George Eliot’s Feminism: “The Right to Rebellion.” by June Skye Szirotny (review)

June Skye Szirotny’s George Eliot’s Feminism: “The Right to Rebellion” is clearly informed by her lifelong study of George Eliot’s life and writing as well as her historically grounded analysis of Victorian feminism. From the first page, she demonstrates her familiarity with Eliot’s and Lewes’ novels, essays, and published correspondence. Drawing from these materials, she offers a fresh perspective on the tensions that shaped Eliot’s responses to Victorian feminism. Defying the recent trend for more casual documentation, Szirotny provides meticulous parenthetical references throughout, citing frequently from Gordon Haight’s edition of Eliot’s letters, William Baker’s three-volume set of George Henry Lewes’ letters (1995–99), and Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston’s edition of Eliot’s journal (1998), as well as from Victorian sources and more than a century of scholarship on Eliot and her writing.

Szirotny’s overarching argument is that although Eliot was “ambivalent” about the political activism of some of her feminist friends, she nonetheless had a “strong belief in the necessity of reform” (26) and “accepted most of the ideals of contemporary feminists” (32) by the time she began to write her novels. Eliot’s critics frequently characterize her as “conservative,” but most have not traced the development of her attitudes as carefully as Szirotny does here. George Levine, for example, in his magisterial introduction to The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (2001) identifies Eliot’s political stance as “conservative” (12), and J. Hillis Miller makes similar claims in “A Conclusion in Which Almost Nothing is Concluded” (151) in Karen Chase’s Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century (2006); Szirotny could have expanded her audience by citing these and other recent examples. Countering the arguments of many of Eliot’s best-known critics who identify her simply as conservative, and second-wave feminist critics like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who demonstrate, for example, Eliot’s “feminine anti-feminism” in several of her novels (Madwoman 466), Szirotny asserts that Eliot was “more feminist than usually thought” (32) and presents close-readings of all of her novels and The Spanish Gypsy to show her support for many of the causes advocated by Victorian feminists.

One of the most original insights of Szirotny’s study is her argument that Eliot, as a child, suffered from what Alice Miller, in The Drama of the Gifted Child, calls “narcissistic disturbances,” and that her ambivalence and apparent conservativism can be better understood as an expression of the psychological defenses related to them. Mary Ann Evans did not have a strong, supportive bond with her mother, and fifteen months after she was born, her mother delivered twins who died soon after their birth. As a result, Mary Ann was sent to boarding school when she was only five years old. Szirotny identifies Christian evangelicalism as a second factor that shaped Eliot’s early “conservativism” and describes her initial enthusiastic response to the faith professed by her teacher, Maria Lewis. She shows that Eliot’s Christian evangelicalism was “most responsible for her ‘conservativism’” as a young adult, but documents how her political attitudes changed after she renounced Christianity at the age of twenty-two.

Szirotny shows that after Eliot moved to London in 1851 and assumed her role as the “subeditor” of the Westminster Review, she developed a strong belief in “the necessity of reform” (26). In 1854 when she decided to travel to Germany, unmarried and unchaperoned, with George Henry Lewes and elected to live openly with him after their return, she suffered from her family’s rejection and from social ostracism. Szirotny acknowledges that Eliot became less politically radical after 1854, but she cites widely from her letters and essays to show that she was not “weak” but psychologically “sick,” and that “the love and success she enjoyed in later years, as well as the influence of the sanguine Lewes” eventually helped counteract “her negativism” (8). The tensions Eliot experienced between compliance and rebellion, depression and...