George Eliot’s Intellectual Life by Avrom Fleishman (review)

602 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE clear principles-in this case about religious poetry, politics, and the vocation of a Christian poet. But equally important to Johnson is the response of "the common reader:' Because of his enormous integrity, Johnson not only weighed the response of other readers fairly, he could also acknowledge that his own passionate response to poetry sometimes clashed with his principles. That did not mean sacrificing his principles. Instead, it offered him the opportunity to add a spirit of generosity and self-criticism to his critical approach. "[S]ince the end of poetry is pleasure;' he writes of Milton's autobiographical passages in Paradise Lost, "that cannot be unpoetical with which all are pleased:' We have much to learn from such a critic, and nowhere more than in his encounter with Milton. Daniel E. Ritchie Bethel University George Eliot's Intellectual Life. By Avrom Fleishman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ISBN978-1107402669. Pp. xi + 296. $88.06. Virginia Woolf famously declared George Eliot's Middlemarch a novel for grown-ups, and it seems appropriate that a book about Eliot's intellectual life should be written by a scholar as established and esteemed as Avrom Fleishman, himself the author of many books, among them one on Woolf. While scholarly books on Eliot are legion, and among them are a goodly number explicating her ideas, Fleishman'sclaim that none sees her intellectual life in the waythat he does is supported by his distinctly "developmental view" (i). He takes seriously Eliot'sown commitment to evolution as a personal and social model, approaching her writing life as a constantly developing process and her mind "as a work in progress" (ii). Also in keeping with Eliot'sown approach, Fleishman eschews a view of experience as primarily socially constructed and instead places value on the importance of person-to-person engagement for the development of ideas. A key thematic strand in Fleishman's text is the notion of Eliot as "tragically idealistic" (x); indeed he claims that she is "the first tragic novelist" (9), and I take this to be a motif that keeps recurring in the book, drawing progressively richer resonance as we read. The challenge of exploring the intellectual life of this highly intellectual writer-this woman with (according to a phrenologist of the time) "a very large brain" who is often said to have "read everything" (5, i)-can be taken on only by someone of enormous intellectual capacity and energy of their own. One must be grateful to Fleishman for-if not reading everything she read, since reading everything would have meant never writing a book about all this reading-reading BOOK REVIEWS 603 much and reading deeply,providing in several cases significant reinterpretations of Eliot'sviews regarding key figures on her intellectual landscape, notably Comte, J. S.Mill, and Riehl. Fleishman structures his book to reflect Eliot'sdevelopmental view; rather than treating the novels in terms of shared themes, for example, he maps her intellectual growth in chronological terms, while making reference to relevant ideas from texts across her career along the way. In keeping too with his aim to trace and explicate her intellectual development, he spends only fiveof the ten chapters on the novels, choosing to spend four chapters on the intellectual development that prepared her to become a novelist and a final chapter on her final essays,which complete a neat arc from non-fiction through a wealth of fiction to a cluster of essaysnarrated by a fictional Theophrastus Such. Fleishman demonstrates the need for his book in the best way possible: at several points he reopens discussions and undertakes analyses that compel readers to rethink their understanding of Eliot's ideas. (Since he chooses to simplify the problem of what to call "George Eliot" by maintaining the use of her pseudonym throughout, I will do so as well). Of particular interest to readers of Christianity and Literature is his exploration of Eliot's early experience of Christianity, which is almost universally characterized among any critics who discuss it as a youthful commitment to Evangelicalism,which was followed by a "loss of faith:' Fleishman accepts this apostasy as fact, briefly but intriguingly discussing it as "astonishingly...