George Eliot's first book

Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot

The title of this caught my eye at Half Price Books, as did the lovely cover of the Penguin Classics edition. The editor, David Lodge, suggests that it is "not a title likely to set the pulse of a modern reader racing with anticipation. . . "  I can't say my pulse raced, exactly, but I was curious to read George Eliot's take on the clergymen who permeate so much Victorian literature, particularly in Anthony Trollope and Margaret Oliphant's books.  I have a list of favorites, starting with Mr Harding and Dean Arabin from the Barsetshire series, and Oliphant's Perpetual Curate, Frank Wentworth.  I've recently added Mary Cholmondeley's Bishop of Southminster, Charlotte Yonge's blind rector Mr Clare, and Rhoda Broughton's saintly James Stanley.

I did not know when I started it that this was George Eliot's first book, published in 1858.  The three novellas that comprise it were initially published a year earlier, in Blackwood's Magazine (Lodge, the editor, states that Adam Bede was originally intended as an additional "Scene").  Perhaps because this is an early work, I found it the most readable of her books, with a simpler, less convoluted language than in the others I've tried.

The title of the first story, "The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton," should prepare the reader.  Mr Barton is the curate of Shepperton, on a salary of £80 per year, with a wife and a constantly-increasing family living in a crumbling old vicarage.  He is a good conscientious clergyman, even a zealous one, but he is unpopular in the parish.  He can't quite seem to hit the right note with his parishioners, no matter how hard he tries.  And they resent his liturgical innovations, like hymns for worship replacing the familiar sung Psalms, and the fervor of his preaching.  Mrs Patten, a rich elderly widow, complains that "I don't understand these new sort o' doctrines.  When Mr Barton comes to see me, he talks about nothing but my sins and my need o' marcy.  Now, Mr Hackitt, I've never been a sinner."  (Mr Hackitt is at least "a little shocked by the heathenism of her speech").  Further trouble comes to the curate when an acquaintance, an attractive widow, invites herself for an extended stay at the vicarage, just as his wife is suffering through a difficult eighth pregnancy, and rumors begin to spread.

The second story, "Mr Gilfil's Love-Story," initially seems to be about a previous vicar of Shepperton, the incumbent for thirty years.  Unlike his successor Mr Barton, Maynard Gilfil was not a zealous active pastor, but he was loved and admired across the parish, and his influence was clear.  I wanted to know more about him, but the story jumps back forty years, and he becomes a supporting character.  As a young man, he was the chaplain to his relatives, Sir Christopher and Lady Cheverel.  On a trip to Italy years ago, the couple rescued a young orphan, Christina, after her father's death, and brought her back to Cheverel Manor.  There the young Maynard fell irrevocably in love with her, while she fell unsuitably in love with Sir Christopher's heir Captain Wybrow, who flirted with her but could not marry her.  Since she is Italian, her love is of course violent and passionate, particularly after Wybrow becomes engaged to the very suitable Miss Assher.  I thought this story really dragged, and I found the romantic resolution improbable at best.  I was also irritated with the way Christina is constantly called "little monkey"!

The third story, "Janet's Repentance," was to me the most interesting.  It moves from Shepperton to the near-by market-town of Milby.  The town is divided over a new curate at a chapel near the manufacturing district.  The Rev. Mr Tryan is an Evangelical who is drawing large crowds to his services, from both the Anglican and the Dissenting congregations.  His proposal of a series of Sunday evening lectures in the parish church is the last straw for many, who think it an insult to their elderly curate Mr Crewe, beloved for his benevolence if not his preaching.  Eliot lays out the battle lines and introduces us to townspeople on both sides.  I found the politics fascinating (and rather Trollopian).  Robert Dempster, the town's leading lawyer, is organizing a formal protest and inciting the anti-Tryan feeling.  He relishes the fight, an outlet for the rage that builds up inside him, which he frequently takes out on his wife Janet, particularly when he has been drinking.  The whole town knows that Dempster mistreats his wife, though not all the sordid details, as they also know that Janet has taken to drink herself.  The scenes where he verbally and physically abuses her came as a shock.  I can't remember reading anything so explicit in a 19th-century novel.  Dempster of course expects Janet to support his anti-Tryan crusade, but when Janet meets the curate, she finds a good and holy minister, who will stand by her in her trials, particularly her struggles with alcoholism.

While the Introduction includes the usual spoilers, it also puts these three stories in the context of George Eliot's life, showing how she drew on her own experiences in creating her characters and plots.  Since I am still fairly new to Eliot, I found the background information both interesting and helpful.  The editor also uses Eliot's correspondence with the editor of Blackwood's Magazine to show how her stories developed, and how she resisted his efforts to tone them down, make them more conventional.  She was proved right as the book became a success.

