You have written about the continuing importance of reading Victorian fiction. why read george eliot?
In principle, I think it is a mistake to think that the most relevant literature is the most recent literature. victorian realism is extraordinarily powerful, in ways that are not fully recognized, and george eliot is the great representative of victorian realism in ‘all ordinary human life’.
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if you want to read literature that sets out to create a holding ground for raw human material, for human struggles, hardships, and celebrations, then you must read george eliot. the goal of the great Victorian novel was to include as richly as possible that diverse and difficult territory.
If you had to place it in a literary context, what other realist writers would you put it with?
above all, leo tolstoy. but if we’re talking about the english context, i guess elizabeth gaskell, anthony trollope, and anne brontë. but she is in a different league than them. the only person who can touch her as a novelist, in my opinion, is tolstoy.
if we think of later literary movements, we might think of naturalism and modernism. what are the advantages of realism over these later movements?
I tend to be wary of these titles and periods, because I think of reading as a kind of time travel. but think, for example, of d h lawrence reading when he was a young man in the province of eastwood in nottinghamshire. He told Jessie Chambers, the girl he was reading with, that it was George Eliot who “started putting all the action in.”
“victorian realism is extraordinarily powerful, in ways that are not fully recognized, and george eliot is the great representative of victorian realism in ‘all ordinary human life’”
here we have the feeling that we are moving away from the novel as mere history or entertainment, and approaching the novel as a great internal psychological investigation. lawrence the modernist writer follows in the tradition of the great provincial writer george eliot. the crucial method that she develops concerns psychology. it’s as if she understood human beings better than any novelist.
historically, george eliot was also writing at a time when many people were losing faith in god. if those people no longer found orthodox religion credible, they wanted something to replace a sense of meaning and purpose in the world.
You might ask that if you don’t have something magical to fall back on, what is the purpose of what you’re doing? what would make life worth living? These are the questions embedded in ordinary life in George Eliot’s work.
that’s an interesting connection between george eliot and d h lawrence. although they were both from the middle lands, weren’t they from quite different classes? Lawrence’s father was a coal miner.
george eliot was not working class like lawrence’s father. although, if you remember, lawrence’s mother came from a slightly higher class and was very interested in education, so there was tension in her marriage.
but in the case of george eliot, or mary anne evans as she was born, her father had worked his way up from being a craftsman to eventually becoming the land manager of an estate for the local aristocracy. then, he was an artisan from the upper working classes beginning to establish himself within a middle class environment.
but he always thought he was poorly educated and wanted his daughter to have a proper education. You can see some of that story in The Floss Mill, which is a transmuted autobiography of Marian Evans’ early life.
but it’s not just a question of class because virginia woolf, for example, one of the beacons of modernism, greatly admired george eliot. she thought that middlemarch was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. I think it’s a wonderful idea, the novel written for ‘adult people’. the novel is no longer treated as an escape or a mere pastime. rather, the novel offers you, as an adult, the best way to think in the most powerful way possible about human existence in terms of psychology and purpose.
why did you choose to recommend the story ‘janet’s repentance’ of scenes from clerical life?
I was thinking in part of his chronology: it comes from his first published work. but it’s also short, so it’s a good starting point if you’re coming to george eliot for the first time.
let’s remember that it’s kind of a miracle that george eliot became george eliot, which he did at the age of 37 or 38. She had formed an unconventional relationship with George Henry Lewes, who was already married. This gave him the confidence to start a second life and transform from Marian Evans into the novelist George Eliot.
before becoming a novelist, she had been a formidable self-taught intellectual who practically ran westminster magazine in london. but she was not satisfied with being an intellectual, because she needed something that was contained both in the power of feeling and in ideas.
‘janet’s repentance’ is the best story in scenes of clerical life, her first work of fiction. It is about a woman, Janet, who is married to Dempster. he is a local lawyer and alcoholic who, in his increasing degeneration, abuses and beats his wife.
george eliot’s first move as a realist novelist is this: of course, janet is a victim of her husband. but this is not a simple category. where normal people will have one thought, george eliot will have many. Janet, though the victim, begins to conspire in what has happened to her and starts drinking herself. that complicates her life.
