English, Department of
Date of this Version
2012
Document Type
Article
Citation
The George Eliot Review 43 (2012)
Abstract
This distinguished work by a major Eliot scholar is the product of decades of reading, writing and reflection on her fiction and thought. It brings together in revised, homogenized form a series of essays from 1972 to the present day, including new material; and further, it engages with and amplifies two of Newton's earlier monographs on Eliot, as well as his collection of essays by other critics on Eliot utilizing modem literary theory. Despite dealing with complex philosophical ideas, Newton's writing is clear and lucid throughout, bringing to light new insights without the unnecessary jargon that occasionally taints modem criticism. Newton also considers nineteenth-century criticism, most usefully that of Lewes, making connections also with Austen and Scott and drawing fascinating parallels between the plots of Little Dorrit and Daniel Deronda: he places Eliot above these three writers as an artist, however. Despite some blemishes this comprehensive monograph demonstrates the radical nature of Eliot's intelligence, her innovative experiments with literary form and her status as 'both artist and ... intellectual. [T]he two are not separable' (69; emphasis added). Newton firmly establishes Eliot's relevance for the twenty-first century - her affinities with writers from Yeats and Joyce to Derrida and Levinas, and with modernist and post-modernist ideas. Use of post-structuralist criticism helps tease out subversive sub-texts, highlighting Eliot's intense scepticism and the range of her thinking in ethics, politics and philosophy. Newton places Eliot in the literary canon alongside Dante, Milton and Goethe, high - and probably merited - praise indeed. This work can come across as a sustained defence of Eliot against her detractors, but it offers considerably more than this.
Placing Eliot so high on her pedestal - an action to which the present writer must also plead guilty - may invite a repetition of early-twentieth-century attempts by envious writers to push her off that lofty perch: the 'half malicious' critics after her death, like George Meredith, referred to by Virginia Woolf in her centenary article, who 'gave point and poison to the arrows of thousands incapable of aiming them so accurately, but delighted to let fly'. There has also been much disparagement of Eliot's work on ideological grounds, of course. Raising an artist so high also creates a tendency to dwarf her peers. Newton thus, in reaction to assertions that Eliot is less 'feminist' than a writer like Charlotte Bronte, cites Pauline Nestor's assessment of Jane Eyre as simply a 'heroine of fulfilment' - 'a psychological fantasy of the extraordinary ... assurance of Jane's ego, '" markedly at odds with the childhood circumstances that produced it. Such a fantasy is diametrically opposed to Eliot's commitment to psychological veracity' (n. 14, 197). Yet Bronte's novels can also be seen as life 'experiments'. Thus Lucy Snowe in Villette, subject to early trauma, is alienated, neurotic and prone to breakdowns.
Included in
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Comments
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