her reading means that she moves among ideas as a medium of being, not a template for interpretation. Perhaps it is therefore not surprising that the insistence of her work is, increasingly, on variability, on multiple instances each differing from its like, and on interpenetrating systems.

Her notebooks reveal the persistent range of her reading from day to day; her novels have recourse not only to that reading, but to the ordering ideas that pull across each other as she seeks shapes for meaning. A couple of pages from one of her reading notebooks, in which she wrote down quotations that impressed her, gives the flavor of her responsiveness (the writers quoted there are Martial, Pliny, Scaliger, Sophocles' Antigone, Cicero, Ecclesiasticus, Philip Sidney, Theocritus, Richard Savage, Heine, and, by reference, Abul Kasim Firdusi, the tenth- century Persian epic poet). Elsewhere we find material on astronomy, military tactics, Gregorian chant, language theory, Celtic myth, the legal position of women and mutterrecht, long quotations from Comte, gambling superstitions, mathematics, Clerk Maxwell's theory of ring vortices, and material from other zones of learning. In the novels themselves all that passionate reading becomes latent, there to be raised to the surface at will, yet rarely alluded to directly, implicated in the lives of unheroic characters.

Impulses for reinterpretation came to the author herself from unexpected angles: she told her friend Mrs. Congreve, for example, that her first skeptical thoughts about religion had come from reading the novels of Walter Scott, long before she encountered the systematic questionings of German historical criticism and translated Strauss's demythologizing Life of Jesus (1846). Scott's influence is clear in the plotting of Adam Bede, which draws directly on The Heart of Midlothian (each novel places near its center the fate of a young woman accused of infanticide, succored by a sisterly presence, and saved at the last moment by a theatrical, eleventh-hour pardon.) The presence of Scott's -432- experiments in conjuring the life of Scotland thirty or forty years before he writes is clear also in the intense feeling for regional life and for dialect in her early novels, Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, and The Mill on the Floss. But Scott does not seem an obvious source for the stirrings of religious skepticism.

It is not uncommon for beginning novelists to be affected by their predecessors in fiction, nor to find them driving on past the solutions of those predecessors to uncover new questions, as George Eliot already in some measure does in Adam Bede. What is uncommon is to find a novelist emerging from a mind already so compellingly engaged with work, past and present, in many languages (Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Hebrew, Spanish) and across so broad a range of fields, including philosophy, theology, history, anthropology, sociology, and the work of contemporary scientists such as Faraday and Lyell and, later, Kelvin and Maxwell. That the writer herself should have emerged from the provinces as Marian Evans and have become known first as a literary journalist, coediting the Westminster Review, and making her way in London in the 1850s at a time before higher education was open to women, meant that many of her male contemporaries were inclined to view her as a phenomenon that proved nothing about the capacities of women, so extraordinary was she. But the route by which she entered the literary world is never obliterated in George Eliot's creativity. All her learning is exercised in the novels within the social scale of unremarked people. Ruskin, writing after George Eliot's death, fulminated against The Mill on the Floss because her characters were living within the constraints of ordinary life, not distinguished by the outer marks of heroism:

There is not a single person in the book of the smallest importance to anybody in the world but themselves, or whose qualities deserved so much as a line of printer's type in their description. There is no girl alive, fairly clever, half educated, and unluckily related, whose life has not at least as much in it as Maggie's, to be described and to be pitied.

What Ruskin saw as disabling most recent critics see as Eliot's radical achievement: her characters are at once strongly individual and yet typical. She does not exempt them from the frayed circumstances of everyday life, nor does she (except in the case of Romola) offer anything like a glorious outcome. For a time this refusal to release at least her heroines into unclouded success caused disquiet among feminist critics of the 1970s, in a period when role models were much needed. Since then, — 433- however, the novels' tonic absence of sentimentality about what an individual can achieve within the constraints of a particular society has been seen as having its own value for feminist analysis.

