2023年4月浙江自考英美文学选读复习笔记：George Eliot

George Eliot (1819-1880), pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, was born on Nov. 22, 1819 into an estate agent's family in Warwickshire, England. As a small child, she showed no evidence of special talent except a passionate longing to be loved. By the time of her teenage, however, her extraordinary intelligence began to be acknowledged both at home and at school. Brought up with the strict orthodox teaching and influenced by her first school teacher Miss Lewis, the bookish girl devoted herself, for four years, to a diligent study of the Scripture. Unfortunately, she was forced to drop school at the age of 16 on account of her mother's death and sister's marriage, and yet, meanwhile, she continued her study at home and managed to learn three foreign languages and music all by herself. A critical change in her life took place when the family moved to Coventry. There, under the influence of her new friends, who were mostly known as free-thinkers, she soon enlarged her study from the church history and theological doctrine to wider, more philosophical issues. This shift in belief eventually brought her into collision with her family and some of her oldest and dearest friends. First, her refusal to attend church almost threatened permanently to separate her from her family, and then, her dramatical departure from the social convention by her common-law marriage with George Henry Lewes, the unhappily married critic and publicist who could not spanorce his wife, resulted in their 25 years of alienation from the respectable society.

Life at Coventry also opened up for George Eliot a completely new prospect. There she met John Chapman, the new owner of the progressive Westminster Review and her job as a distinguished essayist and editor for his paper brought her into contact with many of the famous men of the time: Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Huxley, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and most important of al~, George Henry Lewes. It was under their influence and encouragement that she started her literary career at the age of 39.

Being a woman of intelligence and versatility, she quickly found herself ranking high among the great writers. After her translation of Strauss' Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus), Spinoza's Ethics and Ludwig Feuerbach's groundbreaking Das Wesent des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity), she embarked on a flourishing enterprise as a novelist. In 1857, she wrote her first three stories which were later published in book form under the  of Scenes of Clerical Life. Then there came successively her three most popular novels, Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861), all drawn from her lifelong knowledge of English country life and notable for their realistic details, pungent characterization and high moral tone. The year 1863 saw the publication of Romola, a full elaborately documented story of Florence in the time of Savornarola. Then followed Felix Holt, the Radical, her only novel on English politics. In 1872, Middlemarch, a panoramic book considered today by many to be George Eliot's greatest achievement, came out. Her last novel, Daniel Deronda, a achment against anti-Semitism, appeared in 1876. These novels, together with a number of poems and a collection of satirical essays, The Imssions of Theophrastus Such, constitute a formidable body of work from a woman frail in health and working constantly under the aphension of failure or worthlessness.

In 1879, Lewes died, leaving George Eliot a perpetual mourner. She wrote no more, devoting herself to paring his unfinished work for publication. Even though her marriage with John Cross, a young admirer of hers, finally brought about a kind of reconciliation with her family and the society, she was never able to cast off a sense of dession and dreariness left by Lewes' death. She died, probably of a heart attack, on Dec. 22, 1880. Refused burial in Westminster Abbey by a pious dean on account of her personal life, George Eliot was buried in Highgate Cemetery beside Lewes.

Writing at the latter half of the 19th century and closely following the critical realist writers, George Eliot was working at some thing new. By joining the worlds of inward propensity and outward circumstances and showing them both operating in the lives of her characters, she initiates a new type of realism and sets into motion a variety of developments, leading in the direction of both the naturalistic and psychological novel. She is deeply concerned with the depiction of the people and life of her time; moreover, her mind is always active, instinctively analyzing and generalizing to discover the fundamental truth about human life. In her works, she seeks to sent the inner struggle of a soul and to reveal the motives, impulses and hereditary influences which govern human action. She is interested in the development of a soul, the slow growth or decline of moral power of the character. And in her effort to harmonize a sense of human dignity with a sense of human limitations, she shows that the need of the inspanidual for expansion and growth has to be brought into harmony with a sense of social responsibility. She never loses sight of the limits to the exercise of inspanidual power and always insists on the need to cultivate the strength of will and the necessity to return to the routine of life.

As a woman of exceptional intelligence and life experience, George Eliot shows a particular concern for the destiny of women, especially those with great intelligence, potential and social aspirations, such as Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, Dorothea in Middlemarch, the titular heroine in Romola and Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda. In her mind, the pathetic tragedy of women lies in their very birth. Their inferior education and limited social life determine that they must depend on men for sustenance and realization of their goals, and they have only to fulfill the domestic duties expected of them by the society. Their opportunities of success are not even increased by wealth. It is just as Daniel Deronda's actress-mother says to her son: "Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster ... I cared for the wide world, and all that I could resent in it ... You are not a woman. You may try -- but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl .”