The Literary Criticism of George Eliot

Extract

This essay is an attempt to present some of the most important aspects of the aesthetic underlying George Eliot's novels and to give some account of her little known critical writings. She was perhaps unique among the major novelists up to her time in formulating a coherent set of ideas about life and art before she started to write her first novel. She was known as an important figure in the intellectual life of London during the fifties, as the translator of David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, and as the subeditor of the Westminster Review, the most important organ of liberal thought in England at that time. She was also a prolific writer of articles for magazines and a reviewer of belles-lettres for the Westminster for three years, 1855–57. In these essays and reviews, all published before her first novel, almost all her important ideas about art are stated explicitly, and although many of these ideas are later developed and amplified in her novels and letters, they remain essentially the same. Her later statements of the same theme are often fuller and richer than those found in her periodical writing, but they are rarely inconsistent with each other. Her essays and reviews, together with Gordon Haight's edition of the letters and statements in the novels themselves, furnish an invaluable source from which her creed as a novelist may be derived.