Newspaper Article

WRITING WAS AS DANGEROUS AS LIFE

Beer, Gillian, Gillian Beer is the author of "Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot & Nineteenth-Century Fiction" and a forthcoming study of George Eliot and Victorian feminist writing

1985

Overview

As she wrote to her most enduring friend, Barbara Bodichon: ''I am a very blessed woman, am I not? to have all this reason for being glad that I have lived, in spite of my sins and sorrows - or rather, by reason of my sins and sorrows.'' The novelist Lynn Linton's malicious and vigorous attack, in ''My Literary Life,'' on [GEORGE ELIOT]'s achieved character (''a made woman'') expressed the contradictions in which Eliot found herself: she wished, Mrs. Linton wrote, ''to be at once conventional and insurgent . . . the self-reliant lawbreaker and the eager postulant for the recognition granted only to the covenanted.'' Mr. [Gordon S. Haight]'s grand nine-volume edition of the letters gave readers access to the intellectual and emotional vigor of the Victorians. In that complete edition a good many letters to George Eliot were included that allowed us to assess the responses of her intimates. Mr. Haight succeeds in this more succinct selection in sustaining (even in the absence of their letters) our awareness of the personalities of a great many people with whom George Eliot corresponded. He gives us a shrewd account of the philosopher Herbert Spencer and of the Hebrew scholar Emanuel Deutsch, who brought to its great conclusion a conversion in Eliot's views on Judaism and the Jewish people. In her very early life she was capable of writing ''everything specifically Jewish is of low grade.'' Her reading of Hebrew, and especially her friendship with Deutsch, totally transformed her attitude by the time she reached her literary maturity. Deutsch's influence is particularly strong in this selection of the letters, and the advantage of the current project is that what it loses in spaciousness it gains in intensity. For example, the account of her stepson Thornie's illness is now starkly moving. Unfortunately, some figures more or less vanish, like the feminist philosopher Edith Simcox. Eliot's pleasures, particularly music and friendship, are clearly evident and her interests in anthropology and psychology are given considerable prominence. Her cheerful and sometimes caustic joking is one of the features Mr. Haight allows us to enjoy: ''I don't like anything that is troublesome under the name of pleasure - from eating shrimps upwards.'' ''One touch of biliousness makes the whole world kin.'' Mr. Haight also includes a number of newly discovered letters. The editing gives the lie to George Eliot's own fears that ''Letters are necessarily narrow and fragmentary.'' On the contrary, this collection gives us a buoyant sense of a life lived in full emotional, analytical and intellectual identity.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: Deronda, Daniel / Deutsch, Emanuel / Eliot, George / Haight, Gordon S / Lewes, George Henry