replies, perhaps in order to protect his reputation. Eliot claimed that poetry should be transformed into an impersonal statement, but his poetry was not as 'impersonal' as he alleged, but replete with personal incidents from his private life with his women. His troubled first wife “nearly was the death of me, but she kept the poet alive”. Emily – his first platonic, lifelong love who lived in America – was his poem’s “hyacinth girl”; Mary was a friend he frequented in England for drives in the car, domestic dinners and culture. He finally found true happiness, and the ability to write erotic verse, when he married Valerie, thirty-eight years his junior, and with whom he found contentment in his twilight years. He also had a brief affair with Nancy Cunard, of which he was deeply ashamed. The aim of this paper is to show the various major influences these four women had on Eliot’s life and work. Focus will mainly be on Prufrock, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets.

Class Affect and the Victorian Novelist: George Eliot's Gentility and the Origins of Sympathy in Felix Holt

Class Affect and the Victorian Novelist:George Eliot's Gentility and the Origins of Sympathy in Felix Holt Susan Zlotnick (bio) george eliot's husband, John Cross, singles out Esther Lyon, the heroine of Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), in the beginning of his biography, George Eliot's Life (1885), for her resemblance to his late wife. That observation might surprise Eliot's readers, who have been inclined to see the rebellious Maggie Tulliver and the ardent Dorothea Brooke as avatars of their creator, but not Esther Lyon. An aspirer to gentility who acquired "too many airs and graces" (Felix Holt 75) at boarding school to settle back into her father's small-town Dissenting congregation, Esther is a recurring figure in Eliot's fiction, an early version of that more ruthless aspirant to gentility, Middlemarch's Rosamond Vincy. Despite the glaring contrast between the vulgar young women who inhabit her novels and the mature Eliot's sage-like stature, there are sound reasons for adding provincial strivers to Eliot's roster of semi-autobiographical characters. In his "Introductory Sketch" of Eliot's childhood, Cross highlights the narrowness of Eliot's farmhouse upbringing before noting that Eliot glimpsed a wider life while visiting neighbourhood grandees, and that these glimpses "affected the imagination and accentuated the social differences—differences which had a profound significance for such a sensitive and such an intellectually commanding character, and which left their mark on it" (36). Cross follows this observation about Eliot's sensitivity to social distinctions with a description of Esther from Felix Holt that he believes captures his late wife's characteristic class feelings: No one who has not a strong natural prompting and susceptibility towards such things [the luxuries wealth can provide], and has, at the same time, suffered from the presence of opposite conditions, can understand how powerfully those minor accidents of rank which please the fastidious senses, can preoccupy the imagination. (qtd. in Cross 35–36) By aligning Eliot with Esther, Cross suggests that Eliot too suffered on account of her family's modest social position. Moreover, the link he draws between [End Page 115] Esther and Eliot raises the question: if "minor accidents of rank" preoccupied Esther's imagination, to what degree did they also occupy Eliot's? Embedded in this question about Eliot's rank is a larger one about class affect. Can what sociologist Diane Reay identifies as the "psychic landscape of social class," composed of an "affective lexicon" that includes such emotions as "envy, deference, contempt, arrogance, pride, rage, satisfaction, embarrassment and pity" (912–13), be discerned in a writer's work? This essay attempts to answer that question by turning to Esther Lyon, who shares Eliot's humble origins as well as her boarding-school education in gentility, and the novel in which she appears. Class has long been of vital concern to critics of Felix Holt because of its engagement with the politics of workingclass suffrage.1 Most often read as a contribution to the debates surrounding the Reform Bill of 1867, Felix Holt simultaneously looks back to 1832 and the emergence of the middle class as a rising political force in British society and forward to the passage of the Second Reform Bill. Nevertheless, its stereoscopic focus on both the middle and working classes has been overlooked, and the bulk of critical attention has been paid to the working class, even though the novel links the two reform bills through Felix Holt, who is less a radical than a reformer bent on reshaping the identities of both the middle and working classes. To be fair, Felix Holt remains a difficult text for critics to make sense of: its titular working-class radical turns out to be a conservative who opposes the extension of suffrage, and the backstory that explains how Esther Lyon comes to be the long-lost heir to the Transome estate is so complex that it impedes the story's flow. Moreover, the novel's main narrative threads, Felix's political plot and Esther's inheritance plot, do not seem to align easily, which has led Alison Booth to conclude that "it is impossible to make a fully coherent novel out...

