Could George Eliot have been the perfect woman?
A new biography of the novelist tries to convey its subject’s rapport with her readers and her rich interior life, says Frances Wilson
Virginia Woolf described Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown up people”. What she meant, Philip Davis suggests, is that George Eliot’s vastness of vision, depth of understanding, and immense sympathy force readers to raise their natural standards. Reading Eliot, in other words, makes you a better person: she educates, sees us for what we are, and forgives us our trespasses.
People called her the Sibyl, because, as Davis puts it, she seemed “to know more about human beings than anyone in the century”. What was it like, Davis asks, to think as Eliot did? To answer the question, he looks not at her life but her writing, or rather at the way in which her life made itself felt in her fiction. But this is no straightforward biographical reading of the work. Davis describes his book as a “biography about Eliot’s language … its alphabet, its sentences, its signature episodes”. Eliot’s “nervous system”, as he puts it, can be found not only in her characters – the bookish Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss and the self-improving Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch – but also in the “shape and texture” of the prose itself. “Her very sentences register the struggles the author faced.”
I’ve read few biographies in which the sentences of the subject are given this much attention, and few in which the biographer’s own sentences are as unintelligible. Davis’s aim, if I have understood him correctly, is to achieve in these pages what Eliot achieved in her novels: a “wide-open, deepdelving”, all-encompassing embrace of his subject’s consciousness. This is to be an Eliot-shaped biography, a book as expansive as Middlemarch itself. It’s a laudable ambition, but Davis is no Eliot. He lacks her verbal fluency and her rapport with the reader. Eliot took reading seriously: “Of all the pleasures of reading,” she said, “I rank this the highest – hearing a voice, speaking as it were directly to you.” Reading Eliot is not like reading at all, but reading Davis like doing a series of rounds in the ring. No matter how hard we wrestle, his meanings remain locked inside phrases of baffling complexity.
The title is a case in point. What does “A Transferred Life” mean? The term, Davis unhelpfully explains, describes “the transference of the life in the works to the life outside them”. I wish, as Byron said of Coleridge, that he would explain his explanation, but all attempts at clarification further obfuscate the matter: “The aim here,” Davis says of his method, “is to receive and to retransmit the feeling of what the creation of George Eliot, in and through her work, may stand for in the search for human meaning.”
A better title might have been “Being George Eliot”, because Eliot, says Davis, was her greatest creation. Her nom de plume also endowed her with a second self; as Davis puts it, “George Eliot was created precisely to make possible a presence within the books that sought to take the books out of themselves.”
The fog begins to clear after the introduction, as he weaves Eliot’s life into the life of her stories. She did not become George Eliot until she was 37 and published Scenes of Clerical Life. Until this point she had been known as Marian Evans, but she was born Mary Ann Evans in 1819, the daughter of a Midlands land agent who bought her every book she wanted and ensured her education in Latin, Greek, Italian and German. Eliot’s devotion to her undeserving older brother, Isaac, finds expression in Maggie Tulliver’s loyalty to her inferior sibling, Tom, while her affection for her father repeated itself in her humiliating love for older, and married, men who were drawn to her intellect but rejected her physically.
Vocal about her sexual needs, Eliot flung herself at those she loved. Their response might have been more positive had she looked, as someone said rather unkindly, less like an intelligent horse. Eliot, said Henry James, was “magnificently ugly, deliciously hideous”. Her crime, as Lena Dunham recently observed, was to be both “ugly and horny”.
Until she met, aged 35, George Henry Lewes, Eliot was resigned to loneliness. She then found herself reborn as a novelist. Lewes was a man with whom she could write, read, share a bed, and raise tadpoles (a joint interest). The only thing they could not do was marry because he was married already, to a woman who lived with another man. So the couple lived happily in sin for 24 years, his buoyancy balancing her melancholia.
When Lewes died in 1878, Eliot’s life itself became novelistic. Aged 60 and mired in grief, she married for the first time, taking as a husband John Walter Cross, a man 20 years her junior who called her Aunt and was mourning the death of his mother. During their honeymoon, Cross jumped from the window of their Venetian apartment into the Grand Canal; he realised, it was rumoured, that she expected him to consummate the marriage. Eliot died the following year, and Cross – having survived his suicide attempt – became her first biographer, a role he performed with dutiful dreariness.
The tragedy is that Lewes did not live to take on the task. He knew more than anyone (and certainly more than Davis) the relation between the woman and the work, and described her “transferred” life in sentences that leap from the page. Away from her desk, said Lewes, Eliot was the perfect woman, but “writing – writing – writing, at the desk – oh! – my! – God!!!”