George Eliot’s face had a surprising sway over her career. The portrait most often reproduced is a decorously feminine one by Swiss painter Durade, warm-toned and fuzzily painted. Eliot (who at the time this was painted was not yet Eliot, but still Mary Anne Evans) sits primly upright with her head cocked prettily, as if listening demurely to what someone else is saying. It is probably not a very good likeness.
One biographer speculated that Eliot had a fervent and partially reciprocated crush on the married artist, with whom she lodged for a time: that could perhaps explain either the artist’s softening hand or the subject’s uncharacteristic girlishness. In other pictures, we see her better. A large and slightly long face, with a nose that looks large and long even in that frame. It is a serious sort of a face, although a photograph shows her smiling with the painfully fixed grin of the long-seated Victorian subject.
In an admiring and snippy TLS essay, Virginia Woolf seems to want to save Eliot from this face while impressing the fact of its unloveliness on the reader: “one cannot escape the conviction that the long, heavy face with its expression of serious and sullen and almost equine power has stamped itself depressingly upon the minds of people … so that it looks out upon them from her pages.”
Besides displeasing Woolf, though, George Eliot’s face does not seem to have caused her any great disadvantages. Apart from the insinuated Durade affair, there were many other attachments, generally scandalous – most importantly, the long, loving and creatively vital relationship with (married, though in an open relationship) George Lewes. After Lewes died, she managed to be shocking again, by marrying the much younger and utterly adoring John Cross.
Her novels shiver with socially constrained lust. In The Mill on the Floss, unpretty Maggie Tulliver’s dangerous desires and desirability burst out into a destructive metaphorical flood; in Middlemarch the currents of wanting are as carefully charted as any other strand of that great spider web. George Eliot knew more than a little about sex. The fact that she knew so much about so much else, though, was at least in part a consequence of her looks.
Her family appraised the chances of marrying that face well, and decided instead to invest in Mary Anne’s education. This meant that, unusually for a girl born in 1819, she remained at school until she was 16, when she returned to the family home near Coventry to keep house for her recently widowed father. The most immediately obvious effect of all this teaching was that she acquired the evangelical religion of her teacher: Evans’s first published work appeared in the Christian Observer in 1840, and was a rather lumpy work of religious poetry with a Biblical refrain. Then she started to question her Christianity.
The consequences – worldly rather than spiritual – threatened to be severe: her father said he would throw her out if she didn’t attend church. So Evans attended church until he died in 1849. This moment of apostasy did not erupt completely spontaneously. Evans’s education brought her into contact with the intellectual elite of Coventry, which is not as bathetic as it sounds. In the 19th century, many wealthy industrialists were keen to use their fortunes for intellectual improvement, and this included the ribbon-manufacturing Brays. Through their society, she met philosophers, socialists, geologists, feminists and religious dissenters.
When an associate gave up the task of translating Strauss’s Life of Jesus from German to English, Evans picked it up. The book applied historiographic principles to the Biblical evidence for Jesus: if the resulting portrait of an exceptionally good, thoroughly non-divine man was a disappointment to then devout Mary Anne, that didn’t seem to affect her dedication to the task.
She followed it up eight years later by translating Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity. Again, this applied a rationalist approach to religion – and came to conclusions that were radically humanist. Christianity, wrote Feuerbach, is a metaphor that has been mistaken for the substance: “I … while reducing theology to anthropology, exalt anthropology into theology, very much as Christianity, while lowering God into man, made man into God,” he writes (in Eliot’s translation).
By this interpretation, the study of religion was properly the study of humanity, and the surrender of literal belief did not require one to find faith an absurdity. Far from it: once the question asked of religion moves beyond “is this true?” and becomes “what is this for?”, the answer becomes exponentially more interesting. Eliot’s novels would be a working-through of this problem as she constructed a wholly godless morality within the relationship between reader and fiction – she called them “experiments in life”.
But first, Mary Anne Evans had to become George Eliot. Eliot did not begin to use her pen-name until the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life in 1857, but it’s tempting to mark the beginning of her new intellectual life from the death of her father in 1849. Almost immediately, Eliot left the country with the Brays, and went to Switzerland where she met Durade. Returning to England, she settled in London and was appointed assistant editor of the Westminster Review, which in practice meant she was in charge of the magazine. The essays she contributed stand up as some of her finest works.
There’s a tendency in her fiction sometimes to the heaviness Woolf remarks on: not in the early pastoral works or in the great, elegant cathedrals of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, but in the mid-career novels. In Felix Holt and especially Romola, Eliot seems ambitious to call our sympathies up in the service of intrinsically dislikable characters. The result can have a didactic eat-your-greens quality, of being presented with something unappealing and told we must swallow it for our own good. (For Eliot masochists, though, her poetry is the true prize. Her expansive genius seemed to die the moment it was manacled in couplets.)
But the essays are invariably light-footed and sharply focused, with a satirical gleam which, once spotted, can easily be tracked through the novels. Her savaging of “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” is a hugely entertaining catalogue of all that her own fiction was opposed to – her pen-name, of course, marked her as distinctly not a lady novelist. But Eliot’s greatest kicking is delivered in the essay “Evangelical Teaching: Doctor Cummings”. From the opening sentences, Eliot pummels the eponymous religious phoney with carefully measured and very funny blows:
“Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher…”
But this didn’t represent a general animus against the religious. Eliot’s fiction is full of sympathetic clergymen and the romantically devout, even while the world of her stories is empty of divinity: her first work of fiction was the triptych of stories Scenes of Clerical Life. Her outrage was always aimed at those whose faith obscured their human duties and offered schematic moral solace without the necessity of kindness, and Bulstrode in Middlemarch is the king of this type.
A pious evangelical and a very successful banker, Bulstrode’s confidence in his own redemption leads him into the deepest moral error of the novel. His religious certitude allows him to present his own self-interest to himself as the will of God. And yet Eliot in her maturity as a novelist is still able to draw our sympathies to Bulstrode’s side – not by making us pity his delusions, but by demonstrating that the ills of religiosity are simply one of the many forms of bad faith humans can commit. In the voice of Middlemarch’s narrator, Eliot writes:
“To Mr Bulstrode God’s cause was something distinct from his own rectitude of conduct: it enforced a discrimination of God’s enemies, who were to be used merely as instruments … This implicit reasoning is essentially no more peculiar to evangelical belief than the use of wide motives and narrow reasoning is peculiar to Englishmen. There is no general doctrine that is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”
In Eliot’s work, that direct fellow-feeling is created through fiction: by asking us in the course of our reading to feel as her characters feel, Eliot translates goodness out of the metaphor of Godliness and into the pragmatic language of everyday sympathy. She doesn’t take the easy, Bulstrode-ish satisfaction of celebrating her own atheist correctness, nor does she offer godless readers the pleasures of tribalism.
Instead, Eliot asks something much harder and greater of her readers: to become closer to others by imagining our way into their lives, a secular version of the incarnation that Feuerbach celebrated. Nearly two centuries after George Eliot’s birth, unbelief can still seem far too thrilled by the narrow factual success of its own general doctrine. It is past time for us to ask the difficult next question of ourselves.
This piece is from the September/October issue of New Humanist. Subscribe