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

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.

The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot

The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot

The Honeymoon, A Novel

The Honeymoon, A Novel

George Eliot and mathematics

One feature of George Eliot's life omitted from Derek Ball's interesting article in the latest BSHM Bulletin is her friendship with Sonja (or Sofya) Kovalevskaya, who became Professor of Mathematic...

George Henry Lewes's 1869 Diary and Journal: A Transcription and Annotation of Unpublished Holographs Held at the Beineke Library of Yale University

This article is a transcription and annotation of two unpublished pieces of personal writing by George Henry Lewes, life partner of nineteenth-century author George Eliot. One is a dated daily diary from the year 1869; the second piece comprises sections from his Journal, Volume XII, June 1866-May 1870, relating to that year. The diary and journal are housed in the Beineke Library of Yale University. Special permission has been given by Jonathan G. Ouvry, George Henry Lewes's descendant and holder of copyright on unpublished Lewes-George Eliot manuscripts, for them to be used for this project. The year 1869 was significant in the lives of Lewes and Eliot and included the tragic death of Lewes's son, Thornton. At the same time, George Eliot was compiling research and writing some sections of Middlemarch and Lewes himself was gathering information and working on his five-volume Problems of Life and the Mind. To provide the most consistent and cohesive picture of the year 1869, the diary and journal sections have been incorporated into a single document, with annotations, notes, and introduction. The “Introduction” describes the holographs and places them within the context of George Henry Lewes's and George Eliot's life, domestic environment, work and ideas. The “Editorial Notes” lay down the principles of adherence wherever possible to what George Henry Lewes wrote in the two holographs. The transcriptions and annotations, which locate or explain references, are followed by an alphabetically arranged listing of “Works Cited,” as well as two appendices. The first consists of an alphabetical listing of books read by Lewes in 1869, and the second provides an alphabetically arranged guide to “Friends, Acquaintances, and Visitors” found in the holographs.

(Re)Viewing Maggie and Tess through the Lens of Standpoint Theory

Literary critics admire George Eliot's touching portrayal of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. Many readers prefer to read Maggie's character as a reworking of Eliot's own life. In this article, I compare Maggie with another famous literary heroine, Tess Durbeyfield of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Tess is a "low-born" country girl whose suffering begins as soon as her family discovers that they have noble connections. Both Maggie and Tess go through hardship and humiliation due to their sense of responsibility and commitment to do the best for their families. Looking at these two characters through the lens of feminist standpoint theory, I argue that Maggie and Tess' social locations, imposed gender-roles, and families' expectations are among the primary causes of their tragedy. As members of the oppressed (gender) group, their epistemologies to understand the reality and to make sense of their social relationships contradict with those of the dominant group-masculine.

Reading for our time: Adam Bede and Middlemarch revisited

Foreword: Required Reading or 'some of us, at least', Julian Wolfreys Prelude Acknowledgements 1. Realism Affirmed and Dismantled in Adam Bede Adam Bede and Romanticism Adam Bede as Paradigmatic Realist Novel Challenges to the Paradigm of Realism in Adam Bede Four Passages Challenging Mimetic Realism What Do These Passages Really Say? The Irony of Mistaken Interpretation in Adam Bede Hetty Sorrel as Sophist Figure Adam Bede as a Story about the Reading of Signs and as a Text to be Read Repetition in Adam Bede The Community Restored 2. Reading Middlemarch Right for Today Totalization Affirmed and Undermined in Middlemarch Versions of Totalization Middlemarch as Pseudo-History Demystification of the Connection of Narrative and History Totalizing Metaphors in Middlemarch Middlemarch as Fractal Pattern Middlemarch as Web Middlemarch as Stream Minutiae in Middlemarch Triumph of Metaphorical Totalization The Optical Metaphor Creative Seeing as the Will to Power The Parable of the Pier-Glass Human Beings as False Interpreters 3. Chapter Seventeen of Adam Bede: Truth-Telling Narration Down with the Art of the Unreal! The Language of Realism Performative Undecidability 4. Returning to Middlemarch: Interpretation as Naming and (Mis)Reading Interpretation as the Creation of Totalizing Emblems Money as Metaphor The Boomerang Effect of the Monetary Metaphor Money as Universal Measure The Uses of Art Conclusions About Metaphor O Aristotle! The Roar on the Other Side of Silence The Ruin of Totalization in a Cascade of Misreadings: A Summary Description of the Ground Gained So Far Form as Repetition in Unlikeness A Finale in Which Nothing is Final Dorothea's Limitless Yes Dorothea as Ariadne George Eliot's Life and Work as an Uneven Tissue of Ungrounded Repetitions Coda Notes Index

