George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life

"Mine, I fear, is not a well-regulated mind: it has an occasional tenderness for old abuses; it lingers with a certain fondness over the days of nasal clerks and top-booted parsons and has a sigh for the departed shades of vulgar errors."

Scenes of Clerical Life represents Eliot's first published fiction; its three stories came out in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857; they were collected into the book the following year. She was already reasonably well-known under her real name as an essayist and translator from the German, but the first story was published anonymously before she coined the pseudonym for subsequent publications.

The stories take place in the past, twenty, thirty, sixty years ago. They are either the times of George Eliot's childhood or represent stories of the further past that might have been told in George Eliot's childhood. They're narrated in a first-person voice, but the narrator is not a character in any of the stories, and in at least one is explicitly recalling childhood. They all take place in the same fictional space (closely based on Nuneaton, Wikipedia tells me, where George Eliot grew up) and characters overlap between the stories.

"The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton" is the first of the three stories. Amos Barton is the Vicar of Shepparton, happily married with six beloved children. He's a reasonably good vicar, though no saint. To be sure he holds multiple livings, but has to pay curates to do the work for all except the one, and he doesn't make enough to live on. He loves his wife, but doesn't think much about her. The Bartons get involved in charity toward the fairly dubious Countess Czernacki, and their finances go from bad to worse. George Eliot's ironic tolerance is in fine form and it's the funniest of the stories until, well, it isn't.

The second story is "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story". Mr. Gilfil is just before Amos Barton's time, and the town thinks of him as old and sedate, just a little bit boring, and fortunately given to preaching short sermons. But, as it turns out, that's not the full story.

"Janet's Repentance" is the last and longest of the three stories. The Rev. Tryan comes to town, working among the poor weavers; he wants to start an evening lecture at the church. But the respectable elements of the town accuse Tryan of Methodism or worse; his case is not helped by the support of Mr. Jerome, the town's one well-to-do Dissenter. The lawyer Dempster organizes the opposition to Tryan, with the aid of his wife Janet.

The town admires Dempster as a clever and not overly scrupulous lawyer, but he drinks too much. Janet joins her husband in his campaign to smear Tryan, not so much out of conviction, but as a way to reignite the love between them that had soured since they first married.

I thought this one took a little long to get going and in the beginning there was too much simple picturing of the people of the town, so I'd say it's the weakest; but it does get going and makes a pretty good story as well.

So, are these Middlemarch? Well, no. But even second-rate George Eliot is still awfully good, and it's nice, in a way, to see that she didn't first appear full-grown in armor like Athena from the head of Zeus, but had to work to get better. And did. Gives some hope for the rest of us...

A book from my classics club list

and one for the Karen's Back to the Classics Challenge.

It also means I've only got one volume left to read in that collected Eliot shown above, the volume with the poems, a play (!) and The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Eliot's last work.

The collected George Eliot posts on the blog.

The Lifted Veil (#RIPXIV)

"For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that will happen in my last moments."

Latimer, the narrator of George Eliot's The Lifted Veil, is, to borrow sci-fi terminology, a precog: he sees (some) events of the future in complete detail. His first vision he treats with scepticism; it is of him standing on the Charles Bridge in Prague at a future date and he considers it at first just a daydream. But then it happens exactly as he foresaw it and he comes to trust that these visions are his real future. Like all accurate visions of the future it turns out to be a double-edged sword.

Latimer is dreamy and poetic, though not, he says, a poet: "You will think, perhaps, I must have been a poet, from this early susceptibility to nature. But my lot was not so happy as that." Indeed, he doesn't seem to do much in his life, but he has an income, he doesn't need to. When we first see him, he's a young man of twenty or so; he has an older half-brother Alfred who's engaged to Bertha Grant. Bertha is beautiful and blonde, witty in company, but perhaps just a bit empty. At least, Latimer is unable to see into her. (As he claims he can with others.) He falls in love with her anyway, or maybe because of his inability she seems mysterious; in any case he never believes Bertha is in love with his brother. They marry, after Alfred dies in a hunting accident.

