Re-reading George Eliot's "Natural History": Marian Evans, "the People," and the Periodical

George Eliot’s ‘The Natural History of German Life’, which appeared in the Westminster Review in July 1856 has become a central reference point in George Eliot studies and in accounts of nineteenth-century literary realism because of its supposed compact articulation of the future novelist’s “doctrine of sympathy” offered by the still anonymous Marian Evans. This essay argues that Natural History offers a more equivocal and ultimately intriguing display of Marian Evans’s discomfort with reviewing and with the Westminster Review. In this fractured and much misrepresented essay, Evans emerges as an ironic, evasive voice, ultimately subverting the role of the generalizing authoritative critic, in contrast to George Henry Lewes, who in an article on in the same issue of the Review, embodies fully the generalizing corporate voice of the mid-century reviewer.