The book of revelations


Henry James complained that Middlemarch was too messy. But it was George Eliot's 'riot of subjectivity' that made the novel so bold. Zadie Smith salutes the Victorian novelist who gave future writers the freedom to push the form to its limits


The Guardian


'A feeling for all ordinary human life' ... George Eliot.



Henry & George
In 1873, the young Henry James reviewed George Eliot's Middlemarch. It was an odd review, neither rave nor pan. Eliot represented the past and James hoped to be the future. "It sets a limit," he wrote, "to the development of the old-fashioned English novel." James's objection to Middlemarch is familiar: there's too much of it. He found "its diffuseness makes it too copious a dose of pure fiction." He would have preferred a more "organized, moulded, balanced composition". Such a lot of characters! And so often lacking the grander human qualities. With one exception: Dorothea. She alone has an "indefinable moral elevation" and "exhales a sort of aroma of spiritual sweetness". It is of the "career of [this] obscure St Theresa" that he should have liked to read more. Finding Dorothea the most admirable character, he imagines she "was to have been the central figure". He wonders what went wrong. Because the doctor Lydgate is interesting enough, but his story "yields in dignity" to Dorothea's, and as for hapless Fred Vincy! Why are we presented with such a "fullness of detail" on "this common-place young gentleman, with his somewhat meagre tribulations and his rather neutral egotism"?


A famous query opens chapter 29 of Middlemarch: "But why always Dorothea?" It's neat that James's complaint, essentially, "But why always Fred?", should be the inverse reflection of it. You might say of Henry and George what the novel says of Lydgate and Rosamund: between him and her indeed there was that total missing of each other's mental track . . . James can't understand why Middlemarch should stray so far from Dorothea, to linger on Lydgate, Fred and the rest. Cautiously he asks: was it an unconscious instinct or a deliberate plan?
Questions concerning the gestation of novels aren't often answerable, but Middlemarch is an exception. Eliot kept a journal, and in 1869 she records work on "a novel called Middlemarch" competing with research for "a long poem on Timolean". This Middlemarch is the tale of a young, progressive doctor called Lydgate, whose arrival in a provincial town coincides with the 1832 Reform Bill debates. Work on it goes slowly, painfully - there's more hope for the poem. By the end of the year they're both abandoned. What happens next is interesting. In November, Eliot begins a second story, Miss Brooke, and finds she can write a hundred pages of it in a month. To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly, difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognising that this is what you hold. By late 1871, the Lydgate and Dorothea stories are joined (by the creaky, yet workable plot device of Mr Brooke's dinner party) and like the two hands of a piece for the piano, a contrapuntal structure is set in motion, in which many melodic lines make equal claim on our attention. The result is that famous Eliot effect, the narrative equivalent of surround sound. Here is the old-fashioned English novel at its limit, employing an unprecedented diversity of "central characters", so different from the centripetal narratives of Austen. The novel is a riot of subjectivity. To Mary Garth, Fred Vincy is the central character in Middlemarch. To Ladislaw it is Dorothea. To Lydgate, it is Rosamund Vincy. To Rosamund, it is herself. And authorial attention is certainly diffuse; it seems to focus not simply on those who are most good, or most attractive or even most interesting, but on those who are "there". Unconscious instinct or deliberate plan? That Lydgate and Dorothea's stories existed separately, that Dorothea's story came second, points firmly at deliberation. Yet to say so is to give a question of fiction a factual answer, and the proper rebuff to James comes from a different place, not the place of fact, but the seat of feeling. James mistakes the sensibility of the novel:

"The reader is sometimes tempted to complain of a tendency which we are at a loss exactly to express - a tendency to make light of the serious elements of the story and to sacrifice them to the more trivial ones."

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