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  • George Eliot, European Novelist by John Rignall, and: George Eliot’s Grammar of Being by Melissa Anne Raines
  • Nancy Henry (bio)
George Eliot, European Novelist, by John Rignall; pp. 184. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011, £55.00, $99.95.
George Eliot’s Grammar of Being, by Melissa Anne Raines; pp. xxiv + 208. London and New York: Anthem Press, 2011, £60.00, $99.00.

The recent bicentenary of Charles Dickens’s birth has given scholars and critics of Victorian literature the opportunity to think about the value of structuring our explorations of Victorian literature around the lives and writings of individual authors. While this model of categorizing literary texts has not always been fashionable, it persists, and some of the most subtle and searching analyses of literary works come from those scholars and critics who have devoted themselves to understanding the complete works of an author. The centenary of Mary Anne Evans’s birth does not roll around until 2019, but George Eliot studies continues to thrive, producing books that are tightly focused on her writing.

John Rignall’s George Eliot, European Novelist and Melissa Anne Raines’s George Eliot’s Grammar of Being differ in their approaches, but share a commitment to combining historical contextualization with formal analysis or close reading. Both authors aim to help us see something unique in George Eliot’s writing, stemming from her experiences and intentions. Rignall shows that Eliot perceived her identity as not only English, but also European, and that she wrote self-consciously in a tradition of European novelists. Raines argues that the choices Eliot made as an author, down to the grammatical structure of her sentences, reflected her desire to embody in her prose the emotional and psychological feelings, as well as the physiological sensations, of her characters.

Several critical studies have shown the ways in which Eliot’s experience of travel influenced her fiction. These include Rignall’s own collection of essays, George Eliot and Europe (1997), Andrew Thompson’s George Eliot and Italy (1998), Kathleen McCormack’s George Eliot’s English Travels (2005), and Gerlinde Roder-Bolton’s George Eliot in Germany, 1854–55 (2006). In George Eliot, European Novelist, Rignall addresses both the idea of travel in Eliot’s works (excluding poetry) and the affinity between her novels and those of her fellow realists, including Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Marcel Proust, as well as the lesser-known Gottfried Keller and Theodor Fontane. Concentrating on France and Germany (with only passing glances at her travels to Italy and Spain), he argues that the concept of Europe (so relevant to recent attempts to define a European union and identity) was present in Eliot’s lifetime, and he writes against interpretations of Eliot as a [End Page 546] quintessentially English novelist by illuminating these subtle affinities with French and German contemporaries. The motif of travel, Rignall writes, “not only exposes some of the limitations of English life, as in the Roman scenes of Middlemarch, but it also plays a part in the formation of the self” (9).

Starting with Eliot’s experiences travelling in what she referred to in letters as the “old Germany” (representing tradition) and the “electric France” (representing modernity), Rignall discusses the association in her novels of travel with the conditions of modern life: rootlessness, dislocation, cosmopolitanism, and mobile capital (qtd. in Rignall 27–28). Rather than identify influences, he convincingly argues that Eliot was responding to similar social and cultural conditions and changes as her French and German counterparts. For example, Eliot and Flaubert both use the idea of “diffusion” and negotiate its negative connotations (the squandering and diluting of energies) and positive potential (the expansion and spreading of that energy) in the characters of Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary (1856) and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch (1871–72) (87).

Rignall also participates in a conversation within George Eliot studies about the modernist dimension of Eliot’s fiction, concluding decisively that her experimental late work, especially Daniel Deronda (1876), anticipates modernism in its form and content. In this he agrees with the case made by K. M. Newton in Modernizing George Eliot (2011). Because of this emphasis, Daniel Deronda receives the most extensive...

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