Volume 22, Number 19 · November 27, 1975
Greatness and Melancholy
By Michael Wood
George Eliot: the Emergent Self
by Ruby V. Redinger
Knopf, 515 pp., $15.00
Young Thomas Hardy
by Robert Gittings
Little, Brown, 259 pp., $10.95
George Eliot, born Mary Anne Evans in 1819, died in 1880. Within five years a Life had appeared, written by her widowed husband, J. W. Cross, who disarmingly confessed that he had left out 'everything that I thought my wife would have wished to be omitted.' He probably left out even more than she would have wished, prompting Gladstone to remark that the work was 'not a Life at all,' but 'a Reticence in three volumes'; and allowing Henry James, with a characteristic mixture of condescension and admiration, to see in George Eliot a 'quiet, anxious, sedentary, serious, invalidical English lady, without animal spirits, without adventures or sensations,' who nevertheless somehow managed to produce 'rich, deep, masterly pictures of the multiform life of man.'
Review, 4885 words
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