WITHIN TEN YEARS of her death no one was reading George Eliot. Or no one who mattered. Sales of her work continued steadily in the cheaper editions, but the intellectual élite, the opinion formers, had already moved on. As the nineteenth century spun to a close, new and more apt chroniclers stepped forward to capture the particular combination of despair, ennui and hectic pleasure which marked the 1890s. Hardy and Wilde between them – there was no one whose vision could arc the whole – charted a society that was already dancing on the grave of Victorianism.
The 1919 centenary of Eliot’s birth failed to reverse the decline in her reputation. Now that all her oldest and staunchest friends had died – Cara in 1905, Sara in 1899, Edith in 1901, Elma in 1903 – there was no one to agitate for a proper memorial. An attempt to raise money for a commemorative corner in Coventry library failed, despite the Newdigates stepping in with the gift – appropriate for the daughter of their one-time forester – of some oak panels. But the truth was that by now Joseph Conrad and Henry James had used their un-English eyes and ears to produce a new kind of novel, which expressed doubts about the ability of language to represent the social world that had stood at the heart of Eliot’s work. Before long, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would take the novel even further away from the certain world of Middlemarch.
John Cross could have done something about the centenary. He did not die until 1924 and there was no new marriage to distract him from his job as Chief Worshipper. Ironically, though, it had been his attempt in 1885 to honour his wife in the three-volume Life which had led to her falling so spectacularly out of favour. The version of George Eliot that Cross presents in his well-meaning work is heavy with Victorian righteousness. His Eliot is the Sibyl, the Sage, the earnest talking head who urges the world to try harder. Cross’s method of presentation was to quote extensively from his late wife’s letters, linking them with small contextualising comments from himself. The rationale, he boasted, was to let Eliot tell her story in her own words. But these are not her words. Or rather they are only some of them. Cross pruned everything from Eliot’s letters that might sit badly with his authorised version. Anything catty, sexy or funny has disappeared completely. ‘It is not a Life at all,’ exclaimed Gladstone when he read it. ‘It is a Reticence in three volumes.’1 People who had known Eliot felt cheated. William Hale White, the novelist who had worked with her during the early Strand days, felt obliged to write to the Athenaeum and say: ‘I do hope that in some future edition, or in some future work, the salt and spice will be restored to the records of George Eliot’s entirely unconventional life. As the matter now stands she has not had full justice done to her, and she has been removed from the class – the great and noble church, if I may so call it – of the Insurgents, to one more genteel, but certainly not so interesting.’2
It was an extraordinary paradox. The woman whose private life had been too scandalous – and too sexually scandalous at that – for the High Victorian age now seemed too staid and dreary for the naughty nineties. George Eliot had become like an old aunt at a youngsters’ party whose current reputation for a rebellious youth was confined to the occasional daring cigarette.
And so Eliot languished until the 1940s. It was then that F. R. Leavis picked her off the back shelf, dusted her down and gave her a place in his Canon, that oddly authorised version of literary history. Now she sat alongside Dickens and Shakespeare as a maker of the English essence. But just as had been the case with Cross, Leavis’s attempt to rehabilitate Eliot led to her being buried even deeper. By the 1970s a new generation of critics had arrived to do battle with Leavis’s phallic pretensions. Women writers who had been excluded from the feast, such as the Brontës, were reread with attention and claims made for their absolute significance. Others who were all but unknown were brought back into print by the new feminist printing presses. And even classic texts which had stood proudly down the central spine of English literature were given a new, unfamiliar look. Armed with the sharp bright tools of psychoanalytic and post-structuralist theory, critics now worked to find unauthorised meanings in novels which had previously seemed as closed as a cobwebby chest.
Eliot did not suit this new intellectual mood. Critics favour texts that serve their purpose. Post-structuralists found Dickens very much to their taste. The loose tags in his writing offered them an easy entry point from where they could start their meticulous burrowing: feminists liked the Brontës, Emily Dickinson and even Jane Austen, all of whom could be made to talk thrillingly of psychic and social rebellion. But George Eliot, who clung to a male pseudonym, was invited to dine at Oxford and wrote from the centre of high culture, seemed to be exactly the kind of dead white male in whom seventies people could have no interest.
