Volume 46, Number 16 · October 21, 1999
Eminent Victorian
By John Bayley
George Eliot: The Last Victorian
by Kathryn Hughes
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $30.00
That famous opening of L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between—'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'—has become a cliché of the present time. But some things in the past are more different than others. Isaiah Berlin used to say that some things change and some things don't, and that it is important for the historian of ideas to sense by instinct which is which. Take the case of George Eliot—Mary Ann Evans as she then was—an ardent and naive young woman in 1845. Like all young women she had a special girlfriend, Sara Hennell, and, Hughes writes, 'there was no room in Mary Ann's life for another significant emotional attachment.' Still, her half-sister Fanny Houghton thought she had found a nice boy for Mary Ann, a good-looking young picture restorer, himself prepared to take a keen interest in this plain but intelligent and articulate young woman. All went well: the sound of wedding bells almost audible. But quite abruptly Mary Ann decided no: she couldn't love or respect him enough to marry him. And the decision gave her a series of psychosomatic headaches.
Review, 2257 words
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