Struggling to Achieve Harmony

...Brabant, one-time physician to Coleridge and an acquaintance of many German theologians...

...This became a familiar pattern for her...

...It will seem as if a part of my moral nature were gone...

...her own reputation was irretrievable, and he might have proved inconstant, or been forced to return to Agnes...

...Her characters cry out with the myriad facets of their creator's complicated experience: the great Jewish actress in Daniel Deronda, who tells her son, "You may try, but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl...

...After seven months of happiness, she died suddenly in 1880...

...much of the material is undigested, and major facts are frequently buried in detail...

...Now, in an excellent new biography, in preparation for 15 years, Ruby V. Redinger proposes that "George Eliot" was really the means through which an unhappy, rather unfeminine bluestocking became a great novelist and a fulfilled woman...

...Evidently she felt rejected by her parents, and this eventually developed into a lifelong worry about selfish egoism...

...Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell "Woman," wrote Victorian journalist and physiologist George Henry Lewes, "by her greater affectionateness, her greater range and depth of emotional experience, is well fitted to give expression to the emotional facts of life, and demands a place in literature corresponding with that she occupies in society...

...In spite of the quarrel with her father, she returned to nurse him selflessly in his last illness, writing, "What shall I be without my father...

...In fact, it meant the end of their life together, but Lewes' tolerance precluded all possibilities of divorce...

...Kept in boarding schools from her fifth year, she distinguished herself as a remarkable student...

...Her eight novels were a form of justification for her past experience and for her relations with Lewes...

...omitted was a sense of the struggle Mary Ann Evans had undergone to achieve this harmony...

...Brabant and the other women of the family became alarmed at the apparent degree of intimacy between the two and ordered Mary Ann out of the house...

...In this phase, she took shelter with a Dr...

...Casaubon from the same novel, whom George Eliot suggested was modeled on herself in the Strauss days F. R. Leavis has compared her with Tolstoy in The Great Traditon, and surely no English writer has displayed a deeper understanding of, or tolerance for, the vagaries of human nature...

...The disconsolate Cross set about editing her letters, producing a whitewashed portrait of George Eliot, serene and with sympathies in keeping with her novels...

...women with less refined sensibilities could not imagine so much eager devotion concerning itself only with intellectual matters...

...Redinger shows that submersion of identity in a masculine "other" was an early impulse of her subject...

...or even the pedantic, impotent Mr...

...Mary Ann called him her "archangel," read German and Greek with him every morning and, under his tutelage, began her famous translation of David Friedrich Strauss' Das Leben Jesu, an early "demythologizing" of the Gospels...

...as with her books, the ambiguities of emotions are more significant than events...

...Yet the Haight study is primarily a work of scholarship...

...Besides, she had often expressed a strong desire for privacy...

...Redinger understands, as many earlier biographers have failed to do, that scenes and characters created by George Eliot seldom have exact prototypes in the author's life, but rather embody a symbolic transformation of events in her past...

...In doing so, she put proper society in a quandary over how it should regard a woman of scandalous reputation who was, at the same time, a significant author, revered for the breadth of her moral vision and her portrayal of self-sacrificing generosity...

...He became a "mother" to her, creating an environment where, for the first time, her creative powers were released and she could write fiction...

...There are signs that...

...Grief-stricken for a short time, she unexpectedly married John Walter Cross, a friend 20 years her junior...

...Even after public disclosure of her true identity, Mary Ann Lewes was able to maintain the person of George Eliot as something dissociated from her private self...

...She and Lewes had recently defied convention by choosing to live together in a "sacred bond,' though he had a wife and children...

...She was looking for a chance to be useful, and for someone on whom she could depend...

...Mary Ann soon fell in love with the handsome and Byronic editor, who brought his new workmate home to live with him, his wife and his mistress in what was an unconventional and highly charged atmosphere...

...The other two women united in jealous hatred of her, and the emotional tension between all four parties makes for fascinating reading in Chapman's meticulous diary...

...I had a horrid vision of myself last night becoming earthly sensual and devilish for want of that purifying and restraining influence...