"[This inability to see into her] only brought me more completely under her power: no matter how empty the adytum, so that the veil be thick enough." 

The lifting of the veil--the revelation of that hidden chamber at the back of the temple--is the climax of the story.

It's an odd piece and unlike most of the rest of George Eliot. It dates from 1859, the same year as her first novel Adam Bede, and appeared in Blackwood's. I wondered to what extent Latimer's uncertainty as to his future, his indecision about his artistic calling, represented George Eliot herself. 

Also I believe it's the only work of George Eliot narrated in the first person, and the aura is that of a Gothic novel, unlike the rest of her fiction. (Especially the spooky ending, which I won't reveal.)  

But it does have at least one element in common with other works by George Eliot. Rosamond Vincy has nothing on Bertha Grant. The wisdom of George Eliot? Boys, don't marry that blonde!

Jennifer Uglow's George Eliot

George Eliot (1987) is the first of Jennifer Uglow's books, and also the first of hers I've read, but she's gone on to a notable career as a biographer of English figures. I got as far as the chapter on the writing of Romola before I started that book, and once I'd finished Romola, I read the rest of Uglow's biography.

Literary biography is always a mix of literary analysis of the author's works, and gossipy information about the author's life, and Uglow's definitely leans on the literary analysis side. Maybe it's just a marker of my essential shallowness, but I could have done with a bit more gossip.

Uglow came to this interested in defining the nature of George Eliot's feminism and it's here she's most interesting. As long as there has been feminism, there have been arguments about what that means: are women different from men, and do those differences need to be equally valued? Or are women, at least in their social and legal roles, to be treated the same as men? Of course, those poles aren't exactly in opposition, but they're often treated as such.

Uglow wants to argue Eliot is a difference feminist. (She doesn't use the term, which may not even have existed in 1987.) While at first I resisted her argument, she does make a pretty strong case, though in the end I do think she underestimates how much Eliot is emphasizing the limited options available to women, especially in a character like Gwendolen Harleth. But according to Uglow, Eliot's ideal woman has a more emotional, nourishing role than a man would have. (At the same time, Eliot sees herself as particularly a masculine figure.) I don't know that I entirely agree, but as I say she does present a good argument. Dinah Morris, Romola, even Dorothea Brooke could be examples.

She does quote a passage I copied out as well, and found to be the crux in Romola, where Romola decides to change her fate:

The law was sacred. Yes, but the rebellion might be sacred too. It flashed upon her mind that the problem before her was essentially the same as that which had lain before Savonarola--the problem where the sacredness of obedience ended, and where the sacredness of rebellion began. (Chapter 56)

I was going to build an argument around that for my review of Romola, but ended up going in a different direction. But you have to like somebody who sees the same things you do, right?

I wrote most of this before dinner, then went to cook, and finished up after dinner which included a half bottle of Chardonnay. That's my defense... Swiss chard and leek quiche, with a salad. The Other Reader grows 'em, and I cooks 'em.

George Eliot's Romola

Romola is the least of George Eliot's novels. If you're reading this, you probably didn't need me to tell you that.

What you might hope to have some insight into is, should I read it? Probably you're a person who reads a lot, likes Victorian novels, you've read a few other George Eliot novels, and you're wondering, should I carry on and read Romola?

Well, my answer is, hmm, maybe, but probably not.

Of course, there's a certain charm in being completist, and this is George Eliot, so it's not terrible or anything, but I finished it and I thought, I would have been better off rereading one of hers I hadn't read in a while, say The Mill on the Floss in my case. Ah, well.

The events take place in late 15th century Florence. At the very beginning Lorenzo de' Medici has just died. This is in 1492. His son Piero de' Medici is unable to establish himself, and Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican priest, becomes the guiding hand of the restored Florentine republic, until his fall and death in 1498. The French king occupies Florence for a while. It's an exciting time, but the politics are complicated. Eliot gives you a lot of--perhaps too many--details, but it can still be confusing. The main events of the novel take place over these six years.

