Since the publication more than a quarter of a century ago of Gordon S. Haight’s George Eliot: A Biography (1968), there has been a spate of biographies of this great novelist whose reputation has steadily grown. Rosemary Ashton’s is the latest in the line and follows hard on the heels of the 1995 publication of Frederick R. Karl’s thick 708‐page derivative, George Eliot: Voice of a Century. Ashton’s 14 chapters, Introduction and Epilogue are meant as “a critical biography” rather than what Ashton regards as Haight’s “widely acclaimed documentary life”, which presents the facts of George Eliot’s life, researched by him in the course of compiling his great edition of The George Eliot Letters (1954‐55,1978). There is some new information in the biography including new letters and Ashton does draw on Eliot’s unpublished diaries covering the July 1854 period onward when she went to Germany with George Henry Lewes, with whom she subsequently lived until his death in 1878. It is however curious that Ashton failed to make greater use of George Eliot’s unpublished journals now at the Beinecke Library, Yale University.
Ashton’s interpretation follows in the line of Ruby V. Redinger. In her George Eliot: The Emergent Self (1975) Redinger presents a strident feminist approach to its subject as does Gillian Beer in her George Eliot in the Key Women Writers series published in 1986. Ashton is by no means the first to reveal her subject’s feminine commitments and sympathies, expressed for instance in her support for the Married Women’s Property Act. She is not the first to point out that George Eliot, because of her domestic situation ‐ she was living with a man who technically was still married to someone else ‐ was publicly reticent to support feminist causes. Ashton’s emphasis is more moderate than her predecessors’ and places her subject’s feminism sensibly within the context of her age and of that of her own personal circumstances and reactions.
George Eliot’s works are discussed “in the context of the nineteenth‐century novel, both in England and in Europe”. Her knowledge of German language and culture is shown and integrated into a discussion of her fiction. Eliot’s interweaving of her knowledge into the fabric of her work is nicely suggested. Ashton’s approach is a traditional one: she follows the chronological contours of her subject’s life. Ashton traces her subject from her humble beginnings in the North Midlands. The topography of her journey is clearly shown: her complicated relationship with her father; her journey to London and activity as an intellectual journalist working on the Westminster Review; involvement with her employer John Chapman; her fateful meeting in a London bookshop with the man with whom she was to share most of her subsequent life, George Henry Lewes; the writing of her fiction; her success; Lewes’s death; her marriage to the much younger banker John Walter Cross; and her own demise shortly after. Eliot is shown to be an individual consciously making choices and not the dependent fragile woman depicted by Gordon S. Haight.
Ashton’s is a clearly written biography free from literary critical or psychological terminology. The chapter on The Mill on the Floss is particularly noteworthy. Perhaps more space should have been given to the “jeu de melancholie” which preceded it, “The lifted veil”. This short story, uncharacteristic in George Eliot’s work for many reasons, reveals many of her themes and preoccupations, which are rooted in personal biographical events.
There are 32 black and white, well produced illustrations and a superb dust‐jacket which unfortunately will no doubt be discarded in libraries. The book is set in 11.75/14 pt Monotype Garamond and typeset. The margins are wide, the binding strong. The paper is rather grating on the nerves. George Eliot: A Life is a useful addition to public and academic library shelves.