This wasn't always an easy book, but I am glad that I read it, and now I'm looking forward to Adam Bede, to see how it fits in with George Eliot's first scenes of clerical life.

Down the Floss

The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot

I received this book last year from an anniversary giveaway at Shelf Love, which was such a thrill.  I was fairly new to blogging then, still a little hesitant about commenting, let alone registering for a free book.  At the time, I had not read any George Eliot, though I had read about her in Anthony Trollope's Autobiography, where he rated her very highly among his contemporaries.  Then I came across an article in The New Yorker that judged her a greater writer than Jane Austen, which raised all my Janeite defenses.  Determined to read Eliot, I started with Middlemarch, long on the TBR piles, but I gave up after three chapters.  I turned instead to Silas Marner, which I found a challenging but rewarding book.

Lately The Mill on the Floss seems to be turning up everywhere.  Cat at Tell Me a Story, Jane at Fleur Fisher, and Katherine at November's Autumn are among those who have posted on it recently.  I was also intrigued by a comment I read on William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, to the effect that Thackeray (an only child) couldn't write convincing brothers and sisters, especially compared with the warm and complex sibling relationship that Eliot created in Tom and Maggie Tulliver.

I had only skimmed the reviews that I came across, not wanting to know too much about the plot.  And I'm not going to say much about the plot here, either because it is already familiar to most people, or to avoid spoilers for those who have yet to discover it.  So just some general thoughts on the book:

Having struggled with Middlemarch and Silas Marner, I was pleasantly surprised at how easily I fell into reading this.  Perhaps because it is one of her earlier books, what the editor A.S. Byatt calls "the first stage of [her] work as an artist," the language felt much less baroque.  And then that opening chapter just flows, with the description first of St Ogg to the Floss and the Ripple, leading up to Dorlcote Mill, and that small figure in the beaver bonnet mesmerized by "the unresting wheel sending out its diamond jets of water."  By the end of that chapter, I wanted to know more about the place and the people, particularly the little girl.

Maggie Tulliver is such a fascinating character, one that apparently draws heavily on Eliot's own life.  I haven't discovered yet if Louisa May Alcott read Eliot's books, but surely Jo March owes something to Maggie, in her struggle for independence, for self-control, in the hunger of her mind and heart, in her attempts to be faithful to her duty and in her self-sacrifice, though the arc and ending of their stories could not be more different.  More than once Eliot describes Maggie in terms of "opposing elements, of which a fierce collision is immanent."  My own heart went out to Maggie, so hungry for love, so misunderstood, drawing only criticism and blame, compared so unfavorably with her angelic blonde cousin Lucy.  How could she not react with mischief and outbursts?  At least Jo had her parents' guidance and her sisters' love.  Poor Maggie has only her father, with his care for "the little wench." Against that, she has the range of her mother's sisters, the Dodson side of the family - great chacters so wonderfully drawn.  I particularly enjoyed Aunt Pullet, that watering-pot and hypochondriac, a spiritual twin of Aunt Myra in Alcott's Eight Cousins.

And then there is Tom.  I found him sadly lacking as a brother, though in her introduction Byatt argues that many readers are too attached to Maggie and don't judge Tom fairly.  Naturally as a youngster he lords over his little sister.  And as unsatisfactory as his education is, it confirms his expectations of rising above the mill, of taking a place in St Ogg society.  But when trouble comes, and he is forced to give up on those dreams for the harsh reality of debt and dishonor, and hard work, he shuts himself off emotionally, with all his energy and attention focused on his work.  I can understand all of that, and certainly his parents can't offer support or companionship in what he is going through.  It is only natural that an anger he can barely acknowledge would find its target in Philip Wakem, especially given their conflicts at school.  His anger, his need to control Maggie and to assert his authority, are natural reactions to what he has lost and the stress he is under.  Later, when he has paid the family's debts and regained their place in St Ogg, there is perhaps less  excuse for his reaction to Maggie's situation with her second suitor.  But by then Eliot has shown us how his boyish certainties of right and wrong, his strong moral compass, have hardened into an inflexibility of mind and heart.  Here her characters, especially Maggie and Tom, certainly illustrate how "her psychological insights radically changed the nature of fictional characterization."  At the same time, they are fully realized people that engage us and draw us into their lives.

A final note: I had no idea when I started this book that it, like Vanity Fair and Little Women, would draw heavily on The Pilgrim's Progress.  Clearly I read Bunyan's masterpiece at just the right time (I was recently reminded that Vera Brittain wrote about researching Bunyan in Testament of Experience).   The other book that plays a major part in Maggie's life is The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis.  I used to have a copy of that, and now I'm curious to read it again.