T.S.エリオットの生と個性化の過程

T.S.エリオットの生と個性化の過程

‘The Most Churlish of Celebrities’: George Eliot, John Cross and the Question of High Status

Published in 1885, John Cross's biography of his late wife, George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, was written with the intention to ‘make known the woman as well as the author’ (John Cross, ed., George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, cabinet edn, 3 vols (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1887), I, v). Yet, ironically, the biography is renowned precisely for the lack of insight it affords readers into the private life of George Eliot. Why did Cross make a promise that he could not keep? My essay attempts to answer this question by examining George Eliot's Life in the context of the fame culture of the late nineteenth century. I suggest that it is possible to read Cross's unwillingness in the Life to make Eliot more ‘available’ to her public as a reaction against the sorts of publicity which, throughout the 1870s, had pushed Eliot's persona into a celebrity arena. George Eliot's Life represents Cross's effort to preserve Eliot's high professional reputation by e...

George Eliot and the Prima Donna's 'Script'

After exploring how Germaine de Staël's Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807) originated a set of Victorian literary endeavours considering the pre-Wagnerian prima donna, this essay argues that Hans Christian Andersen's Improvisatoren (1835), rather than George Sand's Consuelo (1842), is the first novel to bridge Corinne and later prima donna fiction. The article then suggests a fresh interpretation of George Eliot's life and œuvre, paying particular attention to Daniel Deronda. The prima donna narrative serves as a literary model for George Eliot and also a personal 'script' (pace Carolyn Heilbrun) for this woman who lived so differently from other women.

T. S. Eliot by Craig Raine (review)

YES, 39.1 & 2, 2009 205 T. S. Eliot. By Craig Raine. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. xxi + 202 pp. ?12.99. isbn: 978-o-53?993-5 Craig Raine's short, insightful, generously spaced book on Eliot appears inanAmerican series entitled 'Lives and Legacies', but it isno critical biography.Aspects of Eliot's life are presented ina fewpages of 'Preface' thatprecede thebook's Introduction, and ina final 'Appendix 3'. The main textofferskeen insightsintoEliot's poetry,with an eleven page chapter on the drama, twenty-one pages on the criticism, and a thirty-page appendix on 'Eliot and Anti-Semitism'. If itsproportions are provocatively odd, then, given that thisbook isfrom theUS imprintofOUP, and sopresumably aimed not least atAmerican students, the tone can be inappropriate: 'We are all of us familiarwith the poem whose real subject is less important than itsrhyme scheme. F.T. Prince's "Soldiers Bathing", for instance.Reading such a poem is likewatching show jumping at Hick stead' (p. 32). There are toomany nods and winks towriters, writings, and assumed cultural co-ordinates tomake thisa book suitable for introducingEliot to, say,first-year students.This is a great pity (and could have been sorted by tough-minded editing), because Raine's study comes closer than most others to communicating on paper the strengthsof a traditional, rather combative Oxford tutorial. The lastwords of Raine's main textare both rhapsodic and donnish: 'Breath taking.Discuss' (p. 147).Repeatedly he offers good one-liners ('TheWaste Land is Eliot's greatest dramatic work', p. 90), telling points about selected details (as when he quotes the sentence of Lucian's ^euxis, which follows thewords Eliot chose as his epigraph to 'Mr.Apollinax'), and finely phrased evaluation: 'overall, Eliot's tart,pitiless, unforgiving irony has none of Laforgue's wry, sprighdy self inculpation' (p. 42). His book is full of intelligence and communicates a strong sense of writerly personality: 'Wewriters frequently inherit our themes from our most admired predecessors' (p. xiv). This poet-critic has a passion for Eliot's poetry, seeing it inmany ways as exemplary. Yet when Raine tells readers Ash-Wednesday 'isEliot's indestructible Das Lied vonderErie' (p. 33), he appears unconcerned that tomany modern readers this statement will mean litde.Raine's book seems the product not least of excited, potentially exciting pedagogy; but there are also pedagogical issues it shirks.The danger is that, however brilliant, this litde volume will be seen as preaching to the converted. I enjoyed it,but I have taught a course on T. S. Eliot for twenty years. Raine's index has no entries for Cats or even Old Possum's Book ofPractical Cats\ nor for Marie Lloyd, Dracula, or music hall. So Eliot too often emerges as a highbrow poet admired by people with donnish tastes and a gift forwaspish put-downs, rather than as a poet of intense emotion, able to fuse nursery rhymes with high culture to incendiary and moving effect ? yet also to create Macavity. Raine relishes Eliot's work, but his taste for intellectual jousting and a desire to exhibit his dauntingly well-stocked mind too often get in theway. This brilliandy opinionated study is at times too show-offy towin many new readers forEliot. Deeply honourable both in theway itdefends its subject, and sometimes in the way itjustly reserves judgement, theAppendix that deals with anti-Semitism is 206Reviews awkwardly appended, while Raine airbrushes out Eliot's rhymes about King Bolo and his big black queen. What Eliot needs now is a sympathetic critical biography that is addressed to the unconverted. Pithy, provocative, donnishly brilliant, Raine's is toomuch an insider's book. University of St Andrews Robert Crawford Metafictionand Metahistory inContemporary Women'sWriting.Edited byAnn Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. 48.00. xi + 222 pp. isbn: 978-0-230-00504-4. Since the late 1980s,historyhas emerged as an increasinglyprominent theme incontem porarywriting, and historical literature ? a genre once dismissed as escapist pap ? has discovered a new critical and cultural respectability: what was 'then' is very 'now'. Heilmann and Llewellyn's timely collection of essays considers what is specific about how contemporary women writers represent history.Their clear and purposeful intro duction, oudining the aims and...

