A Companion to George Eliot ed. by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw (review)

With over five hundred companions or handbooks to literary movements and figures now in print from Wiley-Blackwell, Cambridge, and Oxford alone, the potential pitfalls of such collections have become familiar. The question of audience is never entirely resolved: is this for our colleagues, or for some vaguely defined idea of a student? Topic assignments—often along the lines of “George Eliot and X”—are in danger of producing either a flattened-out overview or an indulgence in the essayist’s latest obsession. I thus approached the thirty-four essays in this massive volume with some trepidation, only to find that I was not just pleasantly surprised, but intellectually excited.

Let me begin by celebrating a few things the volume does not do. It does not concern itself with issues of plot, character, or motivation. The first section, “Imaginative Form and Literary Content,” offers five readings of George Eliot’s narrators at work. The inevitable linkage of Eliot with realism is left blessedly fluid: various potentials of realism are newly defined and refined through concrete descriptions of her narrative activities and in recognitions that the imagination is both crucial and unreliable in Eliot’s conception of the moral life. Nor is the other inevitable term, sympathy, allowed to retain its unchallenged status in discussions of Eliot’s ethics. Monochromatic political complaints are left behind, replaced by treatments of gender, conservatism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and imperialism that give voice to Eliot’s skeptical, many-sided approaches to any identifiable position. Rather than early, middle, and late Eliot, there’s a chapter on each novel, her poetry, her journalism, and Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879).

Quite often adjacent essays create alternative routes to thinking about similar concerns, as if the volume had been designed to act out Eliot’s own predilection for coming at ideas or situations from multiple points of view. Such interweaving also occurs among the book’s four sections. To take just one example, a reader who wants new perspectives on Eliot’s interest in forecasting the future might want to read Adela Pinch’s essay about the ways in which prediction serves to prevent or protect against disaster in The Mill on the Floss (1860) and “The Lifted Veil” (1859), along with Ian Duncan’s “George Eliot and the Science of the Human.” Duncan’s broad argument investigates Eliot’s commitment to the novel in a period when geological and evolutionary time had radically changed the scale of human existence. As he writes of her career arc, “Eliot came to understand the novelist’s task as a shoring up of human nature, a defense of its coherence and integrity, against the abysmal wastes of cosmic time—until her last writings, in which we find her dissolving the stabilizing figures of provincial and national life, and even of ‘man’ and of organic form altogether, to imagine posthuman futures which extend outside the domain of the novel as we have known it” (472–73). Duncan’s formulation could well stand as an epigraph to Eliot studies in the twenty-first century.

Two clusters of interlocking chapters lie at the heart of this collection. The first comprises essays about how Eliot’s narrators behave; the second and larger cluster offers a rich array of readings through philosophy, religion, political theory, and nineteenth-century sciences. Monika Fludernik’s “Eliot and Narrative” opens the volume with a thorough narratological overview of Eliot’s performative voices, with a nice emphasis on their fluidity and satiric posturing. Michael Wood’s “Metaphor and Masque” extends her precise attention in his study of slippery metaphor. This group of essays widens the meanings of realism, locating it in the moral suasion of the narrator in Fludernik’s essay, linking it with the shock of surprise in Caroline Levine’s, or, as in John Plotz’s essay, replacing its supposed focus on the social nature...