DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

Scenes of Clerical Life: George Eliot's Own Version of Conversion

Authors

Alain Jumeau

Date of this Version

2009

Document Type

Article

Citation

George Eliot Review 40 (Special Issue, 2009)

Comments

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

Abstract

Before the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life, few people would have thought that Miss Evans had all the qualities for writing fiction, or, what is more, that she would become a great novelist. She was in her late thirties when she came to fiction writing, although, at the approach of middle age, most novelists have already tried their hand at it. Yet, as she confessed in her Journal, when she started writing the first story of Scenes of Clerical Life, it marked a new beginning for her, because she had always dreamt of writing fiction: 'September 1856 made a new era in my life, for it was then that I began to write Fiction. It had always been a vague dream of mine that some time or other I might write a novel.

This vague dream would perhaps never have materialized without the encouragement and help of her companion, George Henry Lewes, who persuaded her that she had all the gifts to do it well, and helped her find a publisher (Blackwood) - always an essential step for a would-be novelist.

The religious subject she chose for this first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, was something unexpected, perhaps, considering that she was known as the translator of Strauss and Feuerbach, two German critics of Christianity. Moreover, she was associated with the Westminster Review, a Radical and freethinking journal, for which she wrote literary articles and acted as deputy editor for Chapman. Who would have thought that someone who had parted from Christianity would choose a religious subject for her first work of fiction?