Review of George Eliot, European Novelist

Authors

John Rignall

Date of this Version

2012

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 43 (2012)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

On the opening page of this series of connected essays, John Rignall points out that 'George Eliot's readers and reviewers took it for granted that her novels belonged to a European tradition of fiction'. When Leavis conscripted her into his new canon after the Second World War, this dimension of her work was largely erased and has only recently begun to re-emerge thanks to the work of Rosemary Ashton, Elinor Shaffer and others - not least John Rignall himself. One reason for this neglect was no doubt intrinsic to the work: Rignall concedes that George Eliot's fictions are set overwhelmingly in the English countryside; most of her characters live in villages or small, out-of the-way towns and make few journeys other than failed attempts at escape (Hetty, Maggie). The Roman episode of Middlemarch (often discussed in this book) is disturbing and disorientating, while the Prague of The Lifted Veil is the product of a morbid imagination. Of course there is Romola, to which Eliot herself was deeply attached. But the Renaissance world of that novel is a historical construct, and is thus not 'European', in the sense of belonging to the mainstream of European fiction; Rignall only refers to it in passing. However, Daniel Deronda, the other Eliot novel which has until recently been marginalized, is fully in Rignall's focus of attention, featuring as it does not only a significant number of episodes set in Europe but also some powerful affinities with earlier and later European novels.

Rignall approaches the European theme from two angles, corresponding roughly to the biographical and the textual. The first four essays or chapters are primarily concerned with George Eliot's first-hand knowledge of Europe and its cultures: her travels, her local encounters, her preference for 'old' Germany over the 'electric' novelty of France, her vision of landscapes fraught with a violent history. These perceptions are afforded in part by the novels, but predominantly by Eliot's non-fictional writings, her journals, letters and notebooks. Rignall concludes this complex itinerary with the observation that 'one of the uses of abroad is to draw attention to the discord and discontinuity, to the violence and suffering that are as much a part of human history as any sense of the "historical advance of mankind'" (this last phrase is quoted from The Mill on the Floss). Such violence and suffering lurk in the superficially tranquil English fields and villages too, and may be made salient by adumbrations of the wider trans-European picture: in that sense, Daniel Deronda could be read as the culmination of a long meditation on the unquiet, unstable antithesis of home and abroad.