Swift flowering of a creative genius

Press, 18 September 1976, Page 13

Swift flowering of a creative genius

George Eliot: the Emergent Self. By Ruby Redinger. Bod ley Head. 515 pp. $16.45. (Reviewed by Helen Debenham) “George Eliot came into being on February 4, 1857, already a mature woman of 37.” Mary Anne Evans, however, was bom in 1819; she was also known as Mary Ann and Marian Evans, Marian Lewes, and finally as Mrs John W. Cross, and if her personality seemed to vary slightly with these different names it nowhere coincided entirely with that of George Eliot, the austere and esteemed Victorian sage, arguably the greatest English novelist of the nineteenth century’, and "Polly” to her de facto husband G. H- Lewes. ; Her first biographer, and widower, Cross, piously ignored or minimised the problems of ner passionate and unconventional life by leaving out “everything that I thought my wife would have wished to be omitted.” Gladstone called the work “a Reticence in three volumes.” Later scholarship has restored much, but the standard biography, the excellent work by G. S. Haight, is essentially factual, presenting the life without attempting a total explanation of the character. It 4s this latter task that Ruby Redinger has undertaken, particularly to explain the extraordinary and apparently sudden emergence of George Eliot as a fully mature creative artist. Even before" becoming George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans was remarkable. A plain, in her own opinion unloved, child, passionate in friendship and beliefs, she grew up far too intelligent for an age which offered no employment for such talents in a woman. Or so we are asked to believe: the astonishing thing about Mary Ann is that, unlike

Maggie and Dorothea, she did survive in a masculine world, and did use her intelligence to the full. Helped by friends and teachers, by her own perseverance she acquired a daunting education- How many of her privileged male contemporaries could have translated Strauss and Feuerbach or edited a prestigious Review, let alone have written .the novels? In making her own life she had also to defy both family and Victorian convention; later, as George Eliot, she transcended even the scandal of an illicit liaison to command adulation and respect from society.

What all this cost her, and what, at the same time, the embryo-novelist gained from the struggle is Ruby Redinger’s real subject. Her concern is George Eliot’s psyche, reconstructed as it were from the inside, so her emphasis ia- less on facts than oh their consequences as she ranges back and forth in time to demonstrate psychological causes and effects. It is an interesting process but a dangerous one in the scope it allows the imagination. It also results, in this instance, in a disappointingly narrow interpretation. Encouraged in her analysis by George Eliot’s last creation, Theophrastus Such, who admits that his writings may “communicate more than I am aware of,” and inspired by an indifferent sonnet series written a little earlier. Miss Redinger discovers a George Eliot so traumatised in childhood as to have to re-create with every adult male acquaintance her relationship with her brother, and finally psychically freed to write fiction only by the secure love and encouragement of Lewes. This is an unfairly gross simplification of what is at times an extremely penetrating account by a woman whose knowledge of her subject is undeniable, but one must stress the “at times.” Psychology has valuable perspectives to offer the literary scholar but not when used as an excuse for unbridled speculation, which one finds too often ih this work. Words like “if,” “probably,” “must surely,” and “undoubtedly” abound to the extent, that even “straight” statements begin to seem questionable. The line between fact and supposition is constantly and unforgivably blurred. The book has been called a “psychic biography” and the ambiguities of that description are well represented in Miss Redinger’s achievement.