English, Department of
Date of this Version
2009
Document Type
Article
Citation
The George Eliot Review 40 (2009)
Abstract
In an essay published in the Westminster Review in 1856, George Eliot delivered a scathing indictment of 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' which (she claimed) lack verisimilitude, 'intellectual power' and 'moral qualities'. The skill of such a writer 'is in inverse proportion to her confident eloquence'; the picture of life that she draws is 'totally false'. Her motivation is merely 'the foolish vanity of wishing to appear in print' or 'busy idleness'. Finally, these hapless female novelists are likened to La Fontaine's ass. Not surprisingly, faced with such a sweeping condemnation, critics have found Eliot's relationship with gender issues and female writers to be problematic (to say the least) as is reflected in the title to Zelda Austen's article, 'Why Feminists Critics are Angry with George Eliot'.
Eliot's essay has been explained as an 'effort to call forth from women the same standards and demands for quality she made for men', or ascribed to a belief that 'the world of men was where genius flourished, and ... that was where she wanted to be., Perhaps, as her biographer suggests, 'Working through this material allowed Marian Evans to think carefully about the kind of writing she wanted to avoid. By showing what a novel should not be, she was setting out a literary manifesto for her style of fiction.'5 It is probably no coincidence that Eliot's essay was finished just ten days before she herself began to write fiction with Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), followed by her first novel, Adam Bede (1859). Her wish for dissociation is reflected in her choice of a male pseudonym to avoid the stigma attached to an identifiably female writer and to protect her own privacy: 'to keep a crucial psychological distance from any criticism directed towards her work’.
To mark a contrast with such light-weight practitioners, Eliot made careful preparations for each of her works, gathering information, quotations and observations into a notebook which served as a quarry of ideas.? Her notes for Adam Bede show her doing historical research - on the Methodists, on fashion, and on meteorology. Her own account of the 'germ of "Adam Bede'" was an anecdote told to her by her Methodist aunt on whom the character of Dinah was based; her father's experiences inspired the upright Adam.8 Other sources are possible, however, despite Eliot's claim that her work contains 'only the suggestions of experience wrought up into new combinations',9 since it was 'her usual procedure to have definite sources, but to deny' that she did. The sources may be literary, stemming from her wide-ranging reading that (writes Gillian Beer) 'gave her a repertoire, or grammar, of fictional relations which she could then refine'. David Leon Higdon's view is that, 'Literature influenced the creation of her scenes, her characters, and her actions.' 12 Margaret Anne Doody suggests that we look beyond the classics in the search for influences and 'take into account the tradition established by the "Literary Women", many half-forgotten novelists of the eighteenth century. '
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Comments
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