George Eliot in Germany, 1854‑55: "Cherished Memories", and: 142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London (review)

Between Mathilde Blind in 1883 and Barbara Hardy in 2006, biographers have produced more than thirty full length lives of George Eliot. These range from the reticent late Victorians (Oscar Browning in 1890, Leslie Stephen in 1902, and, most importantly, her widower J. W. Cross in 1885); through the ludicrously creative fictionalizations of the early twentieth century (Desmond Chapman-Huston; Walter Cranmore and Joseph Best); to Gordon Haight's 1968 standard. Contenders eager to replace Haight (most durably, Frederick Karl in 1995, Rosemary Ashton in 1996, and Kathryn Hughes in 1999) have drawn on documents and publications unpublished in 1968, such as volumes 8 and 9 of the George Eliot Letters (1979), William Baker's ever growing collection of The Letters of George Henry Lewes (1995, 1999), Margaret Barfield and Constance Fulmer's edition of Edith Simcox's Autobiography of a Shirtmaker (1998), and Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston's The Journals of George Eliot (1998), all of which have prompted new interpretations of George Eliot's life in whole or in part.

With George Eliot in Germany, 1854–55 and 142 Strand, neither Gerlinde Röder Bolton nor Ashton has set out to write a full length biography of Eliot. Instead, drawing heavily on the Journals, Röder Bolton takes for material a very thin slice of her life, less than a year, from July 1854 through March 1855, when Marian Evans and Lewes were on what many authors describe as their German "honeymoon" (7). Ashton, on the other hand, relegates Eliot to the (broad) margins of her narrative to tell the story of John Chapman, at various times Evans/Eliot's landlord, publisher, romantic interest, boss, and friend.

Without question, Röder Bolton's book succeeds in its goals of "providing the reader of today with the historical and cultural background in Germany in order to bring alive the places as Marian and Lewes would have known them and to show the circles in which they moved. It also aims to 'put some flesh' on the names of many of the people they encountered and to build up a picture of their relationship with them" (4 5). Indeed, she succeeds perhaps too well, stretching her narrative of the eight month period over ten chapters and 165 pages.

In the first chapter, which narrates the journey from London to Weimar, Röder Bolton's extensive German expertise leads to heavily detailed descriptions of places and people. The newly declared couple spent but a single day in Cologne on their journey up the Rhine, staying overnight, viewing the cathedral, and breakfasting the next day with Robert Brabant and D. F. Strauss. Despite the brevity of the stop, Röder Bolton describes the history of the city from the time of the Romans, beginning 58 BCE, and of the cathedral, from 1164 through the 1850s. After a full chapter on the two-day Frankfurt stop, Röder Bolton moves her honeymooners to Weimar and devotes four chapters to the busy but lyrical honeymoon interlude they spent there.

In the Weimar section descriptions of people who play no further role in the Leweses' lives occupy much of the four chapters. The well worn connection between Daniel Deronda's Klesmer (1876) and their Weimar neighbor Franz Liszt justifies a full chapter on "Liszt and His Circle," followed by two more chapters describing members of the British group in Weimar, most of whom the Leweses never again encountered.

But when the couple departs from Weimar and reaches Berlin, the surfeit of context turns into a distinct advantage for two reasons. First, before 1989, the most interesting parts of Berlin, including the university and the flourishing museums that attracted the Leweses, along with the address where the couple lodged on Dorotheenstrasse, lay east of...