DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

Review of The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography

Authors

Nancy Henry

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

The literary biographer's most difficult task is to find plausible, sophisticated ways of connecting a human life with the art that emerges from it. In the case of a major imaginative artist like George Eliot, the accumulated weight of previous biographies and critical studies only makes that task more challenging. Nancy Henry confronts this situation head-on in The Life of George Eliot. Her book is not just another re-telling of the familiar narrative, written as if it were starting anew. Instead, Henry has grappled with what a genuinely 'critical biography' might mean on a number of different levels. She interrogates previous assumptions that have been passed down from biographer to biographer in the absence of hard evidence. She articulates a critical method of connecting life situations with artistic patterns, arguing against one-to-one identifications of 'originals', and showing how certain charged situations in George Eliot's intimate experience would be generalized and transformed in many fictional variations. She matches her canny sense of what biographies can and can't do with George Eliot's own fascination with biography and life story telling.

Because Henry has such an impressive command over everything George Eliot wrote, she is always ready with the apt quotation, whether it's from a major fiction or an obscure essay. At times the blending of George Eliot's discourse with Henry's arguments gives the impression that George Eliot is a co-author of this life. Henry has a fine ear for passages that suggest autobiographical meditation, wherever they may occur in the writing career, and she brings them to bear on her reconstruction of each phase of the life, creating a rich layering of biographical temporalities. In all these ways and more, The Life of George Eliot is an original, important landmark in George Eliot studies.

Who is the George Eliot that emerges from this study? First, she's a person who moves from one complex, troubled family situation to another, accumulating stores of secrets and social lies. Her mother, a second wife with stepchildren as well as children of her own, is incapacitated for childcare in some way that remains impenetrable. The Brays in Coventry adopt the husband's illegitimate child, and probably harbour other secrets. The Chapman household in London involves a wife, a mistress in charge of the wife's children, and Marian Evans starring briefly as yet another object of sexual interest. The marriages of George Henry and Agnes Jervis Lewes, and Thornton and Katherine Gliddon Hunt, create a large set of children, among them 'Lewes' children who are kept from knowing that their father is Thornton Hunt. When George Eliot connects with George Henry Lewes she becomes simultaneously a second wife and an adulterous 'other woman', as well as the 'mother' of boys whose real mother lives nearby. George Henry Lewes's family of origin has made him the illegitimate child of a bigamous father, and the stepson of a man he deplores.