I'm very glad to have read The Mill on the Floss (and thank you again to Jenny & Teresa).  I have two more of George Eliot's early works, Adam Bede and Scenes of Clerical Life, and I think I'll try one of them next, before trying Middlemarch again.

My introduction to George Eliot

Silas Marner, George Eliot

I have never read George Eliot before.  I am not sure how that happened, since my reading tends toward British literature.  We didn't read her in school, and I can't remember anyone ever recommending one of her novels to me.  At some point I bought a copy of Middlemarch, probably because I saw it on one of those "100 Classics Everyone Should Read" lists, but it has sat unread on the TBR shelves for many years now.  Somewhere I learned the names of some of her novels, and some vague ideas about the plots.

Then several things happened over the past few months to make me more aware of George Eliot, which also taught me more about her.  The first was reading Anthony Trollope's Autobiography.  In one chapter, "On English Novelists of the Present Day," he rates Eliot very highly, second only to William Thackery, though he writes frankly of what he sees as the faults in her books (which he does with Thackery and other novelists as well).  He also writes that "this gifted woman was among my dearest and most intimate friends."  Victoria Glendinning's excellent biography of Trollope gave me more information about the warm friendship between Trollope, Eliot, and George Henry Lewes.  Next came an essay by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker, "Middlemarch and Me," in which she makes a case for Eliot as a greater writer than Jane Austen.  My Janeite hackles rose in defense of Austen, but I realized I couldn't debate Mead's arguments if I'd never read Eliot.  Finally, I have seen posts about Eliot on various blogs, and in May I received a copy of The Mill on the Floss from a Shelf Love giveaway.

So with so many signs pointing to George Eliot, I at last took Middlemarch off the shelf, with some pretty high expectations.  From what I understood, it is considered her masterpiece, and one of the greatest 19th century novels.  I made it through three chapters before giving up.  It was partly the writing that defeated me.  Anthony Trollope had the same problem:

"It is, I think, the defect of George Eliot that she struggles too hard to do work that shall be excellent. She lacks ease. Latterly the signs of this have become conspicuous in her style, which has always been and is singularly correct, but which has become occasionally obscure from her too great desire to be pungent.  It is impossible not to feel the struggle, and that feeling begets a flavour of affectation. In Daniel Deronda . . . there are sentences which I have found myself compelled to read three times before I have been able to take home to myself all that the writer has intended."

What draws me to Trollope, and to my other favorite Victorian writer Margaret Oliphant, is partly the clarity of their language.  I have also found that in Charlotte M. Yonge, whom I read for the first time this year.

But I couldn't just dismiss Eliot, not after three chapters of a single book.  So I put Middlemarch back on the shelf to try again later, and I decided that I wanted to try Silas Marner instead, for the possibly frivolous reason that it is about an orphan and her devoted foster father. As I've mentioned before, I'm rather partial to orphan's stories, especially those that remind me of Rose and Uncle Alec in Eight Cousins, or Heidi and Uncle Alp  (yes, technically the old Uncle is her grandfather).

I found Silas Marner a compelling, suspenseful book, and I now appreciate why George Eliot is considered so great a writer.  Silas's story starts with his exile from his home after a false accusation of theft, continues through his many lonely years on the edges of the Raveloe community, to the loss of his hoarded earnings through thievery, and the arrival one snowy night of a tiny child, whose mother died of exposure not far from the door of his cottage.  The loss of the gold and the gain of his daughter change his life, save his life.  This is a resurrection story.  It has a parallel, or perhaps more correctly a mirror image, in the story of Godfrey Cass, the son of the village's Squire, with secrets he keeps buried deep.  There are many vividly-drawn characters in the village, such as my favorite Dolly Winthrop, always ready to help her neighbors, to nurse the sick and comfort the bereaved.  The scenes where she tries to instruct the old bachelor Silas in the care of his new daughter are both funny and touching, as is his distant memory of caring for his own baby sister.

Like Anthony Trollope with Daniel Deronda, I too found sentences that I had to read three times, sometimes out loud, in an attempt to understand them.  Sentences like

"The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimmings when once the actions have become a lie."

Unlike Trollope, though, I'm doubtful that "I have been able to take home to myself all that the writer has intended."

In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition I read, David Carroll talks about Silas Marner as an experiment in legend or myth.  (I found his thesis a little hard to follow, partly because I was reading it late at night).  Whatever its origins, I enjoyed Silas Marner as a good story, and I am encouraged to try Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss - and maybe even Middlemarch again someday.