George Eliot Part IV

Marian’s work was admired as serious fiction, and when her identity became known, there was an increasing tolerance of her situation.  Mrs Gaskell wrote to her and said that she wished that she really WAS Mrs Lewes…. but she admired her fellow novelist’s work. (However as a proper Victorian and a minister's wife she could not tolerate Marian's transgression).

Princess Louise, the most liberal minded of the Royal Family, who had artistic friends, visited her.

Marian’s masterpiece is Middlemarch, a novel of “provincial life”, set mainly in the Midlands.  Victorian fiction had developed greatly since the days of Jane Austen.  Austen's works were comedies of manners, set in a stable world of the upper and upper middle classes, with the main focus on the romance of the hero and heroine.  There were a few middle class merchants in her books but there was nothing about their work.

Victorian fiction tended to be much longer and to cover a very wide canvas.  Elizabeth Gaskell-  like Eliot - wrote about the social changes that had taken place in England over the years since the Regency.  
She covered events such as the coming of the railways, which improved and speeded up transport and mobility, the development of medicine and surgery, industrialisation.  She also wrote about religious conflicts and problems.  Trollope’s novels were set in the world of politics and the higher echelons of the Church of England, but Eliot went further, writing about Methodism and other Dissenting churches… as in Silas Marner.

She did have nostalgia for the old fashioned England of her childhood, which was disappearing as the country became industrialised, people moved into cities... New social problems of poverty and slums came into being. In Silas Marner, she set it in the years of the Regency.  She was still critical of the upper classes, yet she also seemed to prefer the rural life of Raveloe, where Silas lives -working as a home based weaver, together with his foster child Eppie.  She sees it as healthier and more decent than the life in towns and cities where people worked in factories. In spite of her radical views in some respects, she had a deeply conservative streak in her nature... which tended to romanticise the older rural England….

Eliot’s novels were more about a whole society than the “romantic couple” such as Austen wrote about.  In Middlemarch, the heroine, Dorothea, marries in the early part of the book... Her marriage is a mistake, caused by her naïve belief that Casaubon, her husband is a “great soul” and an intellectual... who can give her life a meaning.   She comes to realise that he is not as learned or intelligent as he beleives, and that his work is already outdated...and meaningless. 

Tertius Lydgate, a radical minded, reformist doctor and the main male character, marries Rosamond Vincy, a lightweight, silly butterfly female of the kind that Eliot seems to have disliked particularly.  His marriage is also an unhappy one and unlike Dorothea, he is not released from it to make a happier one.  This sort of “slice of life” novel, which studies marriage in detail and does not end at the altar, was typical of Victorian fiction. Middlemarch is a study of marriage, as well as of courtship.  Some of the plot also revolves around political action, church issues, and Lydgate’s attempts to reform medical practices in the town. (He finally has to give in to his wife, give up his research and become a fashionable practitioner). 
 Eliot did a lot of studying on scientific and political issues, to write the book. 

In some of her works, such as Romola, the heavy duty studying tends to result in the book’s feeling overly researched, rather than natural.  However in Middlemarch, she gets the balance right....