Free George Eliot by Kathryn Hughes Page B

showing in her private life, as she demanded in her fiction, that our relationship to the future is like that of medieval stonemasons working on a great cathedral. While we may work painfully and hard, we are always working blind. The results of our labour will not be seen until many years after our death.
    If all this sounds familiar, that is because the dilemmas in which Eliot and her readers found themselves resemble our own. Two hundred years of industrialisation have fragmented the landscape before sticking it back together in virtual terms, via the modem. ‘Community’ has been hooked out of an imagined village pump past and pressed into service to describe something as culturally variegated as the entire black population of Great Britain. Nationalism is increasingly disrupted and made bloody by claims based on ethnicity. Calls for devolution criss-cross with demands for a single European currency. Town and country dwellers declare themselves abandoned by each other. After decades ofagnosticism, the flourishing Evangelical wing of the Anglican Church competes with the biggest surge of interest in Buddhism, not to mention psychotherapy, since the seventies. Feminism, which once seemed such a simple good, reveals itself as a set of conflicting agendas.
    George Eliot was the last Victorian who believed that it was possible to face these kinds of crises without shattering into shards. She would have understood where Post-Modernism came from, recognised the seductive call to retreat from the centre, to take refuge in partial narratives and solutions, to despair of ‘the real’. But she would have hated its defeatedness. For Eliot believed that it was possible for society to move forward from the centre. The pace would be slow, certainly, the mood both sceptical and humble. But there would also be value, purpose, a sense that this was right . Eliot despaired of Progress, with its crude ‘Victorian’ triumphalism and lack of doubt. In its place she proposed Meliorism, a slow, consensual grasping towards something better. It is Meliorism which we need now.

Select Bibliography
    1. Manuscript Sources
    The main manuscript sources for George Eliot (GE) and G. H. Lewes (GHL) are held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. In addition, GE’s 1879 Diary is held at the New York Public Library. However, nearly all the letters have now appeared in print, either in The George Eliot Letters , 9 vols, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven, 1954–78), or have been extensively quoted in the secondary literature which has appeared subsequently. Likewise the manuscript diaries and journals have been heavily extracted in Haight’s George Eliot Letters .
    Robert Evans’s correspondence with his employer, Francis Newdigate, is held at the Warwickshire County Record Office (WCRO). The MS diary ‘Occurrences at Nuneaton’ 1810–45, writer unknown, is held at Nuneaton Public Library.
    2. Works by George Eliot
    Adam Bede (1859), ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth, 1980).
    Brother Jacob (1864), ed. Peter Mudford (London, 1996).
    Collected Poems , ed. Lucien Jenkins (London, 1989).
    Daniel Deronda (1876), ed. Barbara Hardy (Harmondsworth, 1967).
    Essays of George Eliot , ed. Thomas Pinney (New York, 1963).
    Essays and Leaves from a Note-Book By George Eliot (London, 1883).
    (trans.) The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach (London, 1854).
    (trans.) Ethics by Benedict de Spinoza, ed. Thomas Deegan (Salzburg, 1981).
    Felix Holt, The Radical (1866), ed. Peter Coveney (Harmondsworth, 1972).
    George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook 1854–79, and Uncollected Writings , ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1981).
    George Eliot, Selected Critical Writings , ed. Rosemary Ashton (Oxford, 1992).
    George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings , ed. A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (Harmondsworth, 1990).
    Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), ed. Nancy Henry (London, 1994).
    (trans.) The Life of Jesus,