T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888-1922 by James E. Miller, Jr.

528 Reviews Assinghams we have 'akind of representation of,and commentary on perspectivalism itself.They constantly put before us questions of reading, interpretation, and indeed the very process of novelistic creation' (p. I86). While James could come to terms, eventually, with Flaubert, he remained ill at ease with the painting he had experienced first in I875-76, and as Brooks notes, 'He was not so visually advanced' (p. 204). A close account of the visual here would have been useful, but the documentation simply is not there. This is a perceptive and well-finessed account of the novelist's growth, enlivened by several lightnesses of touch-the partly resisted pun on Fanny Assingham's name (pp. 96, I72), and the suggestive echo of 'Sleeping Beauty' in The Golden Bowl (p. I99), forexample-and James should feelwell served. UNIVERSITY OF KEELE IAN F. A. BELL T S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, I888-I922. By JAMESE. MILLER, Jr. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005. xx+468 pp. J29.95. ISBN 978-0-27I-0268 I-7. A fortune-teller once toldEliot he was 'flirtatious' and 'obstinate': he beckons and he baffles (Emily Dickinson's phrase), smilingly interposing nicknames and deliberate disguises. JamesMiller examines the early life with the avowed intentof discovering 'anAmerican poet', but hismore sustained project is theuncovering of a homosexual one; extending his I977 study of The Waste Land (T S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977)), he argues that inParis in I9IO Eliot fell in lovewith JeanVerdenal, whose wartime death made all the difference.Miller acknowledges that John Peter originated this idea (suppressed by Eliot in I952), and has drawn encouragement from the 'outing' of Eliot inCarole Seymour-Jones's biography ofVivienne, as well as fromMichael Hastings's play Tom and Viv (treated as reliable evidence). Eliot's characters 'Eeldrop' and 'Appleplex' sojourned in a street exemplifying 'a respectabilitywhich has something toconceal'-phraseology which capturesMiller's approach to his subject: 'What was there to conceal?' (p. xii). His method is one whereby inquisitorial suspicion prompts rhetorical questions, whose implied answers then install themselves as biographical fact:he seizes on Pound's poetic phrase 'Ura nianMuse' (p. 2), and by page 3 I4 isconvinced thatPound applied this adjective to Eliot himself. Inference and innuendo abound; Miller highlights the description of 'muscular' Harold Peters as Eliot's 'verygay companion' (p. 65), wanting to imagine the two boys together clinging on their sailing expeditions. 'I remained in pursuit of him' (p. 2), he assures us; the almost comically obtrusive agenda reminded me of Kinbote, inNabokov's Pale Fire: nowhere more so thanwhen Miller takesVerde nal's evocation-writing by night to Eliot in I9 I2-of their formerlyhaving heard Parisian bells strike ten o'clock to allude to the awful daring of their firstsurrender ('Both were in amanly state andmoaning likedoves', inKinbote's parlance: Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, I962), p. I27). 'Is ittoomuch toventure that the flower metaphor-"radiant blooms are germinating"-has special meaning forboth Verdenal and Eliot?' (p. I31), proposes Miller; but perhaps it is: however affectionate, these correspondents never rose to tutoiement-suggesting pro prieties observed rather than transgressed. Nor should Eliot's marriage be linked to Verdenal's death, for letters toConrad Aiken imply thathe heard about itafterwards. Miller finds significance in Pound's leaving 'Sage Homme' uncollected; but since Eliot's firstimpulse was topublish thispoem alongside The Waste Land, one doubts that its 'Uranian' exposed any deep secrets: thewittiness consisted in describing MLR, 103.2, 2008 529 their collaboration in such fancifully inappropriate terms.Likewise, the playful-if sinister-theatricality of Eliot's 'deviant' behaviour (greenish make-up etc.) hardly suggests furtive concealment. There were evidently some odd angles to his life;but itno longer surprises us that, biographically and poetically, Eliot's diverted erotics produced unusual inflections (whatAuden termed 'thehermit's sensual ecstasy'). It is unclear whom Miller's book will satisfy: scholars may not find enough sig nificantly new, nor does it effectively shape Eliot's life into biographical narrative. Indeed, itsomewhat resembles awork of reference: anyone curious about themutual acquaintance 'Prichard' referred to byVerdenal, or about...