She also sides with her husband in local religious politics. a new man comes to his little town, a man named mr tryan, who is evangelical and therefore from a different religious party than dempster. she joins her husband in wanting to finish off this man.
however, when she goes to visit a poor old lady who is dying, janet stops at the door of the sick room and tryan, her husband’s enemy, is there talking to the woman. As she speaks, Janet can’t see him but she can hear him. Her normal prejudices built around seeing her are held in abeyance, and she listens to the tone in which he speaks to the sick woman.
janet no longer thinks of this man as an enemy, but suddenly, to her surprise, she discovers that he is a human being just the same. that second thought is simple, but he is also powerful. it’s a time when convention breaks down and something real happens.
That’s why we shouldn’t dismiss Victorian realism as conventional. He is not only interested in the day to day; he is interested in what happens within the day-to-day and in revelation: suddenly seeing the inside of someone manifested in the outside world.
“Victorian realism is not only interested in the everyday; he is interested in what happens within the day to day, and in revelation: suddenly seeing the inside of someone manifested in the outside world”
finally, janet is kicked out by dempster. You would have thought that this would have been a great relief for her because she hadn’t dared to go out on her own, but in reality she feels devastated.
again, you see the complication. It’s not that leaving dempster is the solution to all his problems: rather, he doesn’t know what to do, and suddenly he finds himself faced with the big question of what his purpose is.
‘sympathy’ is a word often associated with eliot. What role does sympathy play in this story?
as janet listens to tryan comforting the dying woman, she hears the pure tones of human sympathy. she asks the dying woman to pray for him as well, as she fears death and admits that one of her worst weaknesses is cowering in bodily pain. As a result, Janet begins to feel a certain sympathy for Tryan: she thinks that he is a human being too, that he has problems like hers.
So, likeability here has to do with the sudden formation of a relationship. it may not be entirely certain, it may be across great distances, but there is an emotional and imaginative connection. ‘sympathy’ is better than the word ’empathy’, because it conveys the fact that although you may feel something for someone, you are not equal to them and you know it.
all the struggles to feel for and with people are involved in that word ‘sympathy’. In George Eliot, although it seems like a soft word, it becomes complicated and profound. Without sympathy as a small version of love, human beings have very little to fall back on.
janet and tryan continue to develop a close relationship.
george eliot is not afraid, even in a post-religious age, of the idea that people need to be saved. tryan saves janet in a secular way by the fact that on some level he loves her and she loves him.
their relationship is not sexually consummated, but there is something sexual about it. they develop a relationship in which he is her support, her counselor, the person who will help her in the despair of her alcoholism, so that when he dies, she is her work; she is in memory of him.
their relationship is about having someone to love and be loved. Despite modern skepticism, George Eliot continues to believe in the strong positive needs that make people feel vulnerable, and are often ashamed or denied.
When Janet is chased out of her house by the furious Dempster in the middle of the night, Eliot writes that she “seemed to be looking blankly into her own future.” Could you tell us about the presentation of time in the story?
yes. Suddenly, Janet is released from a situation in her marriage that seemed endless. the present becomes very abrupt and detached from the past, but it also seems to have no future. the future appears ‘blank’, as george eliot says.
george eliot is very interested in those moments of transition, even though they don’t always feel like a transition. theoretically, you know there was a past and there will be a future. however, you do not feel that the present moment is going to lead to anything; you don’t know that there will necessarily be a story or a narrative; you could be stuck between things.
is brilliant at depicting those “in-between” moments that are deeply uncomfortable and disorienting in time or space. she can detect them, while we may not have understood or even noticed.
it’s similar to when dorothea marries casaubon in the middle of march, and on their honeymoon finds herself back in that void, not knowing what’s going on or where it’s leading. it is in those moments that people fight with all their resources to see if they can evolve, without knowing if there will be an emergency. that sense of crisis and situation in which time is almost suspended is crucial for george eliot.
you mentioned eliot’s transformation into a novelist. Could you tell us about her relationship with john blackwood and how that had an impact on her fiction?
