George Eliot

The George Eliot titles selected for the NIE World's Greatest Literature canon were Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner, published in back-to-back-to-back years (1859-60-61) when the author was 40, 41 & 42 years old, right at the peak age for writers I have frequently identified (ed.--and which I am passing through right now, this being of interest to myself as I had long anticipated that the years 2010-2012 would mark the pinnacle both of my mental vitality and my career. This did not prove to be the case).  Middlemarch, which appeared a decade after these books and at present seems to be almost unanimously accepted as George Eliot's masterpiece (including by me) was not chosen for this 1958 list, which was aimed at adolescents (and perhaps literary adolescents of all ages), and maybe the travails of Causabon and Dorothea and Fred Vincy and Will Ladislaw was a little too relentlessly mature and serious; or, as seems more likely to me, the literary world at the time was for various reasons unable to appreciate its outstanding and substantial qualities with an enthusiasm equivalent to ours. Many critical assessments of George Eliot from the 1920-1960 period, while they acknowledge her importance, especially in her own time, express at best a lukewarm affection towards her work. She was frequently tarred by the damning label 'sentimental' which may have been a more distasteful term among the literati at that time than it is today (because I think we affect a repulsion that they really felt) . Apart from some of her endings, which, at least in her earlier efforts, was probably her weakest point as a writer, she does not I think immediately strike the modern reader, who has come of age in a culture nearly drowned in treacle, as particularly given over to sentiment, though I suppose I can see what these of our forebears in reading were getting at.         

My personal, and somewhat spare George Eliot library, consisting of two 90s era Penguins, a 90s Modern Library, and turn-of-the-21st century Everyman's. The hardcover Middlemarch is my wife's. It was a St John's book in our era at least, hence the two copies. These are the only three George Eliot books I have read, though Silas Marner at least is on the reading list I have been following since 1994, assuming I live long enough to get to it. There will have been a long lacuna between George Eliot books, as I read the others within a fairly close time:

Mill on the Floss: started September 16, 1995
Middlemarch: March, 1993, in school, finished about half; started again May 26,1998
Adam Bede: December 30, 2000

George Eliot seems to be obviously one of the greatest novelists of all time, yet traditionally this has not always been acknowledged with what is called real feeling. The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner especially were required school readings for many years and developed the reputation among nearly everyone who was not an overeager English major as the sine qua non of boring literature. This impression was so ingrained in me that I was really quite surprised when I took up The Mill on the Floss myself that it was not merely readable but one of the most moving and deeply conceived novels, apart from the ending, that I had ever read. It is very much like a mini-Middlemarch, the protagonist and many of the major characters being children and young people, and the limitations of their activities and concerns which that necessitates, but the detail and expansiveness within the confines of the story and the fine rendering of a very precise literary world are in common with the other book. Adam Bede partakes of these same excellencies of literary technique and vision. I would rank it slightly behind the other two because its characters are not as interesting or humorous, though they are drawn with no less care and detail than those in the other books. 19th century rural England must in general rate among the more vivid and familiar of all literary locales, though I am aware that its character differs according to author, time period, region, and so forth, i.e. Hardy, Emily Bronte, D.H. Lawrence and so on; but George Eliot may be the single most important figure in bestowing upon the Victorian Middle England countryside its essential immortal character. I think so at least.

The NIE editor(s), in the very brief introduction to Adam Bede such as accompanies all the plot summaries in the collection, appeared not to have read the book any time recently, as he describes it as "quite short". Say what? The Everyman's edition above runs 613 pages. And it is not big type.

For Silas Marner, our guide advises, "One should not avoid reading it even if his school permits him to."

George Eliot was born in a house called South Farm on the Arbury Estate, two miles SW of Nuneaton in Warwickshire. The house appears to still stand. It is not clear to me whether it is ever open to the public or not. The doors of the main Arbury Hall, or some of them, look as if they are thrown open on bank holiday weekends in summer. Nuneaton, which seems to have been village in George's day, is now a large suburb of 70,000 nine miles from Coventry and twenty from Birmingham. Griff House, where she lived for most of her first 21 years, also still stands. It  now houses a hotel and tavern. The Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery, if nothing else, has a collection of some George Eliot memorabilia.  

George Eliot was buried in the east section of Highgate Cemetery, somewhat celebrated as a decently-preserved patch of Victoriana, in Highgate, London. These photos and the ticket stub below are from my visit of September 8, 1996.

There is a statue of George Eliot in the center of Nuneaton, and a separate garden and obelisk in the same city. I offered some views on why it is worthwhile to seek out memorial statuary in the William Faulkner article. She is also commemorated by a stone in Westminster Abbey.

The neighborhood of Highgate in 1996 at least still looked recognizably like what a person whose ideas of London are mainly derived from reading novels of the 1920s and 30s would expect it to look like. Brick walls, leafy squares closed in by cast iron fences, long vistas of Edwardian era housefronts, quiet. But it was a long time ago, and my memory may be deceiving me. Probably most people of intellect would have found numerous things about it that repulsed them, but sentiment obviously is too strong in me. Since nothing interesting ever happens to me wherever I go I find a great pleasure in feeling like I could be in the setting of one of the kinds of books I like, where something important at least happened in someone's imagination at one time. This is what life gets reduced to when you lack the capacity to be one of the people pushing it forward.

I don't have any idea what this film version of Mill on the Floss is. It does not appear to be the 1937 British effort whose cast included James Mason as Tom Tulliver. The various modern versions are probably better (I see one of them starred Emily Watson, whom I like, sometimes as maybe more than just a friend, as Maggie) than this, but there is a kind of literate irreverence in these older adaptations that is amusing in small doses.