The Mill on the Floss remains probably the most popular of Eliot's novels and the one most frequently written about, apart from the work generally agreed to be her masterpiece, Middlemarch. In recent years Daniel Deronda has prodigiously excited readers and has opened up to fresh analyses. It is worth dwelling first on The Mill since it realizes with extraordinary intensity so many of the questions that prevail throughout Eliot's creative life. It was the first book written 'in her own person,' that is, once it was known to her readers that 'George Eliot' was a woman, and (potentially known, though not to all readers) that she was living in an irregular union with a married man, George Henry Lewes. That felt relation with the readers' knowledge may have its bearing on the swerve of the plot at the end of the book where Maggie turns away from Stephen, whom she desires, and back to her family and her duty. 'The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it.' The inexhaustible tussle is, it seems, all that wisdom can consist in; the impossibility of any decided settlement is George Eliot's form of tragedy.

In The Mill on the Floss George Eliot took seriously an already fashionable topic: the young woman who excels intellectually. The novel is preoccupied with education and with power. Eliot demonstrates what it feels like to want and shows also that the wants of girls may be for learning as passionately as for love. The two desires, the book suggests, are not different in kind: they exercise mind and body at once. Such passions, the commentary sardonically suggests, are debarred by 'good society' but endured by other, less fortunate layers of society.

But good society, floating on gossamer wings of light irony, is of very expensive production; requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving under more or less oppression of carbonic acid-or else, spread over sheepwalks, and scattered in lonely houses and huts on the clayey or chalky corn-lands, where the rainy days look dreary. This wide national life is based entirely on emphasis-the emphasis of want.

Daringly, she measures Maggie's needs alongside material poverty and oppression and insists on them all as part of that «emphasis» in contrast to the well-to-do. -434-

Auguste Comte's then immensely influential argument that cultural development follows the same pathway as the life of the single individual is here turned back upon itself. Maggie develops through the three phases of cultural history in her own short lifetime: from the animistic (when she makes her doll into a fetish that she sticks with pins) to adult civilization. But George Eliot also shows that there is no inevitable pathway for the individual. The ontogeny-phylogeny parallel is delusive. To foreground this difficulty George Eliot brings to bear (and to the test) another popular plot of the time: the bildungsroman, in which a young person-usually male-learns first to roam beyond the limits of his society and then to come to terms with its demands, accommodating his identity to what is possible for adult life lived on society's terms. Instead of exhibiting such creative accommodation, in The Mill Tom Tulliver is shown as beginning to seize up psychically at a very young age precisely because he never succeeds in questioning the assumptions his society loads him with: he must be aggressive, hardworking, rule-bound. He cannot stretch the limits of society as the bildungsroman suggests a young man may do. Maggie, on the other hand, undertakes that role, moves beyond social limits and is then obliged to sacrifice most of her self. Philip, disabled and intelligent, is aligned with Maggie. Both are incapacitated by their society's belief in their powerlessness. And, as Sally Shuttleworth points out in her edition of the novel, the feminizing of Philip prevents him from being considered as an acceptable sexual partner for Maggie, by the book as much as by its readers.

The subtle accretion of happening, response, and reaction in this novel raises also the question of what we dignify with the title of event. And with the name of analysis. For The Mill is a novel that, while energetically analytical, allows much to pass by in dialogue and in description. Philip remarks, 'I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of.' Maggie eagerly agrees. The example they use is that of the effects of music that augments the individual's scope while it is heard: 'Certain strains of music affect me so strangely-I can never hear them without their changing my whole attitude of mind for a time, and if the effect would last, I might be capable of heroisms.'

The impression of discovery and potential, which is so strong in this book, is produced by the way analysis, conversation, and humor lie athwart each other, passing between characters and commentary. That -435- preserves the text itself from the rancors of power and allows a play of comedy over topics that are, equally, allowed their full scope. An example of this is the child Maggie's running away to join the gypsies. It is worth

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