George Eliot: The Last Victorian (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
Kathryn Hughes succeeds in presenting a vivid and psychologically acute portrayal of George Eliot - one of the giants of English literature. Eliot is definitely my most favourite author and while I already had a fair amount of knowledge concerning her notoriously controversial life, after reading Hughes's biography I am able to perceive Eliot's work with a totally refreshing insight, as determined by her moral and philosophical outlook. I am glad that Hughes avoids the typical feminist buffoonery of simply blaming the men for the difficulties and predicaments faced by the women artists. In fact, Hughes identifies that the one of the main causes of Eliot's life-long morbid sensitivity and self-doubt was as a consequence of rejection by her mother at such a young age. Her mother preferred her older brother Isaac over her and at the age of five, Eliot was sent off to a distant boarding school where she failed to find the emotional attachment she so craved and needed. For most of her young life, Eliot looked for a mother-figure and she would often poignantly re-interpret her friends' kindness towards her as a devotion shown by a mother to her child. Eliot's already emotional detachment from her mother was exacerbated by her brother Isaac's increasing alienation, which she later in life so masterfully recreates in her most autobiographical novel The Mill on the Floss. Eliot's life was not easy and her 'plain' appearance only further increased her difficulties. It was very painful to read the continuous rejections and humiliations she had to suffer because of her ugliness. The flattering and prettified cover image of this biography doesn't do her justice at all. She had a "heavy jaw, a large mouth and big nose" and was often a butt of malicious jokes concerning her appearance. The irony is that Hughes criticises early biographers of Eliot for toning down or being embarrassed by her 'horse-like' features, yet her own biography's cover image is the least representation of what Eliot looked liked in real life. One could argue that it doesn't really matter if Eliot wasn't exactly a 'looker', but to ignore it is to undermine the damaging effect it had on her personality and her relationships with men prior to G.H. Lewis. Men were attracted by her charm and her prodigious intelligence, which was often misinterpreted by her as sexual attraction and she would form embarrassing attachments to them which would of course end up in tears of self-loathing and humiliation.Hughes shines when she tackles the ultimate Eliot question which no modern biographer can eschew. Why Eliot who as a Victorian woman led the most radical life imaginable, adopted a socially conservative attitude in her novels? Women (and men) who try to cross social and class boundaries in her novels are pushed back and often punished very severely. It's not that Eliot rejected feminism or she was against the idea of 'progress', she was just not a Utopian. She championed literary realism because it was her aim to present life as it is, not as it should be. Applying the darwinian principle to human societies, she insisted that human development must be slow and organic, that change must not be imposed from above but must come gradually and from within. She shared the Wordsworthian view of the significance of nature and "native land" in the life of a man. Most of her novels are set in provincial, countryside communities and she was afraid that the rapid industrialization would completely destroy the landscape which she loved and treasured so much as a child and always looked back it wistfully whenever she was exiled to London's Suburbia which she found so suffocating. The biography lags behind in providing a solid literary criticism of Eliot's novels (hence the 4 stars). Often Hughes would resort to writing mere summaries of novel's plots and would spend too much time on searching for 'real' people Eliot based her characters on. Sometimes, she gets her information wrong. For example, she says that Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede gives birth in a 'field', when in actual fact, she gives birth in a room. She actually abandons the baby in the field. Or that, G.H Lewis wrote the review of Bronte's Jane Eyre in 1847, when in fact, he wrote it in 1848. I found it ironic and amusing when G.H. Lewis defended Eliot's right to remain anonymous behind her masculine pseudonym, so that her book could be "judged on it's own merits, and not prejudiced as a work of a woman, or of a particular woman". I wonder whether he realised that only few years ago when he himself wrote reviews of Bronte's novels, he couldn't bear not to refer to her sex, calling her novel Shirley 'masculine' and 'a very antipode of lady-like'. In the end, it was her relationship with G.H. Lewis which actually sustained Eliot and gave her life a meaningful direction. He gave her the love and self-confidence she needed to write her novels. For twenty years, it was Lewis who managed her literary career from sorting out minor quibbles with her publisher to boosting her morale whenever she fell into her usual morbid despair and self-doubt. As Hughes correctly points out that "without George Henry Lewis, there could have been no George Eliot."I've made the review unnecessary longer, only because I love Eliot so much, both as a truly unique person and also as a greatest novelist. In her time, she was a critical and commercial success. I emphasize 'critical' because there were many others who wrote absolute trash but still were a commercial success. Later in her life, people would go mad about her wherever she went - a stark contrast to a woman who in her earlier life twice got kicked out of her friends' house. In our modern time, she will perhaps never be as popular and widely read as Dickens. Unlike Dickens, her novels are not page-turners or filled with sinister plots. They also lack the cloying sentimentality which permeates Dickens's work. What Eliot offers in her novels is humanity stripped naked to its very core, with its raw and conflicting emotions. We could see our own reflection in her deeply flawed characters. She hated bigotry and rejected the dogmatic doctrines of organised religion. Instead, she believed that morality should come from within ourselves, not from some supernatural power. She believed in the effectiveness of meliorism in order to improve human society, saying that "The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.” Not a bad thing, I guess.
What do You think about George Eliot: The Last Victorian (2001)?
