Marian Evans, George Eliot, and the Work of Sententiousness

Abstract

This chapter examines George Eliot’s interest in and experiments with the forms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French sententiousness and wisdom literature. Despite the evident differences between Eliot’s long-form realist fictions and the short forms of maxims and character sketches, it argues that such works—and those of La Bruyère in particular—provide a counterweight to the author’s anxieties around labour and the mass productions of print culture. By the 1870s Eliot had mass-market fame for her sententious statements, thanks to Main’s serial anthologization of the Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings of George Eliot. Her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), pays complex tribute to her French influences, translating the site of the coterie to the contemporary world of London literary labour and revealing the competitive labour that Main’s anthology concealed.

On reading your letter, we determined to get Cousin’s book and to unite it with several others as a subject for an article by me on ‘French writers on women’. Do you approve of this? If so, I will endeavour to send you the MSS. early in September. I happen to have the material at hand to make such an article piquant and fresh, which are perhaps the qualities likely to be most welcome to you. (Tell me what space you want filled).

—George Eliot to John Chapman, 6 August 1854