The 1860s / Romola (1863) and The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

Abstract

The publication of Silas Marner in 1861 brought Marian further critical acclaim and even more gratifying sales figures than those for her previous books. Only four years after Scenes of Clerical Life ‘George Eliot’ was established as one of the foremost novelists of the day and the creator of a distinctive fictional world with a distinctive apport. In Virginia Woolf’s memorable formulation: ‘Over them all broods a certain romance, the only romance that George Eliot allowed herself — the romance of the past’. But as Woolf went on to observe, ‘the mist of recollection gradually withdraws’.¹ Marian’s six subsequent books are different from their predecessors in subject, form and aesthetic preoccupation; and their sources — their germs or millet seeds — are not found in her early experience. It is true that two of her later novels are set in ‘Loamshire’ in the early 1830s; but neither Felix Holt nor Middle-march simply offers the faithful representing of commonplace things. The former is a political novel with a tract-for-the-times dimension; while the latter, subtitled ‘a study of provincial life’, is less the étude of a genre painter than the oeuvre of a social scientist. This appreciable divide between the early and later works needs to be accounted for. The place to begin is with Romola Marian’s fourth novel, which she was later to say marked a turning point in her life: ‘I began it a young woman, — I finished it an old woman’ (Cross, ii, 273).

The sleepless sense that a new code of duty and motive needed to be restored in the midst of the void left by lost sanctions and banished hopes never ceased to stimulate her faculties and to oppress her spirits.

Lord Acton