The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, and: Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot (review)

Of all the major Victorian figures, it may be most difficult to imagine George Eliot cozying up with any kind of literary "companion," and yet here are two such volumes devoted to her: The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, edited by George Levine, and the Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot, edited by John Rignall. What would she have made of them? They certainly do not seem to offer knowledge in the way she herself would have found congenial, for as we know, she was an inveterate independent scholar. She learned Hebrew from Isaac Deutsch, taught herself Greek, investigated seaweed under a microscope with George Henry Lewes, and she left us remarkable traces of her own learning. But even in this account, I find, I am relying on my new friends. Of course, I already knew all these things, but I did check them in the Oxford Reader's Companion, so I know that I'm right. How much less reassuring information, wisdom, and ideas all seem in the fictional world of George Eliot—and how much more doubtful the outcome of scholarly labor, whether it be Casaubon's fruitless assemblage of his "Key to All Mythologies" in Middlemarch (1871-72)or the hard-worked truths of Rufus Lyon's sermons in Felix Holt (1866). Much learning all too often comes to much frustration, and the fantasy of ready- to-hand, always-on-your-desk encyclopedic knowledge is far from Eliot's imaginary realm.

These two volumes, each highly impressive in its own way, pose the question of what kind of knowledge literary scholars want. What acts of information-organization do we perform on the Eliot career? How do we locate a novelist of such prodigious learning and such wide-ranging ideas? And, the question that most haunted me in studying these collections, what is the relationship among information, knowledge, ideas, research, and the fascinating novels themselves?

The two collections answer these questions in very different ways. Levine's edited collection of essays, The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, focuses primarily upon thematic questions, suggesting through the range of these questions the extent of Eliot's intellectual reach. With the exception of an opening essay on Marian Evans's life and two essays on the "early" and "late" novels, the essays tend towards more general issues—that is, they do not take their form or impulse from inside the novels, but from external questions, topics with a capital T. There are essays on George Eliot and religion, philosophy, science, politics, and gender; and two slightly more focused essays, one on Eliot and her publishers, and one on "the critical heritage."

One of the aims of the admirable "Cambridge Companion" series is to be of use to intelligent undergraduate and beginning graduate students (and they are often a boon to their teachers as well, particularly when one is teaching outside one's field) but I cannot help suspecting that in this case the method of composition has a little too neatly anticipated the method of digestion. While the essays prove useful compendia of knowledge, and bring us quickly up to speed on relevant issues in the field, they can themselves read rather like responses to thematically set questions: the essays in the middle, on the most "issue-oriented" questions, all tend to fall into the same format, defining their areas, selecting three particularly important aspects of the problem (really, almost three keywords), and then moving towards an application of the issue to a single example of Eliot's novels. The biographically-focused essays prove more successful; Rosemarie Bodenheimer's fine...