William Empson: Against the Christians by John Haffenden

MLR, 103.2, 2008 529 their collaboration in such fancifully inappropriate terms.Likewise, the playful-if sinister-theatricality of Eliot's 'deviant' behaviour (greenish make-up etc.) hardly suggests furtive concealment. There were evidently some odd angles to his life;but itno longer surprises us that, biographically and poetically, Eliot's diverted erotics produced unusual inflections (whatAuden termed 'thehermit's sensual ecstasy'). It is unclear whom Miller's book will satisfy: scholars may not find enough sig nificantly new, nor does it effectively shape Eliot's life into biographical narrative. Indeed, itsomewhat resembles awork of reference: anyone curious about themutual acquaintance 'Prichard' referred to byVerdenal, or about Eliot's Harvard or Boston backgrounds, and theirgayer recesses, can findsuchmaterial here. The research has, however, been more copious thandiscerning, and contains errors, some glaring (Rim baud did not shootVerlaine); speculation about thedating ofWaste Land manuscripts has been overtaken by Lawrence Rainey's systematic investigations. Offering in sup port inertly reductive biographical readings of selected poems, Miller, regrettably, persists inbeckoned bafflement before the contents ofEliot's lifeand art.His book, lengthy and handsomely produced though it is, does not finally justify dust-jacket claims to be a 'milestone inEliot scholarship' and 'indispensable'. LANCASTERUNIVERSITY TONY SHARPE William Empson: Against the Christians. By JOHNHAFFENDEN. Oxford: Oxford Uni versity Press. 2oo6. xxii+797 pp. 030. ISBN 978-0-I9-927660-8. JohnHaffenden's second volume seesWilliam Empson in a series ofwartime and post-war careers: the BBC from 1940 (and marriage toHester Henrietta Crouse, 'Hetta', in I941) and then a post inChina at theNational Peking University from I947 to I952. He continued teaching inhis traditionalway during and after the civil war, the six-week siege of Peking in I948, and the subsequent Communist revolu tion and creation of thePeople's Republic ofChina. No reasonable man would have expected tobe allowed to retainhis intellectual autonomy, or indeed his personal free dom, in thispolitical climate, but Empson was not reasonable. Out of love of theEast and personal obstinacy he hung on until August I952, when he and his family-by this time theEmpsons had two children-sailed fromHong Kong back toEngland. He settled inLondon, inhis huge ramshackle house inHampstead-acquiring Stu dio House, Hampstead Hill Gardens, was the best financial decision that Empson ever took.When he was appointed to theChair of English at SheffieldUniversity in I953 (he served there until I971) theHampstead house remained his major home. In Sheffield he lived in considerable squalor in a cheap and insanitary basement flat ('the burrow'). His indifference tohis physical surroundings was more than equal to this. So long as he could work-whether he was typing out Shakespeare's plays for his students (frommemory) on a battlefield inChina orwriting combative reviews and violent challenges to theold enemy,God, inhis Sheffield basement, he remained oblivious and contented. JohnHaffenden iscalm and accepting inhis account ofEmpson's private life.Emp son liked casual sexual encounters with men, and he and Hetta, a big and impulsive South African artist, had an open marriage. Hetta's taste in loverswas often alarm ingly rough. The most rough was a painter and decorator called Joshwho lived in Studio House for some years.When Empson was there fromSheffield he and Hetta would share Josh's sexual favours in a menage a trois.Empson records his gratitude for this arrangement in a hitherto unpublished poem, 'TheWife isPraised', printed in fullhere as an appendix to thebiography. In 1956 Hetta had a child by one of her other lovers (Peter Duval Smith) and 530 Reviews offeredEmpson a divorce. Their subsequent exchanges show Empson's characteris tic steeliness and equanimity, though he was clearly hurt. But Hetta stayed inplace, Duval Smith was soon off the scene, and husband and wife remained on surprisingly good termswith each other until the end ofEmpson's life. After his retirementEmpson found thathis pension was pitiful (because his career inBritish academic lifehad been relatively short) and he was to be found teaching for money at odd American institutions and reviewing, again for money, with prolific energy rightup tohis death. The creativeness was fuelled by alcohol, and thishad its downside: in I984 he died, ineffect,of drink, a factpolitely obscured inhis obituaries but set out with compassionate...