The relationship with Blackwood took place almost entirely through George Henry Lewes. Marian Evans was an intelligent but unattractive woman. she had a series of shameful and humiliating relationships with older men and was rejected in various ways. Eventually, although she was by no means ideal because she couldn’t marry him, she found her match in George Henry Lewes.
It was George Henry Lewes who took over the business side of things. he was the one who gave her the confidence to try again to be a writer. she had had some initial attempts at fiction, but not many, and he encouraged her.
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It was he who, through his literary contacts, made a connection with Blackwood. Initially, he said George Eliot was a man and tried to protect her because Blackwood might be critical.
blackwood was very concerned about “janet’s regret” with its risqué theme of alcoholism and wife abuse. he was a decent man but very conservative. it was up to george henry lewes to tell blackwood that he shouldn’t criticize his friend george eliot because, being very sensitive, he wouldn’t write anymore. In fact, Lewes had to protect George Eliot for a lifetime from reviews and criticism of her because she was so insecure.
blackwood became a very loyal fan. However, there was a difficult moment when, encouraged by George Henry Lewes, George Eliot decided to quit because a rival publisher was offering him a huge amount of money for a jukebox. He later returned to Blackwood, regretting leaving the old firm, and achieved great success with plays like Middlemarch.
Is it significant that Lewes claimed that George Eliot was a man in his initial correspondence with Blackwood?
yes. Marian Evans despised many female novelists. if she was a proto-feminist, it wasn’t because she wanted to support women writers. she felt that some women, whether through her own fault or not, were letting down the seriousness of being a woman. she therefore thought it best to disassociate herself from frivolous novelists, so that the novel would be taken seriously.
“She felt that some women, whether through their own fault or for another reason, were belittling the seriousness of being a woman. so, she thought it best to disassociate… ”
and then, he used the male pseudonym ‘george eliot’. She had gone by a variety of names—mary anne, mary ann, marian and so on—but it was crucial for her to have this new name. some people think it’s a tribute to george henry lewes, (‘to george i owe it’) but we don’t know. It was crucial to her, essentially, that she was creating a better version of herself.
Am I right in thinking that Eliot’s first full-length novel, Adam Bede, began life as one of the stories set in scenes of clerical life?
It was originally planned as an extension of the scenes of clerical life. Already in ‘Janet’s Repentance’, he was clearly moving towards the need for the full canvas of the novel. He then went from “Janet’s Regret” to write Adam Bede, which includes a transmuted version of his own father as Adam Bede.
can you tell us about that novel?
The novel can be thought of as a triangle, with characters at its points. There’s Adam Bede: Tough, morally scrupulous, and self-made, but with an edge in that toughness. So, he doesn’t like his co-workers putting down their tools at six o’clock just because it’s six o’clock. he likes to get the job done. It’s that kind of artisan rigor. it’s completely straight and decent.
There is also Hetty, a beautiful young woman with whom he falls in love. hetty hasn’t even started to think yet, and she doesn’t need to: she’s a fantasist. Adam Bede loves her and they are engaged, but—here’s the complication—there is another man.
that other man is arthur donnithorne, who is a squire and becomes adam bede’s patron. It is Arthur who takes Hetty from Adam without him knowing. he seduces her and goes to the army, not knowing that she hetty is pregnant.
Suddenly, this provincial novel goes crazy. hetty leaves her house and embarks on a journey to try to find arthur while she is heavily pregnant. her world becomes a nightmare and she has to endure the most terrible thoughts. it is as if a limited human being is thrown into a situation without limits.
You might have thought George Eliot would have been critical of his character, Hetty, since she’s beautiful but not very smart. But such considerations suddenly vanish (just as they had occurred to Janet in relation to Tryan) when she puts Hetty in this dire situation: pregnant, wandering aimlessly, unable to find Arthur, not knowing what to do with the baby she’s having. is about to be born. she about to be born and thinking of committing suicide.
