George Eliot, European Novelist by John Rignall (review)

As the very idea of Europe has become a matter of debate, with the potential disintegration of monetary union and the expansion of the European Union, John Rignall asks us to entertain the notion of a European George Eliot. And it must be said that as soon as the notion is entertained, it seems so right that one wonders why it has not been centrally examined before (other than in Rignall’s edited collection, George Eliot and Europe [1997]). For all her explorations of provincialism (just think of the subtitle of Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life), Eliot, as Rignall reminds us, had wide experience not only of European locales but also of European literatures, especially French and German—reading indicated, for example, by the presence of Balzac in the background of her provincial novels. Much attention has been paid in recent years to Eliot’s cosmopolitanism, most influentially by Amanda Anderson in The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (2001); Rignall’s strictly European approach, which tends to be biographical and literary rather than ideological or theoretical, offers a welcome contribution to the discussion.

Rignall’s book divides loosely into two halves—a first half that explores general concepts of the European in Eliot’s life and writings and a second organized through comparisons between Eliot and specific European authors (a final chapter, which serves as a coda, considers her Europeanism in the context of Nietzsche’s critique of her persistent faith in morality, even absent religious faith). Rignall starts by discussing Eliot’s own sense of herself as a European, observing that her career as a novelist had its genesis not only in her relationship with George Henry Lewes but in the trip to Germany that inaugurated their “marriage.” He also sets some parameters. His decision to focus his discussion on French and German literature, especially in the context of Eliot’s shifting responses to the Franco-Prussian War, offers some useful bounds to a subject that might otherwise threaten to be “dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called” Europe (to adapt a [End Page e-25] famous phrase from Middlemarch). In chapter 2, Rignall argues that while France tends to be associated with “modernity and revolution”—with all that is “electric”—Germany stands for the old and the dull, for tradition and its famed Gemütlichkeit. On the whole, he notes, Eliot prefers Germany, although that preference was tested by the rise of German militarism during the Franco-Prussian War. Chapter 3, “The Idea of Travel,” is to me the book’s most interesting. Here Rignall points out that for all her own travels, journeys play a relatively minor role in Eliot’s fiction—and even in her nonfiction, where she largely avoided that favorite Victorian essay genre, the travelogue. He considers the structural centrality of the journey in Dickens’s novels (as, for example, in Little Dorrit), contrasting it with Eliot’s more static metaphor for her own art, Middlemarch’s web. Chapter 4 then returns to the discussion of France and Germany to explore what it calls “European Landscapes and the Violence of History,” focusing on the leveling plains of the Floss and on the diseased picture of Rome experienced by Dorothea in Middlemarch. History here functions analogously to the previous chapter’s journey (although Rignall does not quite state the connection): Rome disrupts the idea of historical teleology, replacing it with a fragmentariness that resembles Rignall’s take on the web.

Rignall’s observations are frequently insightful and suggestive, and his writing displays such grace and clarity that one is easily carried through the chapters, which have the feel of little essays as much as parts of a thesis-driven book. In other words, the flow of the larger argument meanders a bit as it circles around different ideas of the European. This is especially true in the book’s second half, where the comparisons with specific European authors start to structure Rignall’s claims. Thus we hear accounts of the relationship...