NOT CLEAR

Craig Raine has something to say about T. S. Eliot; there is nothing wrong with that, for there are always going to be plenty of things to say about one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and no reason whatsoever why Raine, whose critical writing can be lively and stimulating, should not be saying at least some of them. Although this is a short book, the thing Raine has to say can be stated at much less than book length: this is (at sentence length) how T. S. Eliot's governing concern is with ‘the buried life’. The proposition is a simple one, and in no sense deceptively so: Raine states it repeatedly in the clearest of terms, seldom without some kind of authorial fanfare. Near the beginning of the book, for instance: Given that the main events of Eliot's life are so sensational, even lurid, it may seem odd that the central focus of his oeuvre should concentrate on the life not fully lived, ‘buried’, avoided, sidestepped. … We writers frequently inherit our themes from our most admired predecessors. It is they who set the agenda. It is we who continue it, who develop it. It is important to realize that, for writers, the fully lived life also means the interior life, the mental life. Grey matter acting on reading matter is a matter of passion, too.

Language and Ritual in T. S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes

T. S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes is one of the most important pieces in modern drama. The purpose of this study of Sweeney Agonistes is to explore the fertilising forces that made it possible for the play to bring new colours to the language of the theatre; another aim is to look at the background of the fragments, exploring the different elements of ritual, religion, and literary sources working in the play. Although the play is fragmentary, it can be regarded as a key to Eliot's dramatic art. The way Eliot used the language of Jazz is unique in early 20th century literature; the lack of characters, plot and settings naturally draw our attention to language, which is characterised by an unprecedented vitality and dynamism. Eliot clearly succeeded in establishing a new vehicle for dramatic expression. The rituals providing the background in Sweeney are closely connected with Greek drama and the religious turn in Eliot's life leading to the birth of the Ariel Poems, one of which, "The Journey of the Magi," opens up to further analysis if we approach it from the direction of Sweeney Agonistes.

George Eliot and the British Empire

In this study Nancy Henry introduces a set of facts that place George Eliot's life and work within the contexts of mid-nineteenth-century British colonialism and imperialism. Henry examines Eliot's roles as an investor in colonial stocks, a parent to emigrant sons, and a reader of colonial literature. She highlights the importance of these contexts to our understanding of both Eliot's fiction and her situation within Victorian culture. Henry argues that Eliot's decision to represent the empire only as it infiltrated the imaginations and domestic lives of her characters illuminates the nature of her Realism. The book also re-examines the assumptions of postcolonial criticism about Victorian fiction and its relation to empire.