At one point, he sits next to a pool where he could drown. she had been a vain creature, but here his vanity is transformed. he begins to feel his own arms, and the pleasure of that feeling, the warmth and roundness of the flesh, makes him think that he must live, that he must not kill himself. what had been foolish and weak before is now something on the side of life. george eliot loves those transitions.
thinking about the love triangle, the relationship between adam and arthur reaches a critical point in the chapter called ‘crisis’.
it was a chapter that george henry lewes had partly suggested: bringing the two men together to create a kind of implosion. But what is notable about this is not the anger and violence on Adam’s part, although that is there. Rather, what is interesting, in one of those perspective shifts that are so powerful in George Eliot, is the effect on Arthur.
when arthur realizes how damaged and hurt adam is by his actions, he experiences something irrevocable. At that moment, irresponsible Arthur, who is not a bad man but is sexually in love with Hetty, suddenly sees for the first time, looking at Adam’s face, that there are things you just can’t get away with.
“suddenly, this provincial novel goes crazy”
That reality principle, that there will be consequences, is the amazing depth of the “crisis” chapter. it is not about the sensationalism of bringing the two men together in a possible fight. Instead, it explores “morality” (which might otherwise seem like a very boring Victorian concept) as an internal psychological process, in which Arthur realizes the indelible consequences of his actions.
in those moments when arthur realizes the terrible damage he has done, you get an inner language, what lawrence called “action” in the “interior”, which is not spoken aloud. it’s what we all say silently in our hearts, minds, or brains, and sometimes we don’t even want to know we’re saying it.
technically, this is called free indirect speech. it is not a direct speech in which a character says something out loud, or “thinks that…”. rather, it is an ambiguous speech that follows arthur’s train of thought, even though he himself does not know or want to know what he is thinking. that’s one of the important technical moves george eliot makes.
Thinking further about this psychological understanding, you have elsewhere drawn a parallel between eliot as a realist novelist and psychological field theory. could you explain that parallel?
Basically, it is about getting into areas, often of secrecy, where suddenly what will not be said out loud in society, however, begins to find expression in a secret language of unconsummated confession.
These areas can be geographic or determined by geography. for example, when hetty leaves her house and goes to the country looking for arthur, it is not only that she is in the desert but that she is in a different psychological place driven by that desert. Her thoughts almost seem to be outside of her, as she sees the pool as the site of the suicide.
for other people, these fields go inside. For example, there is the crooked banker Mr Bulstrode in Middle March who wants to forget his past, but eventually that past begins to be discovered and he begins to feel terribly afraid.
george eliot said it’s like trying to look out a window on a dark night. when the lights come on behind you in the room, you can’t see out the window: what you see are reflections of yourself and the room behind you.
That’s a wonderful image of the creation of a psychological field: you want to look outside but suddenly, with the reflection, you’re going back to the past. you cannot leave the zone, in this case of guilt, that has been created around you. it’s a place you now have to psychologically inhabit.
You mentioned that Eliot achieves psychological interiority through free indirect speech. Jane Austen is also known for her deft use of free indirect speech. what is the relationship between the two? was eliot inspired by austen? Did he learn from her?
I think he learned from her, although there is no explicit record of this. it’s a deep and complicated question you’re asking here, but i guess it’s different in george eliot for this reason: she’s completely obsessed with secrets.
it is true that jane austen is very committed to the privacy of the public, and in that sense there is a similarity in terms of hidden psychology and hidden ways of being. but it’s much more tense in george eliot than it is in jane austen, because his characters often want these things to come out or are afraid they will come out.
for george eliot, psychology is doubly important because there is nothing else. that is, if you want to find purpose or meaning in life, you will have to find it in this psychological waiting ground. she does not subscribe to a firm theology; she is a great reader of philosophy but she does not believe in a single philosophical system. In a world without answers, the great contention ground is within the human psyche, with all its mess.
that is why george eliot’s realism is not only about the external. it’s about trying to find that language that hides below the surface. in a better world, a world we don’t yet have, more would be outside. but much is hidden, unfulfilled, and unappreciated.
