Discernment Do's and Dont's by George Elliott

Indeed, 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 who remember George Eliot, so that it looks out upon them from her pages.

Still, the memory of talking about Marivaux to George Eliot on a Sunday afternoon was not a romantic memory. It was dated on the Monday morning, and she accused herself of having spoken with due forethought of Marivaux when she meant another but not doubt, she said, her listener had already supplied the correction. Certainly, the talk had been very serious, as a note in the fine clear hand of the novelist bore witness. He had been so much alarmed by the grave lady in her low chair he had been so anxious to say the intelligent thing.

Asked to describe an afternoon at the Priory, the story-teller always intimated that the memory of those serious Sunday afternoons had come to tickle his sense of humour. Moreover, her private record was not more alluring than her public. She was the pride and paragon of all her sex. Lord Acton had said that she was greater than Dante Herbert Spencer exempted her novels, as if they were not novels, when he banned all fiction from the London library. She became one of the butts for youth to laugh at, the convenient symbol of a group of serious people who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the same scorn. Perhaps George Meredith, with his phrase about the ‘mercurial little showman’ and the ‘errant woman’ on the dais, gave point and poison to the arrows of thousands incapable of aiming them so accurately, but delighted to let fly. Some people attribute it to the publication of her Life. At what moment and by what means her spell was broken it is difficult to ascertain. It is also to become aware of the credulity, not very creditable to one’s insight, with which, half consciously and partly maliciously, one had accepted the late Victorian version of a deluded woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more deluded than herself. To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one knows about her.

This article by Virginia Woolf was first published in The Times Literary Supplement, 20th November, 1919. George Eliot was the pseudonym of novelist, translator, and religious writer Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880).

Discernment Do's and Dont's by George Elliott