George Eliot

1819 - 1880

The only novelist in English prior to George Eliot who shares with her a truly philosophical mind is Emily Brontë. But no two writers could, as individuals, be more different. Whereas Brontë protected herself within an elaborate privacy, George Eliot was at times caught, despite her best efforts, in the Victorian badlands of family fissure, scandal, and nervy refusals of what many expected of her. She faced all these crises with the same courage and generosity of spirit that so clearly animate her novels. We do not so much read the novels as embrace them, and, in turn, we are embraced by them. Famously, Eliot both creates and explores in her fictions the imaginative impulse that she calls sympathy and by which she means, as Forest Pyle puts it, a strenuous effort to bridge the epistemological and ethical gap between self and world.

The site of that effort is, precisely, constituted by her texts. It is always crucial to recall what the word means. To quote the OED: [a. F. texte, also ONF. tixte, tiste (12th c. in Godef.), the Scriptures, etc., ad. med. L. textus the Gospel, written character (Du Cange), L. textus (u-stem) style, tissue of a literary work (Quintilian), lit. that which is woven, web, texture, f. text-, ppl. stem of tex-re to weave.]. One need only put this next to the following well known passage from Middlemarch: "I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe." For Eliot text, moral vision, and aesthetic achievement are inseparably bound one to another.

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Texts collection for George Eliot
essays | letters