Middlemarch Backgrounds

Summary

                I read number of short to medium length letters, journal entries, and essays to, from, and about George Eliot (Eliot and Hornback, 532-69). While they do not meld into one neat and tidy whole, they create a pattern that reveal Eliot as driven, artistic, and highly intelligent. For example, Eliot records in a 1 January 1869 journal entry her explicit goal to write Middlemarch; she completed and published it as planned by the 1 January 1873 entry. The excerpts from Quarry for “Middlemarch” further reveal her commitment to research and organize her art. It is also impressively highlights her intelligence. Eliot cared deeply about her art and her message, as shown when she tells Mr. Blackwood that she avoids reading her critics, hinting that she preferred to avoid discouragement. She goes on to mention that she likes the emotional effect the novel’s installment publication plan had on her readers, a notion that contrasts rather amusingly with her husband’s reason for liking the plan—it made for better sales.

Readers saw the artistry in Eliot’s realistic characters right away. Blackwood praises her at length on their sophistication, while in another letter Eliot had to correct Harriet Beecher Stowe, American author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who apparently thought Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon so realistic that she believed, incorrectly, that it was drawn from Eliot’s personal experience. In the “Story-Telling” section from Leaves from a Notebook, Eliot explains that the best storytelling comes from keeping the reader’s interest, and the best way to keep that interest is to introduce a character as a “stranger in some unusual or pathetic or humorous situation,”—pathetic here meaning to cause or evoke pity—” or manifesting some remarkable characteristics” (537).

Eliot has well-articulated, intelligently constructed ideas about the world. As she tells Stowe, she believes that our common humanity supersedes any one religious denomination. Emily Davies relates that Eliot believes honesty as the greatest thing to be taught, whereas dishonesty in speech and action ought to be avoided at all costs, and both impact people and society in general. Davies went on to tell Eliot that the girls at her school did not give up on achieving anything because they could not achieve great things, but rather they did not care to do anything in the first place. Eliot pronounced this as stupid, explaining that stupidity is not only intellectual, but can be of the character as well. She said it is entirely possible to be good and smart at the same time.

Analysis

George Eliot wrote in Leaves from a Notebook that “In endeavouring to estimate a remarkable writer who aimed at more than a temporary influence, we have first to consider what was his individual contribution to the spiritual wealth of mankind” (537). It is this statement that convinces me that Eliot wanted to create great art to stand through time. She wasSense is perhaps too loose a word, but the statements and clues I gathered from just a few pages of letters and other writings show a person deeply interested in the artistic merit of her novel. She wants to throw great lights on the human condition; she wants to render life as accurately as she may, and she expects no less from other authors. She was speaking generically—the title of the essay was “Judgments on Authors”—, yet I sense this is the very ethic she poured into her work.

Works Cited

Eliot, George, and Bert G. Hornback. Middlemarch: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2000. Print