THE THIRTY-SIXTH GEORGE ELIOT MEMORIAL LECTURE, 2007

• Published in: The George Eliot review 2008-01 (39), p.7
• Main Author: Handley, Graham
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) (1819-1880); English literature
• ISSN: 1358-345X

[...]novels are not solely written on ideas, though they may incorporate them: the Marian Evans who became George Eliot was intent on realism, as she had made clear in her Westminster essays on Riehl's 'The Natural History of German Life' and 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' in 1856, and an important part ofthat realism would of necessity include aspects of official Christians, from the well-meaning, ineffectual, unaspirated Amos Barton through to the materialistically ambitious and ingratiating Henry Gascoigne, whose acquired dipthong is in some ways a kind of verbal initiative which may ultimately get him on to the Anglican honours list. Ladies of Independent chapel or Anglican church loyalties predominate in the audience, and in the structure of the novel this balances those other public scenes of male predominance in politics, where corruption and violence are part of the action. The irony is deepened by the fact that her remarks are not directed at Farebrother himself, though he might well feel the cutting edge of their implication: but in strict honesty to Fred and the self-interest he feels, he pushes Mary further and learns that she would not give up Fred for anyone else. [...]his own wish to marry Mary, made now more possible because of his improved position, is dead before it can be spoken. [...]let me repeat that George Eliot's clerical scenes are integral to her fiction which, with the exception of Romola, deals mainly with the particularities of society as it was in the first half of the nineteenth century and a little beyond.