A House of Air. Hermione Lee

stone walls…’ Their marriage is a pastoral. Then again, late on in the book, Dorothea has a moment of vision that is in the nature of an epiphany. It is after her sleepless night of extreme misery over Will Ladislaw.

      She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance…

      What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.

      Dorothea’s inspiration, at this late stage, comes from the early-morning sight of the labourer and the wayfarer. This, too, is pastoral. George Eliot, of course, did not deceive herself. If her Warwickshire childhood had been an Eden, it was one that she had lost. But it remained as her surest way of judging life as it hurried forward through the unpeaceful, expanding nineteenth century.

      Introduction to the Folio Society edition

      of Middlemarch, 1999

       Not Herself

      George Eliot, Voice of a Century: A Biography, by Frederick R. Karl

      ‘[Burne-Jones] came across her standing monumentally alone at Waterloo Station, and, as he talked with her, they walked for a short distance along the platform. Suddenly Lewes rushed up to them, panic-pale and breathlessly exclaiming “My God! you are HERE!” George Eliot gravely admitted it. “But,” stammered Lewes, “I left you THERE!”’

      This story (from Graham Robertson’s Time Was) belongs to the 1870s, when George Eliot had become not only a precious charge to G. H. Lewes but also an object of general reverence as the greatest of secular teachers and (after Dickens died) the supreme English novelist. Opinion turned against her not long after her death in 1880. (A book I’ve got here, a Practical Text Book for Senior Classes published by Harrap in 1923, doesn’t even include her in its chart of the Chief Victorian Novelists.) She had to wait for rescue by F. R. Leavis and above all by Professor Gordon Haight, with his nine volumes of letters and a classic biography (1968). Endlessly helpful, Haight reckoned to be able to say what she was doing at any given moment on any day of her life, even before her written diaries begin, in 1854.

      Frederick Karl’s new biography is seven-hundred-odd pages long and has taken him five years’ hard labour. He has consulted, he thinks, all the available material, notably Eliot’s brave but embarrassing letters to Herbert Spencer (‘If you become attached to anyone else, then I must die’). In his acknowledgements he thanks Haight as the most dauntless of scholars, but, six hundred pages on, he calls the 1968 Life ‘narrow, squeezed, protective, and carefully conventional.’ This leads you to expect a bold treatment of some debatable points, but that would be a mistake. Of John Chapman, the publisher in whose house she lodged when she first came to London, he says ‘it is quite possible she and Chapman were intimate, although we will probably never have definite proof one way or another.’

      Why did John Cross, her second husband, twenty years younger than herself, jump from the balcony during their honeymoon into the Grand Canal? Professor Karl examines the evidence at length, and concludes that the incident only seems amusing ‘if we put on hold the pain of the participants.’ In fact he is more protective of his subject than Haight himself, refusing to accept that she was emotionally dependent on a succession of men, beginning with her father and her elder brother Isaac.

      Although she believed that ‘there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it,’ George Eliot invented herself (though probably not more than most women). She let it be understood that her right hand was larger than her left because of the dairy work she did as a girl, but Isaac declared she had never made a pound of butter in her life. She gallantly defied society when she threw in her lot with the all-purpose journalist and philosopher George Henry Lewes, and yet what she longed for was acceptance and solid respectability, the right wallpaper, the right callers on her Sunday afternoons. Karl patiently admits these contradictions, but relates them to the troubled consciousness of Victorian society, with all its divisions and paradoxes. George Eliot trusted passionately in the individual, coming to believe that each of us should create his own church, but at the same time dreading the chaos and disorder to which freedom might lead. To Karl she is the ‘voice of the century.’ All her changes of name, he says—Mary Anne, Marian, Mrs G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, Mater, Mutter, Madonna—correspond to willed transformations, the moral and spiritual versions of self-help.

      Her responsibilities, as she said, weighed heavily on her, and Professor Karl can’t be called light-footed either. For the most part he plods along with dignity by the side of his Mary Anne. He is strong on her years with Chapman’s Westminster Review and on the details of her business affairs. Lewes, acting as her manager, was a sharp customer, and John Blackwood, most noble-minded of publishers, had reason to complain. But respectability had to be earned, or, as Karl puts it, ‘the inflow of money was an indisputable form of empowerment.’ In the background were Lewes’s legal wife and children, whom he supported to the very end.

      The book goes less well when it parts company from hard facts. In the last twenty years or so, Karl tells us, we’ve come to expect from the biographer ‘the psychological analysis of possibilities and potentialities’ from patterns in the work itself. If by ‘we’ he means the readers, then we have brought deconstructionism on ourselves. From these patterns Karl feels able to suggest that the theft of Silas Marner’s life savings from the floor of his cottage ‘does seem linked to Eliot’s uncertainty about her work,’ or perhaps ‘Eliot saw herself as part of a “theft”…she had “stolen” a particular kind of life in the face of social opprobrium,’ while Hetty, the kitten-like dairy-maid in Adam Bede, is a ‘subtle yet demonic double of Eliot’s own desire to rise, achieve, emerge.’ It’s as if he was allowing himself a well-earned holiday from his long search for exactness.

      The search itself is on the grand scale, but never, it seems to me, quite arrives. Frank Kermode was surely right in distinguishing, in George Eliot’s fiction, between the given and the calculated. Dorothea Brooke is ‘given.’ Middle-march, when the novel begins to expand in Chapter 10, is ‘calculated.’ Silas Marner was ‘given’ to such an extent that his image ‘came across my other plans by a sudden inspiration’ and Eliot had to write it before she could go back to the ‘calculated’ Romola. Of course, she was well aware of the difference, telling Cross that ‘in all she considered her best writing, there was a “not-herself” which took possession.’ Certainly it would be difficult to write the story of a not-herself, but that is what is missing from this biography.

      Observer, 1995

       MRS OLIPHANT The Heart and Soul of Carlingford

      I. A Fighting Life

      In the winter of 1860—61, Mrs Margaret Oliphant, a penniless, undaunted little Scottish ‘scribbling woman,’ called at the office of the brothers Blackwood.

      It was a very severe winter, and it was severe on me too…I had not been doing very well with my writing. I had sent several articles to Blackwood’s [Magazine] and they had been rejected. Why, this being the case, I should have gone to them…I can’t tell. But I was in their debt, and had very little to go on with. They shook their heads, of course, and thought it would not be possible to take such a story—both very kind, and truly sorry for me, I have no doubt. I think I see their figures now against the light, standing up, John with his shoulders hunched up, the Major with his soldierly air, and myself all blackness and whiteness in my widow’s dress, taking leave of them as if it didn’t matter, and oh! so much afraid that