You described the flossing mill as a transmuted autobiography. how is that?
In a sense, it’s simple. Maggie Tulliver is a portrait of Marian Evans when she was a young woman: she has powerful emotions and a strong desire to be educated, and she wants a life that is not just boring and normal.
You look around a room and see a mother, a father, a brother, furniture, and think: what unites them all? what makes them more than bits and pieces? what is the meaning of these things?
That’s why in my book the transferred life of george eliot I talk about george eliot’s syntax, not simply in terms of his sentence structure, but in a deeper sense as a way of putting things together in your mind. and that’s what maggie tulliver is looking for: links to create some kind of meaning.
But, as Maggie moves from her romantic childhood to the dawn of sexuality, she finds herself with the difficulty of having sex. This is what cost Marian Evans the most.
maggie meets an attractive man, stephen guest, who is already engaged to his cousin. Maggie is a decent person and doesn’t want to betray his cousin, but the power of Eros and his own emotional needs are very strong.
what is george eliot doing at the floss mill? She creates a situation that is not autobiographical in the sense that it actually happened, but it is autobiographical in the sense that it is the kind of thing George Eliot and Marian Evans are most interested in. it is a humiliating middle ground. Meaning, Maggie starts to elope with Stephen, but halfway aboard the ship, she decides she can’t go through with it. she is the worst of both worlds: she has lost her reputation but she has also given up her man.
Almost everyone despises Maggie when she returns, except for her mother. This is surprising, because her mother had been completely insignificant in her life, compared to the father she adored, just as Marian Evans adored her own father.
but in her great crisis, in her great humiliation, maggie hears four words from her mother that marian evans never heard from her mother: ‘you have a mother.’ That is the bond, the love, that Marian Evans herself had never had.
an important aspect of the mill on the floss is the relationship between maggie and her brother tom tulliver, who is a real life version of george eliot’s brother isaac. But here, for once, it’s not her father or her brother offering the love, it’s her mother, and Marian Evan’s mother is never really there for her, as we say now.
can you tell us more about tom tulliver?
tom tulliver is a tough man. he is tougher than adam bede, who was softened by what happened to hetty and his suffering. tom is much stiffer. he’s practical and maggie looks up to him, but she knows she’s different from him and, in a way, deeper.
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isaac evans, the brother that marian evans adored, was like that. When Marian Evans formed a relationship with George Henry Lewes, Isaac would not speak to her. he would not speak to her until very close to the year of her death when, after lewes’s death, she was officially married for the first time. then and only then would she communicate.
the pain of losing isaac’s love goes very powerfully to the floss mill. It’s a mixture of admiration for Tom, combined with the counterjudgment that he’s wrong in judging her.
“for george eliot, psychology is doubly important because there is nothing else: in a world without answers, the great ground of contention is within the human psyche, with all its disorder”
It’s a wonderful conflict between loving someone and having critical thoughts about them that you can’t say out loud, or if you do say them, then you’ve forfeited them, simply to be accepted because you have. something bad too. this is the kind of messy relationship george eliot was so into.
in the novel, maggie and tom drown in the great flood.
This is the culmination of the novel. they are in a kind of emotional climax. Maggie sets out on a journey through the flood to his brother Tom to rescue him from drowning. she doesn’t, and they both drown together.
It’s almost a fantasy of how they could meet, not in life but in catastrophic death. it shows the emotional desire for some kind of reunion that could not happen in life.
middlemarch is longer and more narratively complex than adam bede.
It’s like several novels in one. It began as two separate novels, one about the town of Middlemarch and Ella’s new doctor Ella Lydgate, and one about Dorothea, a young woman who has great intelligence and even greater emotional needs and aspirations.
george eliot started to tie these separate novels together and incorporate new elements so that there are four or five things going on at the same time. the wonderful thing about that is that the novel ceases to be linear. suddenly you go from one character or society to another, throughout the novel instead of across. is a webform.
as you think about the relationship between dorothea and her scholarly husband casaubon, you suddenly come back to the relationship between lydgate and rosamond, who (like hetty in adam bede) is a beautiful but selfish young woman.
