George Eliot, Pseudonym of Marian Evans :: George Eliot Writers Authors Essays

George Eliot, Pseudonym of Marian EvansGeorge Eliot, pseudonym of Marian Evans (1819-1880)This article appeared in The Times Literary Supplement and was reprinted inThe Common endorser First Series. Virginia Woolf similarly wrote on George Eliot in the Daily Herald of 9To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one knows about her. It is also to become aware ofthe credulity, not very creditable to ones insight, with which, half consciously and partly maliciously, one hadaccepted the late Victorian indication of a deluded woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more deludedthan herself. At what moment and by what means her spell was broken it is difficult to ascertain. nigh peopleattribute it to the publication of her Life. Perhaps George Meredith, with his phrase about the mercurial littleshowman and the errant woman on the das, gave point and envenom to the arrows of thousands incapable of aimingthem so accurately, but delighted to let fly. She became one of the butts for youth to laugh at, the convenientsymbol of a group of right people who were all(a) guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the samescorn. Lord Acton had said that she was greater than Dante Herbert Spencer exempted her novels, as if they werenot novels, when he banned all parable from the London Library. She was the pride and paragon of her sex.Moreover, her private record was not more alluring than her public. Asked to describe an afternoon at the Priory,the story-teller always imitated that the memory of those serious sunlight afternoons had come to tickle his sense ofhumour. He had been so much alarmed by the grave lady in her low chair he had been so anxious to say theintelligent thing. Certainly, the talk had been very serious, as a note in the fine clear hand of the great novelist borewitness. It was go out Monday morning, and she accused herself of having spoken without due forethought ofMarivaux when she meant another but not doubt, she said, her listener had already supplied the correction. Still,the memory of talking about Marivaux to George Eliot on a sunshine afternoon was not a romantic memory. It hadfaded with the passage of the years. It had not become picturesque. Indeed, one cannot escape the conviction thatthe long, heavy face with its expression of serious and sullen and almost equine power has stamped itselfdepressingly upon the minds of people who remember George Eliot, so that it looks out upon them from her pages.