The Cambridge companion to George Eliot

Abstract

By the time George Eliot died on December 22, 1880, she was celebrated as the greatest contemporary English novelist.But her work fell into the disrepute that attended almost all things Victorian in the early twentieth century.The two great writers of the time were, in most respects, polar opposites: Charles Dickens the great popular entertainer; George Eliot the voice of a higher culture, learned, self-refl exive, tormented by her own aesthetic and moral aspirations.It was, ironically, her deep seriousness that turned most modernist writers -many of them, clearly, her direct literary descendants -away from her. Dickens survived their condescension because his popularity never fl agged, his comic and melodramatic energy triumphing over the "luminous brooding" that Henry James identifi ed as George Eliot's dominant literary mode.Half refusing Dickens's kind of spectacular popularity, hoping that it might be achieved without compromising her strenuous moral and aesthetic standards, she became for almost half a century something of a monument to an era whose name, Victorian, had become almost synonymous with prudishness and humorless solemnity.Distance of time and enormous social changes made it possible for readers in the last half of the twentieth century to rediscover the marvels of George Eliot's fi ction and grow out of the Oedipal inevitability of modernism's rejection.Since the end of the Second World War, critics and readers have been discovering that her modern reputation belies the formal brilliance, the comic virtuosity, and the intellectual depth of her fi ction.The respectability she herself sought and for which posterity had seemed to condemn her was an aspiration rather than a fact.The case may now reasonably be made, despite the massive energy and genius of Dickens , that George Eliot was indeed the greatest of Victorian novelists.It is less controversial that Middlemarch is the greatest of Victorian novels.We now recognize that her art not only infl uenced the modernist experiments of writers like Henry James but it anticipated the epistemological skepticism of postmodernism .If George Eliot the woman was susceptible to the conventions and comforts

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