It’s as if you’re being taught to move from one life to another and you become, as a reader, a kind of novelist: someone who can understand different people of different classes, ages and genders.
The idea is that, while you read successively, the events that are narrated happen simultaneously. it makes you appreciate that there are so many lives interconnected and separate at the same time in this small world. it’s just a provincial town, but it’s an image of the whole world.
that is why george eliot has the metaphor of the web, of things that are interconnected through different histories. that’s the complicated form of middlemarch which, I’d argue, must be the best novel in the language.
That’s a huge compliment. Why is it the best novel in the language?
because it’s a novel you would go for in terms of ordinary problems, vocation or marriage problems, all kinds of resolutions, losses and frustrations. here is dorothea who, in an earlier age, might have been a great religious figure, but there is no religion and no role for women. so what happens to that content in a person when it has no form? Here’s Lydgate, a doctor with a strong sense of calling but with certain weaknesses, particularly sexual foibles. Will he manage to do the big thing that he wants to do?
It’s not like ordinary people just started being ordinary and stayed ordinary. there are extraordinary things that happen, and there are also great disappointments. it is the hidden story of what does not happen that is constantly repeated throughout the novel.
as for the relationship between dorothea and casaubon, dorothea makes a bad decision to marry him. she stupidly chooses to marry an elderly scholar who is nothing like the idol she had been searching for. and clearly, sexually, she is just as powerless as she is in her work that she ultimately never produces.
you have feelings for dorothea because casaubon is unattractive and horrible to her. however, george eliot also manages to make you feel for casaubon. it’s an almost impossible feat.
this is how your mind will expand when reading the novel: you feel for dorothea, you feel for casaubon, and you feel for both almost simultaneously, in the space between them at the same time.
You’ve talked about George Eliot’s ability to create remarkable shifts in perspective. can you explain how he does that with casaubon in this novel?
she starts a chapter by simply asking: ‘but why always dorothea?’ all the neighbors think casaubon is boring and unattractive: dorothea’s sister objects to his blinking eyes and white moles.
but then george eliot chimes in and says suppose we move away from external estimates to ask what is really going on inside casaubon. Suddenly you see, for example, that her unkindness to Dorothea when she offers to help him with her work is not simply rejection. it stems from her fear that she knows he will never be able to finish this job. she doesn’t think that, it’s her own fear, projected.
So, they’re people who should be inches from each other in their marriage, but they’re separated by a great chasm of misunderstanding because her love seems like criticism to him, and his criticism of her seems to be hate instead of love. Of something. unfortunate.
Dorothea, in the midst of her victimization, chooses to help him. this is not female submission. she doesn’t love him, she just pities him, but she realizes that she is the bigger body.
“it is as if you are being taught to go from one life to another and you become, as a reader, a kind of novelist: someone who can understand different people of different classes, ages and genders”
casaubon is going to die, and dorothea wants to be ‘the mercy’ of his sorrows. she does not say ‘merciful towards’. she thinks it should be ‘mercy’, as if there is a thing called mercy that can exist in the world and must be embodied. She therefore thinks that regardless of what has happened to her, she will be Casaubon’s mercy, as George Eliot often is for her characters.
I like your idea of the middlemarch reader learning to appreciate life as some kind of interconnected web. remembering adam bede, is that exactly the kind of skill that hetty lacks?
yes. hetty would read novels, if she read at all, for the fantasy of eloping with arthur. when you read middlemarch, this adult novel, as virginia woolf says, you get the feeling of complicated human geometry: you move in different angles, perspectives, and dimensions.
