Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings

"Her essays are fascinating. What struck me when writing about them was how un -tactful they are. Though she did return to the essay form at the end of her life, most of her essays are written in the 1850s before she turned to fiction. They’re a transitional form for her. Her essays often attempt to tear down various obstructions to what we might think of as a more tactfully created novel. One of her subjects—in her essay ‘Dr Cumming’—is a particular kind of evangelical religion which is all about condemning the world and announcing the end times. She thinks that’s a con and brilliantly demolishes its psychological logic. ‘ Silly Novels by Lady Novelists ’, one of the essays still often read, is a great example of what Eliot thinks of as a powerful cultural form not living up to its responsibilities. Though novels don’t have to be deadly serious and dry, they do have to be more fully responsible for representing the complexities of human life. She attacks the ways in which they aren’t. The essay becomes a weapon, a tool for accountability. Her targets are the cultural resources of her time, and how they let people down. She’s such a remarkable person that one is tempted to say she’s just a standalone individual. George Eliot is one of the great intellectuals of British history. It took a great deal of intellectual and moral courage to move to London when she did, and try and make her way in the world as a single woman in the field of journalism—which, of course, she was never credited for directly. Partly because of conventions of the time, but mainly because she was a woman. “George Eliot is one of the great intellectuals of British history.” Nevertheless, she had a great talent for finding those resources in the world which could lead to an interesting life. One of those resources became her partner, George Henry Lewes—leading to one of the great collaborative love-affairs of the century. At this time she is so attuned to the ways her world offers creative resources for her life, or fails to do this—her essays tend to express outrage at inadequate forms passed on through culture. She thought art and literature should help us to live. Yes, but this reaction produces the famous sympathy of her novels. In my book, I write about what happens in the transitions from her Westminster Review essays to her first full novel, Adam Bede . The themes of her essays are worked out in a positive way in her novels. It’s as if we’re seeing the grounds of or preconditions for an investment in tact—clearing the obstructions to it. Yes! How formidable, uncompromising and invested in sympathy and forms of kindness those two are. It gets at an important distinction, which is that tactful sensibility is not invested in making everyone like one another. It’s not merely politeness."