Avrom Fleishman , George Eliot’s Intellectual LifeGeorge Eliot’s Intellectual Life by Avrom FleishmanReview by: Diana PostlethwaiteModern Philology, Vol. 111, No. 1 (August 2013), pp. E116-E119Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670318 .

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B O O K R E V I E W

George Eliot’s Intellectual Life. Avrom Fleishman. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2010. Pp. viiþ296.

While writing my dissertation on George Eliot during the l970s, I had thethrilling opportunity to work for silver-haired, patrician Yale professoremeritus Gordon Haight, indexing the final two volumes of his monumen-tal George Eliot Letters (9 vols. [1954–78]). Those letters, in tandem withHaight’s pioneering George Eliot: A Biography (1968), initiated a rich recla-mation by later twentieth-century critics of this earnest nineteenth-centurynovelist’s brilliant blend of realism, humanism, myth making, social criti-cism, psychological case study, and applied ethics.

Avrom Fleishman ruefully admits his acknowledgments are ‘‘partly anecrology’’ (viii). Written by a scholar who published his first books (onJoseph Conrad and Jane Austen) in l967, George Eliot’s Intellectual Life is ded-icated to ‘‘Felicia Bonaparte, doyenne of Eliot studies,’’ author of two booksimportant to the reclamation of the novelist: Will and Destiny: Morality andTragedy in George Eliot’s Novels (1975) and The Triptych and the Cross: The Cen-tral Myths of George Eliot’s Poetic Imagination (1979).

Fleishman claims in his preface that this is to be an ‘‘internal history ofideas’’ in the tradition of A. O. Lovejoy, untainted by ‘‘currently fashionablemarxisant views of the strong, even determining, relation between ideasand social history’’ (xi). Reading this well-seasoned study—rigorous, metic-ulous, occasionally imperious (toward ‘‘fashionable’’ critics) but invariablyworshipful (of its subject)—transported me back to a more old-fashionedera of literary scholarship.

Fleishman asserts he will approach the products of ‘‘this mighty mind’’(2) ‘‘not as works of art but as moments for the emergence of ideas’’ (ix).Like Middlemarch’s Casaubon (though an abler scholar!), Fleischman, re-tired Professor of English at Johns Hopkins, has undertaken a monumental

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scholarly task: a ‘‘key to all mythologies’’ for George Eliot, as it were, basedupon ‘‘reading (or reading in) what George Eliot read’’ (ix). To tackle thereading list of such an intellectual polymath is no modest proposal (forexample, in the single year 1856–57, Eliot herself reviewed over two hun-dred books and read many more [94]). Peppering his pages with stagger-ingly compendious reading lists—in many disciplines—of books Eliot pe-rused throughout her lifetime, Fleishman ruminates on what Eliot’s fictionmight have drawn from them. George Eliot’s Intellectual Life will convince itsreader that its author has, indeed, read (or ‘‘read in’’) an impressive num-ber of them.

Interested less in Eliot’s life and times than in her ever-mutating mind,Fleischman organizes his book along a continuum of what he calls ‘‘evolving-self-creation’’ (ix). Each chapter title denominates a new intellectual iden-tity: from ‘‘The ‘Evangelical’’’ to ‘‘The Apostate,’’ ‘‘The Journalist,’’ ‘‘TheGermanist,’’ ‘‘The Novelist’’ (Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, and Mill on theFloss), ‘‘The Historian’’ (Romola and The Spanish Gypsy), ‘‘The ‘Radical’’’(Felix Holt), ‘‘The Encyclopedist’’ (Middlemarch), ‘‘The Visionary’’ (DanielDeronda), and ‘‘The Intellectual’’ (Impressions of Theophrastus Such). Thissequence will be familiar to anyone who knows Eliot’s intellectual biogra-phy. George Eliot’s Intellectual Life tells us little that is new about George Eliotand the history of her ideas, but it does offer a number of insights that areusefully revisionistic of the received wisdom of Eliot scholarship, as well asan appreciation of this Victorian novelist that I found to be deeply andwisely true.

I will begin with examples of the revisionism. Two shocking momentstake center stage in all George Eliot biographies: (1) she lost her Christianfaith and stopped going to church; (2) she eloped with a married man andwas cast out of ‘‘respectable’’ society. Fleishman has no interest in the influ-ence of adultery (what he calls ‘‘sexual fiddle-faddle’’ [44]) on his subject’smental development. Both as lover and as intellectual influence, GeorgeHenry Lewes plays a relatively minor role (too small, I think) in this intel-lectual biography. Note the near-Victorian prudishness of Fleishman’s con-voluted first mention of Eliot’s life companion: Michael Wolff’s unpub-lished dissertation, he writes, ‘‘is perhaps the most palatable presentationof the Comte influence. . . . It brings up an important and hitherto (in thepresent work unmentioned) aspect of Eliot’s development, the beginningof her lifelong relationship with George Henry Lewes’’ (64).

