I
It is fairly certain, as the bicentenary of Eliot’s birth approaches and promotes reflection on her writing, that her literary reputation in 2019 will be very different from what it was on the centenary of her birth in 1919. In that year the decline of interest in and regard for her work that had been evident towards the end of the Victorian era had not yet been halted, and little notice was taken of the centenary outside of Nuneaton and Coventry. It was clearly not regarded as a significant event in the literary world generally, as press comments show: ‘comparatively few among the present generation read the works of this great Victorian novelist’; ‘George Eliot has, I fear, no message for the twentieth century’ (Harris 2007, 42).1 Identified with the high-mindedness, high seriousness and moralism which were widely seen as characteristic of the Victorian sensibility, the general view seems to have been that she could be safely relegated to the nineteenth century along with Lytton Strachey’s set of ‘eminent Victorians’. Though there has been a major change in Eliot’s reputation from the low point of a hundred years ago, it is likely that, while her bicentenary will be generally celebrated, doubts about whether her high literary status is deserved may again be raised in certain circles, such as critics outside of academia and literary journalists. It may be unlikely that one could encounter, ‘George Eliot has, I fear, no message for the twenty-first century’, but in the light of the vicissitudes there have been in critical judgements of her literary status and reputation she may not be invulnerable. It may not be difficult to show that past denigration of Eliot now has little credibility, but this book aims to go much further and show that few nineteenth-century writers in the next hundred years are likely to be seen as more essential in terms of both their art and thought than Eliot.
Though Eliot’s reputation may still have been in steep decline a hundred years ago, 1919 did suggest a turning point since Virginia Woolf published, though anonymously, her now famous essay on Eliot in the Times Literary Supplement in which Middlemarch was proclaimed as ‘the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’ (Haight 1965, 187), a judgement now often printed in paperback editions of the novel. One should remember, however, that Woolf also wrote in that essay that the ‘movement of her mind was too slow and cumbersome to lend itself to comedy’; that readers ‘have good reason’ to ‘fall foul’ of her on account of the fact that her heroines ‘bring out the worst of her, lead her into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic, and occasionally vulgar’ and that ‘she had little verbal felicity’ (Haight 1965, 186, 187, 188), most if not all of which are, at the very least, highly disputable. One had to wait until the 1940s before criticism took a more solidly positive turn, most notably with F. R. Leavis’s inclusion of her as a central figure in his study of the English novel, The Great Tradition (1948). The question as to whether her fiction could be persuasively defended in terms of its form and art remained a contentious issue, but with the publication of Barbara Hardy’s The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (1959) and W. J. Harvey’s The Art of George Eliot (1961), some of the objections made by Henry James and modern critics influenced by him2 were confronted. From this point on, Eliot’s reputation as a major novelist was largely restored, and for most academic critics at least her literary importance was assured and beyond serious question.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, that assurance may have appeared fragile. Various critical schools were negative in their attitudes to her fiction, and it may have seemed likely that her reputation was again going to be subject to serious questioning. Some critics committed to a modernist aesthetic saw her fiction as flawed at its root. She was, for example, identified with the ‘traditional novel’ which ‘assumes that the world and the world as we are made conscious of it are one’, whereas the modernist novel of Woolf and Proust ‘emphasiz[es] the will to form that is characteristic of consciousness’ (Josipovici 1971, 139). Critics influenced by Marxism such as Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton associated her fiction with a conservative ideology, fundamentally supporting the socio-economic status quo with its class divisions and inequalities, and exposed what they saw as the contradictions inherent in her ideological position, and newer forms of materialist criticism have tended to support that stance.3 The major challenge, however, came from the most influential ‘isms’ of recent times: structuralism and post-structuralism , feminism , post-colonialism . Critics influenced by Roland Barthes, such as Colin MacCabe, have reinforced the modernist critique: ‘The conviction that the real can be displayed and examined through a perfectly transparent language is evident in George Eliot’s Prelude to Middlemarch … [T]his language of empiricism runs though the text’ (MacCabe 1978, 18).
Feminist critics of the 1970s found her fiction unsympathetic to feminist political aims and its representation of female characters often uninspiring and conservative in viewpoint, one critic notoriously proclaiming that ‘ Middlemarch can no longer be one of the books of my life’ (Edwards 1972, 238). Debate centred on Eliot among feminist critics has continued since then, but with negative criticism generally more nuanced and defences of her from a variety of points of view common.4 Post-colonial critics have been even more severe in their attacks on what they see as her conservative politics and sympathy with colonialism and imperialism , finding Daniel Deronda and Impressions of Theophrastus Such particularly problematic: ‘For Disraeli’s Tancred and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the East is partly a habitat for native peoples (or immigrant European populations), but also partly incorporated under the sway of empire’ (Said 1993, 63).5
None of these critiques has, however, significantly affected her status as a major novelist. Criticism that operates outside of the more committed perspectives outlined above has continued to devote much attention to her writing. Historically focused criticism that aims to be non-ideological and highlights the social and psychological themes of her novels has been a recurrent feature of critical commentary. There have also been many readings which exploit the breadth of Eliot’s intellectual interests, focusing on her relationship to such literary figures as Goethe , Schiller , Scott , Austen , Dickens , Woolf , and she has been linked to various thinkers and philosophical positions, such as Comtean positivism, Mill , Spinoza . Since the 1970s her work has aroused the interest of critics associated with deconstructionist or psychoanalytical critical theory, notably J. Hillis Miller and Neil Hertz whose writings on Eliot call into question the view that her language is conventionally mimetic by focusing on her intricately metaphoric language and what Hertz refers to as ‘complicating … strands of figuration’ (Hertz 2003, 8).6
II
As Eliot will soon move beyond the bicentenary of her birth, are significant new perspectives on her and her fiction emerging? Around the beginning of the twenty-first century, a group of US critics, all with a strong interest in Eliot, emerged, who wish to break away from the dominant critical perspectives of the late twentieth century, such as conventional...