The Sacramental Dada of T.S. Eliot

THE COMPAKATIST THE SACRAMENTAL DADA OF T. S. ELIOT Sean Cotter Eliot's baptism and confirmation in the Anglican Church in 1927 is usually taken to mark a conversion, not only in his spiritual life, but also in his aesthetics. This year divides the "early" from the "late" Eliot, the author of "Prufrock" and The Waste Land from the author ofAsh- Wednesday and Four Quartets, the ironic avant-garde ventriloquist from the dogmatic czar of letters. Helen Gardner's statement is exemplary: The change in Mr Eliot's poetry cannot be discussed without reference to the fact that the author ofAsh Wednesday is a Christian while the author of The WasteLandwas not. Nobody can underrate the momentousness for any mature person ofacceptance ofall that membership ofthe Christian Church entails. (103) While it is not clear what all is entailed, we can hear in "momentousness " the solemn tone reserved for this moment in Eliot's life, as though he has made a desperate and possibly fatal choice. I will argue that we are mourning a false sense ofrupture. We know from his Harvard notebooks (Gordon 537-8) and from poems such as "The Love Song of St. Sebastian" that Eliot wrestled with Christian belief throughout his life, and 1927 marks his public avowal of this commitment. Eliot's statement ofbeliefdoes not, however, mark his withdrawal from the avant-garde. In fact, this statement shows the depth of his involvement with that particular faction called Dada. Eliot was not a Dadaist in that he did not perform at the Cabaret Voltaire, he did not contribute to Dada journals, and he did not write or sign any of the many Dada manifestos. But we can understand the dynamics of his Anglican beliefs more accurately if we see them as an extension of this continental avant-garde tradition. As Ronald Bush and Denis Donoghue both argue, Eliot's poetry does undergo a change, beginning with Ash-Wednesday (1930), his first long poem published after 1927. This poem moves his aesthetics closer to, not further from, those of the Dadaists Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara. In it Eliot employs the aesthetic nonsense ofDadaist goading as a structural technique, making his Christianity not into a solemn funeral but into a music-hall comedy. Eliot must have expected, when For Lancelot Andrewes was published , the overwhelmingly hostile reaction that his preface would evoke. For example, Eugene Jolas (the editor of transition, publisher ofJoyce's Work in Progress and Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons) called Eliot "senile" and assumed that he had given up literary creation: The gratuitous act ofthe creator having become apparently abhorrent to him, Mr. T.-S. Eliot constrains his reformatory forces into the straightjacket of political and religious dogma. Although I retain a profound Vol. 26 (2002): 69 THE SACRAMENTAL DADA OF T. S. ELIOT admiration for the great poet that he was, and although I try to have tolerance for another man's viewpoint, I cannot help feeling that Mr. Eliot has committed intellectual treason. (11) The extremity of this reaction, with its strange emphasis on allegiance to a cantankerous and factional avant-garde, was not confined to Jolas. The Times Literary Supplement called Eliot "a kind of traitor" (Gordon 226). Ezra Pound rhymed "psychosis" with an accusation that Eliot "abandoned the muses for Moses." Mark Van Doren summarized the Eliot "legend" a year later: Mr. Eliot[. . .]has withered into a triple faith, hardened into a three-headed dogma—turned a fastidious, tired back upon our glorious confusion and gone the easy, empty way ofabsolutism. The author of"The Waste Land," people say, has repudiated even his vision ofour contemporary intellectual desert—a vision which was useful at least in that it showed us what we are—in honor ofmeaningless formulas from old time which he alone mumbles, thinking thereby to achieve impossible certitudes. (590) Eliot was seen as isolating himself from the avant-garde: he is not part of"our" confusion but states formulas "he alone mumbles." Blind as these critics were to the fact that Eliot was not alone in a church which dated from the English Renaissance, they also missed the fact that he had not left the avant-garde...

BOOK REVIEW: Edited by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston.THE JOURNALS OF GEORGE ELIOT. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

This well-edited collection of the extant George Eliot journals makes a welcome addition to the published biographical materials which chart the inner and outer topographies of the George Eliot-George Henry Lewes landscape. Although three-quarters of the journals have previously appeared in print, interpolated mainly in J. W. Cross's George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (1885), or in Gordon S. Haight's The George Eliot Letters (1954-78) and George Eliot: A Biography (1968), Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston are right to claim in their Preface that reading the material "in the context of companion pieces in George Eliot's diary volumes" makes a big difference (viii). The difference is not that we are suddenly treated to an unmediated autobiographical narrative. Eliot's prohibition against written self-revelation was one of her most profound instincts, and it operates more powerfully in the notebooks secreted in her drawer than in the creation of fictional characters offered to the world at large. These diaries and recollections are valuable because they offer ground for reflection on the daily grind of a Victorian writing life, in which every day had to be made valuable through the private summoning of energy and imagination against the lurking demons of depression, anxiety, and illness.