target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#uead8598d-2ebc-5f1b-a27a-5ed67c2e24de">Chapter XLIX.
Biographical Introduction
GEORGE ELIOT
Described by Harold Bloom as “the beginning of the end of the traditional novel of social morality” (xii), George Eliot’s Middlemarch is nonetheless replete with a kind of authorial intervention that modern readers might find tiresome. Readers today are accustomed to the contemporary fictional maxim of “show, don’t tell” but Eliot had different aesthetic ideas, for she always tells us right away who we are dealing with. At the beginning of Middlemarch, the character of one of its protagonists, Dorothea Brooke, is laid out. Eliot writes,
Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it (Middlemarch).
In this passage, we are exposed to several of the themes running through Eliot’s work—her emphasis on women’s education, the poor state which is referred to several times in the novel, the role of religion in daily life and how this is often linked with rapturous states and a self-abnegating martyrdom, and the need for a moral code separate from religion, which in failing to find, the individual must needs throw herself into a frantic search for knowledge.
As Virginia Woolf pointed out, the story of George Eliot’s heroines is “the incomplete version of the story that is George Eliot herself”; the above themes, therefore, are not only found in George Eliot’s oeuvre but also in her life which, for a Victorian woman, was an unconventional one. Born in 1819, George Eliot’s real name was Mary Anne Evans, later changed to Marian Evans, and finally to George Eliot to ensure that the knowledge of her sex would not detract from the favorable reception of her novels. Although her true identity came to light shortly after her work was deemed a success, the pseudonym “George Eliot” has endured, a significant fact according to her biographer Rosemarie Bodenheimer who writes, “Exactly because it is an assumed name, it brings into play the odd quality of a life that could develop its great capacities only under the cover of partly fictional social roles”. As Mary Ann Evans, the author was limited to the only roles available to women in the Victorian era, and although she never entirely gave up this identity, becoming George Eliot allowed her to shed the fetters and view herself and those around her more clearly—to pin down a whole social structure as though viewing it through the eyes of a stranger.
George Eliot had a middle-class rural upbringing, a somewhat humdrum affair compared to the child labor that her contemporary Charles Dickens experienced after his parents, unable to