The snub was unfair. Critics accused Eliot of dogmatism when it was they who wrote out of totalitarianising systems. For instance, Eliot had never rejected feminism, but she shied away from a single reading of it, always insisting that the issues were more complex than her friends like Bessie and Barbara, with their arguments grounded in economic liberalism, liked to believe. She knew from her own, often painful, experiences that it was possible to be deeply dependent on male attention and yet enjoy a career which involved beating the best of them. To combine a belief in marriage with an approval of divorce. To want the best for women, yet insist that ‘the best’ did not necessarily mean qualifying as a doctor. And despite what her critics said, George Eliot had never clung, Canute-like, to the literary programme of High Victorianism. Her last published book, Theophrastus Such, was a dazzling calling-card for Modernism. Here was a narrator who fibbed, a text made up of allusions to other kinds of writing, the whole thing wrapped up with a bitter glee.
Yet all the signs point to the fact that, had she lived and written longer, Eliot’s next book would have represented a turning away from the worldly exhaustion of Theophrastus Such. Some time in 1877 she had written a fragment for a new work, which suggests a return to the time and landscape of her first novel, Adam Bede. The book was to be set among a group of families living in the Midlands at the beginning of the nineteenth century. One of the main characters is the suggestively named Richard Forrest, yet another version of her father, who is described as being ‘not an ordinary tenant farmer’ but ‘a man of weight in his district’.3
From the time of beginning The Mill on the Floss in 1859 it had been Eliot’s habit to plan a book, then put it aside for another piece of work. Thus ‘The Lifted Veil’ had cut across The Mill, Silas Marner across Romola, Felix Holt across The Spanish Gypsy. Assuming this pattern continued, it seems likely that George Eliot would have turned back from the precipice represented by Theophrastus Such and moved once again to the middle ground, ‘the rich Central plain’ of Richard Forrest. This was not a retreat, but a reclaiming of the social and moral centre as the only place from where the future could properly be grasped. She had done it during the holy war, giving up her early refusal to go to church in favour of the other less glamorous calls on her integrity. She had done it again during her relationship with Lewes when, to the embarrassment of feminist friends, she insisted on claiming the identity of a conventionally married woman. It was not cowardice, although it could sometimes look like that. Eliot was showing in her private life, as she demanded in her fiction, that our relationship to the future is like that of medieval stonemasons working on a great cathedral. While we may work painfully and hard, we are always working blind. The results of our labour will not be seen until many years after our death.
If all this sounds familiar, that is because the dilemmas in which Eliot and her readers found themselves resemble our own. Two hundred years of industrialisation have fragmented the landscape before sticking it back together in virtual terms, via the modem. ‘Community’ has been hooked out of an imagined village pump past and pressed into service to describe something as culturally variegated as the entire black population of Great Britain. Nationalism is increasingly disrupted and made bloody by claims based on ethnicity. Calls for devolution criss-cross with demands for a single European currency. Town and country dwellers declare themselves abandoned by each other. After decades of agnosticism, the flourishing Evangelical wing of the Anglican church competes with the biggest surge of interest in Buddhism, not to mention psychotherapy, since the seventies. Feminism, which once seemed such a simple good, reveals itself as a set of conflicting agendas.
George Eliot was the last Victorian who believed that it was possible to face these kinds of crises without shattering into shards. She would have understood where Post-Modernism came from, recognised the seductive call to retreat from the centre, to take refuge in partial narratives and solutions, to despair of ‘the real’. But she would have hated its defeatedness. For Eliot believed that it was possible for society to move forward from the centre. The pace would be slow, certainly, the mood both sceptical and humble. But there would also be value, purpose, a sense that this was right. Eliot despaired of Progress, with its crude ‘Victorian’ triumphalism and lack of doubt. In its place she proposed Meliorism, a slow, consensual grasping towards something better. It is Meliorism which we need now.