Volume 43, Number 7 · April 18, 1996
George Eliot, Radical
By Millicent Bell
George Eliot, Voice of a Century: A Biography
by Frederick R Karl
Norton, 708 pp., $30.00
The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction
by Rosemarie Bodenheimer
Cornell University Press, 320 pp., $33.95; $15.95 (paper)
How could she have written them? Henry James, reading John Cross's biography of George Eliot in 1885, decided that it failed to explain how 'this quiet, anxious, sedentary, serious, invalidical English lady, without animal spirits, without adventures or sensations, should have made us believe that nothing in the world was alien to her; should have produced such rich, deep, masterly pictures of the multiform life of man.' It was, he thought, an illustration of the final curse of all literary biography—that there is never more than the most misleading connection between a work of the imagination and the life of its maker: 'It is certain that George Eliot had this characteristic of a mind possessed: that the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life.'
Review, 5428 words
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