George Eliot in Romantic Biofiction

Dinitia Smith’s The Honeymoon is the first complete biofiction of the woman enduringly known by her masculine pen name, George Eliot. It tells the story of a precocious provincial English girl who challenges the conventions of her middle-class upbringing as she pursues a writing career in Victorian London, moves in with an already-married man, becomes one of the greatest living British novelists, and then marries John Cross, a man twenty years her junior whom she’d long called “nephew.” Whether or not Eliot’s brief marriage to Cross constituted a “happy ending” depends on how you interpret the harrowing incident that took place during their honeymoon in Venice. This is the mystery of the novel, which I will not spoil here.

Parts of Eliot’s life have been represented in fiction in several other works, but no novelist before Smith has attempted to recreate Eliot’s whole life. The Honeymoon is thus an important contribution both to the biographical record of George Eliot and to the still-emerging genre of biofiction, in which a novelist draws from traditional biographical sources to create a new version of the life of a historical figure, usually paying particular attention to the subject’s interiority. In a brief prefatory “Note to the Reader,” Smith clearly states that she has written “a novel, a product of my imagination inspired by the life and writings of George Eliot” in order to depict Eliot’s “inner world as she lived out her life.”

The Honeymoon begins a few months before Eliot’s death. It opens with the newlywed couple approaching Venice, the site of their ill-fated honeymoon, then weaves this story in short chapters between longer ones that reveal Eliot’s past. This double narrative structure helps to maintain the novel’s dramatic tension and to illustrate how Eliot’s character responded to successive challenges. Smith acknowledges that John Walter Cross was “the most difficult character to track” in the existing biographical record, but I believe this paucity of information ultimately freed Smith to fashion him as Eliot’s foil, a man with complex motivations and secrets he keeps from his new wife. Her representation of Cross is one of the greatest strengths of the novel; his character unfolds in surprising new ways not previously depicted in fiction or biography. As the past catches up with the present, the honeymoon experience in general and Cross in particular come to symbolize how little we really know about other people, even those closest to us.

In her foreword “Note to the Reader,” Smith asserts her prerogative as a novelist to alter some biographical details to suit artistic purposes. She explains that she has “sometimes transposed phrases from Eliot’s novels, letters, and journals” and that “[f]or the sake of clarity” she has taken “some dramatic license in the chronology.” Transmutations of this sort represent an expected practice of biofiction authors who regularly subordinate biographical facts to their creative vision. Smith not only specifies which biographical elements she has changed, she also adds, “There is nothing in this story that I know with certainty did not happen,” a curious statement that suggests her biofiction is essentially authentic. In an afterword entitled “Fact into Fiction: A Bibliographical Essay on Writing The Honeymoon,” Smith further details the sources of her research into the life and times of her subject. The description of this diligent research serves to convince readers that they can trust Smith’s depiction of Eliot as a kind of biographic truth. The usual distinctions between biofiction and biography are nearly erased.

The honeymoon story is the most dramatic of the novel’s two narratives but the protagonist’s backstory—Eliot’s recollection of past events and relationships—actually dominates the novel. Smith’s version of Eliot’s life is closest to the conclusions of several pre-feminist biographers, including Charles Bray, Gordon Haight, and Kathleen Adams, all of whom Smith acknowledges as sources. All regard Eliot as needy, lovelorn, and insecure, entirely dependent on the men in her life...