George Eliot – “Felix Holt”

ISBN-10: 0460876872
ISBN-13: 978-0460876872



I commented in relation to John Updike’s ‘Terrorist’ that a sentence of 157 words was the nail in its coffin. I noticed while reading ‘Felix Holt’ that there were four consecutive sentences of 78, 13, 100, and 64 words. The difference is that in 1866 George Eliot wrote perfect prose, properly punctuated and capable of being understood and enjoyed despite the sentence length. The whole book is a clever, frank portrayal of the 1832 election when England ( I use the specific advisedly) was in the middle of Reform. As is to be expected with George Eliot there is an element of romance, pathos and moralising but the less than happy endings found in some of here books has been left aside for once.
Thoroughly enjoyable.
I can recommend the Everyman edition which has footnotes to help with some of the more obscure classical or contemporary references and words which are now obsolete like ‘megrims’. A delightful little word, meaning whims or fancies, I wonder what poor little megrims did to fall into disuse! Similarly, ‘opodeldoc’ – a medical plaster or liniment (not linement as Everyman’s editor spelled it) of soap, opium and herbs is a wonderful word. I wish I had a chance to drop that into the conversation.
As always with Victorian novels I learn a lot about the social life and times and sometimes I am surprised by simple little things. I had, for example, always assumed that the use of the word Jew as synonymous with money-lending was simply because of their predominance in that field. What I had failed to realise was that Christians were forbidden by Canon Law from money-lending and that is how the Jewish predominance in that field first arose.
As with many of the best books the number of quotations I could have included here are legion but I will settle for a couple of the shorter ones:-
“These social changes in Treby parish are comparatively public matters, and this history is chiefly concerned with the private lot of a few men and women; but there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life, from the time when the primeval milkmaid had to wander with the wanderings of her clan, because the cow she milked was one of a herd which had made the pastures bare.”
“Esther was a little amazed herself at what she had come to. So our lives glide on: the river ends we don’t know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.”



GEORGE ELIOT – see Daniel Deronda

George Eliot – “Daniel Deronda”

 

This is the fourth George Eliot novel I have read in the last twelve months or so and probably the one I enjoyed least. The other three – Middlemarch, Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss made a real George Eliot fan. Compared to Middlemarch, the quintessential Victorian novel, Daniel Deronda seemd to me a bit pedestrian and rather hard work. Nevertheless it was good enough for me to complete the work which was originally published in seven volumes and which I reckon has 4 million words.
Only in her final novel, in 1876, did George Eliot turn to contemporary English and European life as material for the expression of her own idealism. Daniel Deronda is a psychologically incisive investigation, probing the egoism of a spoiled girl, Gwendolen, and her increasing awareness of conscience through suffering. She comes to regard Daniel as her moral and spiritual mentor. He, meanwhile, is busy rescuing a young Jewess from suicide and getting involved in the Jewish culture - a theme which Eliot explored in depth, demonstrating the depth and quality of her research.


GEORGE ELIOT, the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans. was born on 22nd November 1819 near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, and died in 1880. She began her literary career as a translator, and later became editor, of the Westminster Review. She lived for many years with George Henry Lewes, a journalist whose marriage had irretrievably broken down but who could not get a divorce. It was through his encouragement that she started writing fiction at the age of 37. In 1857, she published Scenes of Clerical Life, the first of eight novels she would publish under the name of 'George Eliot', Adam Bede, published in 1859, caused her to be described in The Times thus – “It’s author takes rank at once amongst the masters of the art.”
My favourite quotations from Daniel Deronda:-
“’...I will wait till after Christmas’.
What should we all do without the calendar, when we want to put off a disagreeable duty? The admirable arrangements of the solar system, by which our time is measured, always supply us with a term before which it is hardly worth while to set about anything we are disinclined to.”
“Extension, we know, is a very imperfect measure of things, and the length of the sun’s journeyings can no more tell us how far life has advanced than the acreage of a field can tell us what growths may be active within it. A man may go south, and, stumbling over a bone, may meditate upon it till he has found a new starting-point for anatomy; or eastward, and discover a new key to language telling a new story of races; or he may head an expedition that opens new continental pathways, get himself maimed in body, and go through a whole heroic poem of resolve and endurance; and at the end of a few months he may come back to find his neighbours grumbling at the same parish grievance as before, or to see the same elderly gentleman treading the pavement in discourse with himself, shaking his head after the same percussive butcher’s boy, and pausing at the same shop-window to look at the same prints.”
(This second quote really sums up how I felt when David died. I could not believe that after having gone through such emotions and revolution in my life in the space of two and a half weeks I could come back to find that work had not changed one iota and the same people were carrying on their lives in the same old way...)