Abstract
Compare and contrast the lives of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. So one might set an undergraduate essay and receive some obvious answers. Both women in their lives and in their books laid stress on the need to love and be loved. Both reflected but in a way rejected the Evangelical teaching of their youth, although Eliot carried her revolt further. Both put a great deal of themselves into their heroines and drew upon their acquaintances to provide models for their other characters, although the game of finding real-life models for the people in Eliot’s novels has never been carried so far as it has been in the cases of The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette. The central episode in the lives of both novelists, apart from their success as authors, was falling in love with a married man, but Eliot, whose love unlike Brontë’s was returned, took the unusual step of going off to live with her lover, G. H. Lewes. Finally both women married unexpectedly, late in their lives, although in each case the marriage lasted a tragically short time and had little influence on literature.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
G. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford, 1968), p. 160. R. Ashton, G. H. Lewes: A Life (Oxford, 1991) gives a very fair account of the Lewes ménage, including the quite extraordinary statement (pp. 180–1) made by one of the daughters of Agnes Lewes and Thornton Hunt that her mother could never have committed adultery. This statement is a good insight into the gap between Victorian practice and post-Victorian theory. Ashton also suggests (pp. 211–12) that Lewes did try to get a divorce in order to marry Eliot.
Haight, George Eliot, pp. 49–95. There are also good and frank discussions of Bray, Brabant and Spencer in K. Adams, Those That Loved Her (Warwick, 1980). G. Haight, ‘George Eliot’s Bastards’ in George Eliot: A Centenary Tribute, ed. G. Haight and R. van Arsdell (Toronto, 1982), pp. 1–10, gives details of Bray’s illegitimate children and suggests that the prevalence of illegitimate children in Eliot’s novels is due to this fact.
It is a sign of the times that in his first Eliot book, George Eliot and John Chapman (London, 1940), Haight is remarkably circumspect. In his justly famous life, published in the swinging sixties, he still is unwilling to make a definite statement that Eliot slept with Chapman, although admitting that Chapman recorded his amours with Elizabeth Tilney in the same way as he marked Marian Evans’s initial. More recently, Adams assumes a physical affair and Haight is very frank in the Centenary Tribute about Bray. A similar frankness can be noticed among the biographers of Dickens, with the notable exception of the latest Ackroyd book.
D. Holbrook, ‘Holy Vows’, London Magazine, 30, nos 7, 8 (October/November 1990), pp. 20–28.
See Ashton, p. 117, for the episode with Eliza Lynn, including the fact that Lynn was urged to submit her work to the censorship of Thornton Hunt.
S. Dentith, New Readings in George Eliot (London, 1986), p. 16, says that Isaac Evans was especially harsh, refusing to write to his sister for twenty-four years, and then having the effrontery to appear as the chief mourner at her funeral.
Haight, George Eliot, pp. 159–68; and Ashton, pp. 153–8, give a good picture of the reaction to Eliot’s affair with Lewes. Ashton speculates, p. 134–9, that Lewes and Eliot became lovers in the winter of 1852–3, a year and a half before the irretrievable step of fleeing to Germany and more than four years before Isaac Evans was informed.
Daniel Deronda, I, p. 368. The Clarendon edition of Middlemarch, ed. G. Handley (Oxford, 1989), p. 227, prints ‘properties’. There is no textual explanation for this reading, but it does seem to make sense in the context of Klesmer’s proposal to Miss Arrowpoint. Yet Eliot wrote ‘proprieties’ in the manuscript and passed ‘proprieties’ for the Cabinet edition; and P. Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (Oxford, 1986), II. p. 169 certainly takes the remark to indicate that Eliot could not be as frank as she would like to have been. Recently, in K. Newton, ed. George Eliot (London, 1991), two articles by C. Chase, ‘The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double Reading of Daniel Deronda’, pp. 215–17, and K. Newton, ‘Daniel Deronda and Circumcision’, pp. 218–31, have raised not very delicately the delicate issue of whether Daniel should have known he was Jewish.
George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, ed. D. Carroll (London, 1971), gives a fair selection of reviews.
Almost all the reviewers of The Mill on the Floss cited in The Critical Heritage compare this novel, usually unfavourably, with Adam Bede, and make many references to the sex of the author.
T. Wise and J. Symington, eds, The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence (London, 1932) I, p. 122.
B. Hardy, ‘Implication and Incompleteness: George Eliot’s Middlemarch’ in The Appropriate Form: An Essay on the Novel (London, 1964), pp. 105–31, gives the best account of Casaubon’s impotence. See also R. Ellmann ‘Dorothea’s Husbands’, in Along the Riverrun (Harmondsworth, 1989) pp. 115–31.
B. Zimmerman, ‘Gwendolen Harleth and ‘The Girl of the Period’, in A. Smith, ed., George Eliot: Centenary Essays (London, 1980), pp. 196–217.
Copyright information
© 1994 Tom Winnifrith
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Winnifrith, T. (1994). Eliot. In: Fallen Women in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377721_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377721_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-39130-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37772-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)