George Eliot in Context ed. by Margaret Harris (review)

Margaret Harris’s edited collection is designed to make George Eliot “less abstract by attending to some of the ‘wider relations’ that establish coordinates on her life and work” (xvii). In her preface, Harris illustrates Eliot’s elusiveness by examining the ways in which she “was conscious of herself as a text, managing the ways her names were used” (xvii). Harris concludes that “in these protean manifestations her awareness of the importance of context is demonstrable” (xvii). “More than most writers,” she argues, “George Eliot was conscious of the intellectual and material milieux in which she operated” (xviii). Therefore, the essays in Harris’s edited collection “discuss both concepts and context contemporary with her [Eliot], and later ones, contemporary with us, to provide as full a range of lenses as possible through which to illuminate her achievement” (xviii). In keeping with the idea of providing cultural contexts for Eliot’s life and works, Harris first provides an interesting and useful twelve-page chronology that includes, along with the major events in Eliot’s life, a listing of significant contemporary historical and literary events. This makes the chronology read like an essay written within the context of cultural criticism.

Part 1 of the text “offers perspectives on George Eliot’s life, particularly her career as an author, and her afterlife” (xviii). It begins with a very traditional biographical summary by Kathryn Hughes, which includes only one striking point—that George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil” “seethes with a sense of suffocating paranoia” (8). This chapter is followed by two contributions by Joanne Shattock: a discussion of Eliot’s “Publishers and Publication” and a review of the “Editions of George Eliot’s Work.” The fourth chapter, “Genre” by Nancy Henry, notes that Eliot produced work in every major literary genre except drama and provides a mainstream work-by-work summary of Eliot’s writing career. In chapter 5, titled “The Biographical Tradition,” Harris makes the assertion that “[Eliot] herself was her greatest work” (41). Harris begins with biographical facts from Eliot’s obituaries and proceeds through the major studies, including Haight’s “magisterial work” (48); Rosemary Ashton’s “pre-eminent” work, which includes “active new research” (48); and Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s “illuminating reading of the letters,” which “discloses new dimensions to an understanding of George Eliot’s actions” (49). The chapter appropriately closes with a tribute to Barbara Hardy and her “attention to imagery and language in George Eliot’s writing in all genres” (49). Chapter 6, “Afterlife,” was also written by Harris. She emphasizes that “George Eliot lives principally on in university curricula and in academic publications” (52) but notes that her legacy “is a potent one, constantly visited, revisited and revisioned” (60). This first section provides a firm foundation for the rest of the volume and a succinct summary of scholarship on George Eliot’s life up to the present.

Part 2, titled “Critical Fortunes,” contains three essays by Juliette Atkinson from the University of London, who has earned a New Scholars Award from the Bibliographical Society of America. She competently sums up the critical responses to Eliot before 1900, as well as from 1900 to 1970 and from 1970 to the present. Like Harris, Atkinson gives a well-deserved tribute to the work of Barbara Hardy. Part 3, “Cultural and Social Contexts,” is made up of twenty-seven brief essays written by a variety of junior and senior scholars from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Each gives a competent overview of his or her topic as it relates to Eliot’s life and novels, and each is followed by a list of sources. The most useful aspect of this collection is that readers can be sure to find essays that deal with cultural topics that have unique personal interest and appeal. I was particularly impressed with the chapters on religion, dress, education, and the Woman Question. Other topics include class, etiquette, historiography, interiors, law, music, secularism, theatre, transport, visual...