By contrast, in his chapters ‘‘The ‘Evangelical’’’ and ‘‘The Apostate,’’Fleishman gives us a close thoughtful rethinking of Eliot at an earlier age,weighing the meanings of ‘‘evangelicalism’’ and ‘‘apostasy’’ as they can beapplied to the mind of young Marian Evans. It is ‘‘doubtful the term ‘Evan-gelical’ suitably applies to her religious stance or experience,’’ he argues;by the standards of the day, she was ‘‘hardly puritanical’’ (18), and her

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‘‘demystification was astonishingly abrupt’’ (24). (Our generally soberauthor is not above a bit of James Bondian wit: ‘‘she may have been stirredif not shaken by her first foray into Charles Lyell’’ [21]). Fleishman makes aconvincing case that Eliot’s intellectual transformation from Evangelical toApostate took place along a more gradated continuum than previous intel-lectual biographers have claimed; ‘‘In all, the ascription to her of the epi-thet ‘Evangelical’ reflects the mentality and taste of present-day commenta-tors rather than those of her time’’ [24]).

Another area of conventional wisdom challenged in the book is theinfluence on her thinking of French philosopher Auguste Comte. Comte’s‘‘religion of humanity’’ has been seen as an intellectual framework forEliot’s fiction by many scholars, beginning with Bernard J. Paris’s Experi-ments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values (1965). On one hand, thereappears to be something of an idee fixe in Fleischman’s vehement excoria-tions of Comte (‘‘one of the most colossal egotists who ever lived,’’ with ‘‘allthe characteristics of a cult leader’’ [63]). But Fleishman gives Eliot’s intel-lectual biography another thoughtful spin with the argument that JohnStuart Mill can be seen as a more central influence on Eliot’s thinking thanComte: ‘‘she shared with Mill something of a greater sweep . . . an estima-tion of the desirability and the possibilities of human development . . .through the application of informed and sympathetic reflection’’ (56). Hefollows this up splendidly in a later chapter, making a fine case for theinfluence of Mill’s Culture and Anarchy on Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (194–96).

Fleishman’s readings of Eliot’s novels can be equally willing to challengereceived wisdom of decades of Eliot scholarship. Middlemarch, he suggests,‘‘is not a novel about what England was in the first third of the nineteenthcentury’’—rather, it is ‘‘a novel about how that society showed the marks ofcoming to an end, . . . the story of how pre-Victorian England came to bewhat it was at the time of writing’’ (173). This is an excellent point. He alsorevises the notion that Daniel Deronda is ‘‘George Eliot’s Zionist novel’’(216); instead, Fleischman insists, it is something even more ambitious: anovel ‘‘about how . . . ideas are transmitted in history through minds actingon each other. . . . It enacts the processes not of political reason but ofinherited ideals and personal idealism that constitute what may be calledpolitical inspiration’’ (217).

Woven throughout the book is Fleishman’s insistence that George Eliotis not just part of The Great Tradition, but of an even greater tradition ofWestern thought; she is, he claims, perhaps the first, and one of the great-est, of ‘‘tragic novelists’’ (9, 83). Long before Death of a Salesman, GeorgeEliot had the innovative genius to imagine a form of tragedy in which thelofty cohabits with the lowly. Although her work illuminates The HumanCondition, Eliot’s realistic portraits of working class heroes like Adam Bedeor Silas Marner are fashioned from the common clay of nineteenth-century

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England. Before George Eliot, no British novelist had written about thesekinds of people in these kinds of ways. Eliot demonstrates an ‘‘intimacywith a social system previously unavailable to novelists. . . . Performing thesame function in prose as Wordsworth had done in verse’’ (98).

What Avrom Fleishman understands, appreciates–and clearly loves–about George Eliot are the remarkable ways in which, from her earliest fic-tion, she strove to harmonize the seeming dissonance of the Mythic andthe Real. Fleishman shows us how, with each subsequent novel, GeorgeEliot was to revisit to this challenge, until ‘‘ultimately, [in Middlemarch andDaniel Deronda] she would carry the mythic mode to a new level, discover-ing in fictional art the power to design myth-like scenes that convey deephuman truths’’ (111). I share Fleishman’s view that, in a remarkable finalact, Eliot achieves the perfect Victorian novel (Middlemarch)–and then, inher next (and last) novel (Daniel Deronda), begins all over again, playing byan entirely new set of rules. What Fleishman sees these two (in many waysso different) novels sharing is Eliot’s ability to ‘‘create climactic scenes inwhich realism and myth are all but indistinguishable’’ (111).

George Eliot’s Intellectual Life adds new shadings to the outlines of GeorgeEliot’s intellectual biography. But what I ultimately found richest and mostrewarding about this study was a quality above the footnotes and beyond thereading lists: the wisdom accrued by Fleishman over many decades of read-ing, teaching, and literary scholarship. He has clearly read and reread, lovedand thought deeply about the novels of George Eliot, and his pages rever-berate with that admiration and insight.

Diana PostlethwaiteSt. Olaf College

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