George Eliot and the British Empire (review)

Halfway through her thoughtful study of George Eliot's relationship to Victorian imperialism, Nancy Henry tells an intriguing story of scholarly omission. In his 1955 edition of The George Eliot Letters, Gordon Haight included an appendix which contained the literary receipts of G. H. Lewes, Eliot's longtime companion, but he did not include a list of stocks and bonds held by the couple. Given the fact that Eliot amassed a small fortune through investment in a wide variety of colonial shareholdings at the height of her professional career, Haight's editorial selectivity is intriguing. Henry speculates that because Eliot's investment profits were earned through speculation rather than directly from writing, Haight may have considered them irrelevant to Eliot's literary biography. Given the themes of money, debt, and capital accumulation which run through Eliot's works of fiction—not to mention Victorian associations of money with vulgarity and corruption, and contemporary preoccupations with women's vulnerability to both—his omission offers nothing less than an invaluable opportunity to reassess Eliot's writing life in the twin contexts of imperial investment and colonial culture in nineteenth-century Britain.

Henry's reassessment has several objectives. In the first instance, she argues for "the importance of the colonial context to our understanding of Eliot's fiction and to a fuller and more accurate picture of her situation within Victorian culture" (4). The work of excavation she does to demonstrate the impact of empire on Eliot's life and writing is impressive. Not only do we get a sense of the extent of Eliot's investments in, and profits from, companies like the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, we learn in great detail about her stepsons' involvements in African emigration schemes and her own early and ongoing interest in the exploration narratives that were both published and reviewed in periodicals like Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. The link between print culture and colonial investment was not serendipitous: the founder of the Indian Railway was a cousin of the editor of the Westminster Review, to which Lewes and Eliot both contributed. The saturation of local, regional, and national culture by empire is refracted nicely through Eliot's life, and her life is seen in turn through the variety of colonial encounters she had, however distant and second-hand they may have been. Although she makes no allusion to the link, Henry's claims about the embeddedness of the world of literary culture in trajectories of empire are in keeping with arguments about the larger, multidirectional movement of people and capital which historians such as Catherine Hall have suggested were constitutive of imperial culture "at home" in the Victorian period.

Henry is equally keen to re-visit Eliot's reputation as an imperialist and a "Zionist" writer in the wake of analyses of her fiction by Edward Said and other postcolonial critics. Her challenge to Said is two-pronged. She objects first to the erasure of the author's life from the reservoir of cultural evidence from which a critic can and should draw—a phenomenon that follows on postmodern claims about the death of the author. Second, she questions the anachronism involved in labeling Eliot an imperialist, an orientalist, or an anti- Semite before these terms had coalesced into fully developed (as opposed to emergent) ideological formations. Entailed in this critique is a rejection of the formalist and representational interpretations offered by recent scholarship on Eliot—not because Henry wishes to revive the question of authorial intent, but because she wants to re-materialize those cultural texts and artifacts which are not strictly "literary" but which can have interpretive relevance in assessing the historical significance of an author. As compelling as these challenges are, Henry's readings of Daniel Deronda (1876), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879) don't consistently fulfill their promise, in part because the combined pressure of...