Beneath the conscious behavior, or the words that are spoken, lies the depth of the unconscious, the little things that happen in transition. then suddenly you have the most powerful working model in fiction of what human life is like. It’s as if George Eliot had somehow found the building blocks, the DNA, of existence. she can see that whole framework, all the underlying things, all the different connections, as well as bringing out the individuality of feelings within each person separately.
this is equivalent to an almost superhuman activity: being able to feel with people, but criticize them; being able to imagine radically different people, seeing how radically different they are; to be able to bring them together in a marriage and feel for both of them at the same time. is constantly creating content that breaks through simple containers and makes you think of things more difficult than comfortable.
To give just one example, in the marriage between lydgate and rosamond, the doctor knows that they are in financial difficulties and asks his wife for money. Rosamond doesn’t want to do that and doesn’t realize it. Lydgate desperately wants to keep her marriage together, even though she knows she is falling apart.
we read that “their marriage would be a mere bitter irony if they could no longer love each other.” and then comes this devastating phrase: “in marriage, the certainty, “she will never love me very much”, is easier to bear than the fear, “i will not love her anymore”.
He doesn’t dare to think that he will stop loving her. She doesn’t even dare to think about the sentences produced by George Eliot’s syntax, though they are in her own consciousness.
so, instead of thinking that he won’t love her anymore, he has to think that “she will never love me very much”. Isn’t it wonderful that ‘much’ is the most powerful and hurtful thought, the one she has to put up with? It’s not the extreme black and white that she’ll never love him at all, but more of a dark gray middle area that’s typical of midmarch: “never much.” those are the terrible compromises people have to live with.
your last recommendation is the life of george eliot from jw cross. who was johnny cross and what was his relationship with george eliot?
Johnny Cross was a young friend of George Henry Lewes and George Eliot, or Marian Lewes as she was then known, and had almost the status of a nephew. When Lewes died, she spent more time with Johnny Cross, who comforted her. they read dante and tennyson’s ‘in memoriam’ together, as part of a process of mourning and seclusion.
he had waited so long to find someone and then he lost lewes. she always needed someone to lean on. Even though Johnny Cross was decades her junior, she turned to him and married him.
It was the first formal legal marriage he had. That’s when Isaac Evans wrote to congratulate her, twenty years too late.
there was a terrible incident in venice on their honeymoon when cross, who was depressive, threw himself out of the window. some people think, we can never know for sure, that he didn’t want to sexually consummate the marriage. If that were true, and I hope it isn’t, then it must have been a terrible experience for George Elliot. she had come full circle and was still ugly, as she had always feared she would be.
Whatever the truth of that particular story, Johnny Cross later wrote the life of George Eliot. The great achievement of this work is that there is very little written by Cross himself. He tried to create a surrogate autobiography, compiling three volumes of letters and diary entries in chronological order, from Marian Evans to George Eliot.
“we write biographies as if they could take the place of novels, but they can’t: novels offer more truth than biographies”
in the life of george eliot, you begin to read between the lines. it’s like you have the original text and you have to guess; does not fill in the gaps. You start to see the suffering of Marian Evans. there are some details, like the sexual details, that he leaves out, but nonetheless, you get the general sense of the struggle he had in those first 37 or 38 years to grow up, find a life, and be someone.
george eliot always said he didn’t want a biography and wouldn’t write an autobiography. the only reason to have either, she said, would be if he showed an equivalent person that, despite and because of all their struggles, they can make something of themselves. well, that’s what you can feel, particularly in the first of the three volumes.
the cross approach has served me as a model, as a biographer. I think biographies are often bad fiction. we fill in the gaps and offer explanations and become friends. we write biographies as if they could take the place of novels, but they can’t: novels offer more truth than biographies.
as a cross, i try in my own book to use as many george eliot words as possible. but I reuse the words not only from his diaries and letters, but also from literature itself, because the deepest biography will always be the one that gets into the heartfelt mentality of the author.
i like to think that there might be a part of us that looks out from within our lives, rather than god, trying to do some passionately informed thinking in relation to self and others. that’s what the novelist does, and I’d like the novelist to be taken seriously as the producer of the deepest form of human thought there is.
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