...Surprisingly, Mary Ann was able to subdue her own passion and remain an excellent friend and co-editor...

...No wonder Lewes called her "Madonna...

...He was in the process of buying John Stuart Mill's Westminster Review, and he wanted an assistant behind the scenes...

...or great-hearted but nearsighted Dorothea Brooke, for whom, "No life would have been possible which was not filled with emotion...

...Redinger shrewdly points out that the couple partially reversed roles...

...Then, convinced by her brother that she was an economic drain on the family, she entered into partnership with the publisher of her Strauss translation, John Chapman, in 1850...

...When she first met him, he was co-editor of the Leader, a radical weekly...

...When he died, she ceased to write...

...Actually, they both supported his wife's children by Hunt, while Lewes' three teenage boys came to live in the new household...

...He also handled financial dealings with publishers, protected her from discouraging reviews and letters, and laid to rest her doubts about her femininity and self-worth...

...But few writers have become so permanently or irrevocably linked with their assumed names...

...Her most successful heroines share her compassionate humanism and her loving heart, but none can equal her intellectual power, nor her ability to creatively transcend life's vicissitudes both in her art and in her existence...

...Its drawbacks notwithstanding, the "marriage" was a success and George Eliot wrote thankfully, "Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age...

...Above all, he was able to convince her that his critical evaluation of her novels was independent of his love for her...

...Like Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of Middlemarch, the young Mary Ann believed her life's vocation was to submit to the endeavors of some great man's mind...

...He and his partner, Thornton Hunt (son of the poet Leigh Hunt, a friend of Byron and Shelley), tried to preserve the libertarianism of an earlier era, and so when Lewes' wife Agnes and Hunt fell in love, the husband initially condoned the affair and the children it produced...

...Were we to have access to additional material on George Eliot, she would not necessarily be more comprehensible to us...

...The recent reediting of the letters by Gordon S. Haight and his monumental biography have uncovered a great deal that Cross had concealed or that had been concealed from him...

...Cross, too young to have known her before the Lewes period, is hardly to be blamed...

...Lewes' circle was shocked at her haste, and at the age disparity, but her implacably conventional brother, who had severed relations with her over the "sacred bond," resumed them over the legal one...

...Born in 1819, as a little girl Mary Ann lived for her brother Isaac, a relationship she was to portray through Maggie and Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss...

...she underwent a prolonged inward struggle which-even while exacting its toll in the form of depressions and psychosomatic disturbances-aroused psychic strengths that began to give her the inner poise her later friends assumed she had enjoyed all her life...

...In one of these establishments, during her teens, she fell under the influence of Evangelicalism (subsequently satirized in her novels) and embraced its harsh subservience to God, its renunciation of personal desires, with all the enthusiasm of her nature...

...Even so, her writing was always attended with anxiety and ill health...

...each new success depressed her with the fear that she could never reduplicate it...

...A few years later, at 37, Mary Ann "Lewes" turned to fiction and, as "George Eliot," established herself as one of England's leading novelists...

...He was doubtless thinking of one woman in particular: Mary Ann Evans, essayist and translator of German theology...

...Nonetheless, she includes shrewd literary analyses of the novels...

...Ruby V. Redinger's subtle portrait is a most important contribution to our knowledge of a great woman and novelist...

...The reaction against it came with equal force not long afterward when she was introduced to German Higher Criticism, which reevaluated the interpretation of Bible texts historically...

...Many female writers have hidden their sex behind pseudonyms-one thinks of the Bronte sisters' "Acton, Ellis and Currer Bell," or Violet Paget's "Vernon Lee...

...Not that she had quietly and easily transferred her love for him into the calmer feeling of friendship," says Ms...

...He could never marry George Eliot, and she took a risk living with him...

...The Doctor, who was 61, claimed her as a second daughter, but Mrs...

...This episode prepared her both for future dealings with the world of publishing, and for her relationship with George Henry Lewes...

...Ruby V. Redinger's title, George Eliot: The Emergent Self, correctly indicates that her preoccupation is with the psychological development of a complex artist...

...She lost her faith and quarreled with her father and brother...