The two main characters are Tito Melema and Romola. Tito is a poor Greek-speaker from southern Italy who has acquired an education and is hoping to make it in Florence, a leading point of Italian culture at the time. Romola is the daughter of a renowned but aging humanist scholar in Florence; her brother has become a Dominican priest and has been cut off by her anti-clerical father. Tito comes to take the place of that son in the father's eyes, but Tito's ambitions will go beyond simple scholarship. But he does marry Romola.

It's Tito I thought the main problem in the novel, and Tito dominates the first half. He's a weak man, who wants to be liked, and can't make himself do the things he knows he should if it will be unpleasant in the short term. He's like Arthur Donnithorne in Adam Bede in this, except while we see Arthur from the side, we're constantly with Tito. It's not like Tito is unrealistic, we know the type, but it's painful and slow to spend time with him. And Eliot's great virtue I think is her sympathy; Tito is Arthur without the bit of redemptive uplift at the end. His fall can't be considered a tragedy. In the end he's just a villain.

Romola herself is more successful, though there were points where I was not convinced her psychology was appropriate to a fifteenth century woman. Of course realism is not required in a novel, but I think of George Eliot as generally a realistic writer and not a fantasist. Romola is given a happier ending with a constructed family.

There are a number of portraits of actual historical figures: the painter Piero di Cosimo has a minor but amusing and important role, a young Niccolò Machiavelli appears, the pro-Medicean politician Bernardo del Nero is Romola's godfather. But the other major character is Savonarola himself, of whom Eliot gives a fairly full portrait. Eliot, from the Methodists in her family background, is interested in reforming religious figures, and she's fairly sympathetic to Savonarola, and he plays a prominent role both in the history, but also in the lives of the characters. I don't know enough about Savonarola to comment on the accuracy, but he was interesting as portrayed.

Well, it was George Eliot on an off-day, or an off three years, it seems, even if it feels a bit hubristic of me to say it. But, in any case, that's still George Eliot.

From my Classics Club list and for the Back to the Classics challenge at Books and Chocolate.

George Eliot's Adam Bede

"With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader."

So begins Adam Bede, the beginning of George Eliot's career as a novelist, in 1859. There's non-fiction, translations from German, and the volume of short stories, Scenes From A Clerical Life, before this, but her career as a novelist, what we know her for now, begins here.

It's astonishingly assured for a debut.

Adam Bede is a master carpenter, working for Jonathan Burge, but destined somehow for larger things. His father's a drunk (and dies soon); his mother's clingy but solid; his younger brother Seth, whom he loves, is a bit dreamy and not nearly as hard-working as Adam himself. Adam falls in love with the beautiful Hetty Sorrel, even though everyone knows she's vain and irresponsible.

(Though one could argue about that: Hetty's irresponsibility is more commented on, including by the narrator, than it's shown; she does adequately well with the children she's set to watch, and is hard-working at the farm tasks she's assigned. Admittedly she buys earrings for herself with what she earns. Horrors!)

Other characters include the Poysers, Hetty's aunt and uncle, the tenant farmers at Hall Farm; Dinah Morris, another niece of the Poysers, who preaches at Methodist revivals; the local schoolmaster Bartle Massey, a crotchety, woman-hating bachelor; Rev. Irwine, the genial Church of England rector, and his family.  And then there's Arthur Donnithorne, the grandson of the current neighborhood squire, handsome, earnest, and completely lacking in willpower. It's a far-reaching, socially integrated novel that looks at all levels of the society where it takes place. It's like Middlemarch in that regard.

The plot has a major event; you can see it coming, partly, but its magnitude is not clear until quite late and it's shocking. If you've read it, you'll know what I mean; if not, then 'Spoilers,' as Dr. River Song might say, before refusing to explain.

I would say that, while it may be George Eliot, it is still a first novel. I read somewhere, the literary agent Janet Reid's blog, I think, that first novelists should almost always cut from the beginning and expand at the end, and really, that's true of Adam Bede as well. We get quite a long picture of local society to start, often in dialog that's in a thick dialect, and the novel's better than halfway over before the main events kick in. The main events do represent a considerable gut punch, however; and Eliot's benevolent sympathy resolves everything very satisfactorily.

