Free George Eliot by Kathryn Hughes Page A

phallic pretensions. Women writers who had been excluded from the feast, such as the Brontës, were reread with attention and claims made for theirabsolute significance. Others who were all but unknown were brought back into print by the new feminist printing presses. And even classic texts which had stood proudly down the central spine of English literature were given a new, unfamiliar look. Armed with the sharp bright tools of psychoanalytic and post-structuralist theory, critics now worked to find unauthorised meanings in novels which had previously seemed as closed as a cobwebby chest.
    Eliot did not suit this new intellectual mood. Critics favour texts that serve their purpose. Post-structuralists found Dickens very much to their taste. The loose tags in his writing offered them an easy entry point from where they could start their meticulous burrowing: feminists liked the Brontes, Emily Dickinson and even Jane Austen, all of whom could be made to talk thrillingly of psychic and social rebellion. But George Eliot, who clung to a male pseudonym, was invited to dine at Oxford and wrote from the centre of high culture, seemed to be exactly the kind of dead white male in whom seventies people could have no interest.
    The snub was unfair. Critics accused Eliot of dogmatism when it was they who wrote out of totalitarianising systems. For instance, Eliot had never rejected feminism, but she shied away from a single reading of it, always insisting that the issues were more complex than her friends like Bessie and Barbara, with their arguments grounded in economic liberalism, liked to believe. She knew from her own, often painful, experiences that it was possible to be deeply dependent on male attention and yet enjoy a career which involved beating the best of them. To combine a belief in marriage with an approval of divorce. To want the best for women, yet insist that ‘the best’ did not necessarily mean qualifying as a doctor. And despite what her critics said, George Eliot had never clung, Canute-like, to the literary programme of High Victorianism. Her last published book, Theophrastus Such , was a dazzling calling-card for Modernism. Here was a narrator who fibbed, a text made up of allusions to other kinds of writing, the whole thing wrapped up with a bitter glee.
    Yet all the signs point to the fact that, had she lived and written longer, Eliot’s next book would have represented a turning away from the worldly exhaustion of Theophrastus Such . Some time in1877 she had written a fragment for a new work, which suggests a return to the time and landscape of her first novel, Adam Bede . The book was to be set among a group of families living in the Midlands at the beginning of the nineteenth century. One of the main characters is the suggestively named Richard Forrest, yet another version of her father, who is described as being ‘not an ordinary tenant farmer’ but ‘a man of weight in his district’. 3
    From the time of beginning The Mill on the Floss in 1859 it had been Eliot’s habit to plan a book, then put it aside for another piece of work. Thus ‘The Lifted Veil’ had cut across The Mill, Silas Marner across Romola, Felix Holt across The Spanish Gypsy . Assuming this pattern continued, it seems likely that George Eliot would have turned back from the precipice represented by Theophrastus Such and moved once again to the middle ground, ‘the rich Central plain’ of Richard Forrest. This was not a retreat, but a reclaiming of the social and moral centre as the only place from where the future could properly be grasped. She had done it during the holy war, giving up her early refusal to go to church in favour of the other less glamorous calls on her integrity. She had done it again during her relationship with Lewes when, to the embarrassment of feminist friends, she insisted on claiming the identity of a conventionally married woman. It was not cowardice, although it could sometimes look like that. Eliot was