George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century: Literature, Philosophy, Politics by K. M. Newton (review)

In time for George Eliot's bicentenary this year, K. M. Newton, author of two important monographs and numerous articles on Eliot, editor of a critical reader on Eliot, and coauthor with Saleel Nurbhai of George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism (2002), has published George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century: Literature, Philosophy, Politics. Focusing foremost on Eliot's last two novels, Middlemarch (1871–72) and Daniel Deronda (1876), but drawing evidence from all her fiction and from her essays, letters, journals, and biography, the book is a comprehensive evaluation of Eliot as an artist and novelist, as well as of the politics, ethics, and literary psychology she developed over the course of her life and in her writings. Contrary to more standard critical approaches, it treats Eliot not as a primarily British or Victorian novelist, but as a significant figure in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature and intellectual culture. It examines her connections to contemporary figures like Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry James, George Henry Lewes, Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer, among others, as well as her connections to associationism, literary modernism, deconstruction, the ethical thought of Bernard Williams, Aristotelian tragedy, and Laingian psychology.

Newton's aims in the book are twofold. First, taking as his point of departure a survey of Eliot's critical reception in the U.K. and the U.S. from 1919, her first centenary, to the present, he aims to dispel received misperceptions of Eliot as, among other things, a consummate Victorian, political liberal or conservative, didactic moralist, positivist empiricist, and conventional mimetic realist. Contrary to these common misunderstandings, he defines Eliot in terms of the radicality of her political thought and empiricism, the complexity and sophistication of her ethical vision, and the modernity and radicality of her literary realism.

Newton's second aim, as per the book's title, is to make a case for the relevance to twenty-first-century readers of Eliot's writings and thought: "this book aims to . . . show that few nineteenth-century writers in the next hundred years are likely to be seen as more essential in terms of both their art and thought than Eliot" (2). "She is one of the few writers of the past," he maintains, "who is 'our contemporary' in that her mind and work speak to readers in the twenty-first century more powerfully than any other Victorian writer" (5).

As regards the first aim, Newton is persuasive in demonstrating through close readings and carefully chosen examples the complexity, innovativeness, and radicality of Eliot's thought and writings on the level of politics, ethics, psychology, and literary form. He shows, for instance, that Eliot's realism is often mistaken by critics as a pure objectivism, in the terms of a Coleridgean organic unity, or as a simple empirical observation and mimetic reflection of an external reality. Newton convincingly argues that it should be understood instead as a complex interaction of subjective and objective elements, as Eliot's deliberately subjective construction of fictional worlds and fictional characters out of objective phenomena. What is radical about this conception of her own fiction, he maintains, is that Eliot pointedly conceives the seemingly godlike commentaries her narrators make about her novels' fictional worlds and characters as being neither omniscient nor objectively true. She conceives them, rather, as subjective and inherently limited interpretations on her narrators' part, thereby opening a space for readers to question and disagree with her narrators, and to make alternative interpretations and judgments.

Newton develops this point about literary form in a particularly rich discussion of Daniel Deronda. Arguing against a Sartrean critique of the novel by Peter Brooks, he demonstrates that reality in Eliot's late fiction, as it is shaped for instance in Daniel Deronda by the narrator, is never imminently, organically structured, nor predetermined by a narrative endpoint, unlike reality in many more standard, conventional realist...