With that said, it is great. If I were ranking George Eliot's novels, I'd place this fourth, I think: Middlemarch has to be first, and I'd put Silas Marner second. It's been a while since I've read The Mill On The Floss, but I'd probably rank that ahead of this, too. (After that, Felix Holt, Daniel Deronda, Romola, I think.) In any case it's a great read.

I had two thoughts in reading this, and if I were a better scholar, I'd do some homework on them, but as it is, I'll just throw them out. First, it's George Eliot, and in 1859 that's still George; who the real George Eliot was only began to break after Adam Bede was published. We all know now that George Eliot is a woman, but how would it be to read this novel thinking it was written by a man? I think that would have an enormous effect, and I think it's one that Eliot is playing with in writing this. For example, she talks at one point about speaking with her friend Adam at one point, years after the novel takes place. What we think of that conversation, it seems to me, would change if we thought that friend was a woman.

SOMEWHAT SPOILER-Y

The second thing that struck me is that the adulterous couple in this is Hester (Hetty) and Arthur, just as it is in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. I tried to build up an argument about what that might mean about Adam Bede, but didn't get there. Wikipedia tells me that George Eliot thought highly of The Scarlet Letter, so I'm sure it's not a coincidence, though the events in each novel are fairly different, with the similarity of the two Arthurs' temperament being the strongest likeness. But a better scholar would be reading George Eliot's letters or something.

END SPOILER-Y

As if reading this weren't its own reward, I read it as part of my Classics Club list and for the Karen K.'s Back To The Classics challenge.

Coming soon! Romola. I'm currently about halfway through.

George Eliot's Silas Marner

"Nay, nay," said Silas, "you're i' the right, Mrs. Winthrop--you're i' the right. There's good i' this world--I've a feeling o' that now; and it makes a man feel as there's a good more nor he can see, i' spite o' the trouble and the wickedness."

--from Chapter XVI

George Eliot's Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861) is the story of Silas Marner, who comes from a Dissenter community in an industrial city in the north of England. Falsely accused of theft, with evidence planted by the man he thought his best friend, he leaves his home and his church to become a recluse and a non-believer and eventually a miser in a town where nobody knows him. He's set to let this real injustice ruin his entire life. Then two events come one upon the other and change that life for him. The gold he'd piled up as a miser is stolen, and a dissolute woman dies on a cold night and her infant daughter crawls to Marner's hearth to keep warm. It's a classic.

You probably don't need me to tell you that. (But if you do, let me say it again: it's a classic! It deserves it!) Though I didn't, you may very well have read it in high school: it's George Eliot and it's short. The fact that people first read it in high school, when the language still seemed antique-y and the dialect difficult, poisoned it for some; but if not, then it's just a delightful story, with a few well-thought out twists. A crime story and love story both.

And it is such a classic that I don't know that I have much to say, or that I dare say much. I reread Middlemarch not too long ago, and I thought to myself, why haven't I read all of George Eliot? After all there is this bunch of green books on my shelves, bought back when I was youthful and had more ambition toward diligence: I bought complete editions when I could find them. (Though Felix Holt somehow went missing from mine.) I still have Romola and Adam Bede and a couple of the minor works to go from this one. (More unread George Eliot. Lucky me!)

Otherwise I have just two things to note: 1.) Silas Marner is in some ways a dry run for Middlemarch. Simpler, yes, and perhaps more sentimental. But it also makes an attempt to present a cross section of a small society, the local gentry, the bourgeois middle class, and the poor. That's like Middlemarch and different from The Mill On The Floss. The nature of a proper marriage is a question in this, and in Middlemarch, and the plot is also driven by a crime in the past that has ramifications in the present. (Bulstrode in Middlemarch, that of Dunstan Cass here.)

And 2.) It made me cry. It's not every book that does that.