Great Britain before the Great War

A year before Queen Victoria died, in the summer of 1900, the petit monarch was returning to England from Ireland aboard the royal yacht. She was 81 but still in relatively good health. A large wave struck the boat, disturbing her Majesty at rest. She summoned her doctor. “Go up at once, Sir James,” she said to him, “and give the Admiral my compliments but tell him the thing must not occur again.”

Her attitude was a metaphor for the times. The sea was rising. It must not. Apparently, just by saying so.

Lord Salisbury, leader of the last truly patrician British government, about 1900Five years earlier, in 1895, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Salisbury, the ninth Earl and the third Marquess of his line, became prime minister in a crushing Conservative victory, installing in power what would be the last truly patrician government in British history. At sixty-five, Lord Salisbury surrounded himself with his own circle from Oxford and marriage, mostly peers of the realm; his cabinet included a Viscount, three Barons, and two Baronets. Of its commoners, one was a director of the Bank of England; one, a squire whose family had represented the same county in Parliament since the sixteenth century; and one, Lord Salisbury’s nephew who had inherited a Scottish fortune estimated at four million pounds. The outlier was a manufacturer from Birmingham, chosen to represent the working class, despite being the richest man in England.

They were hot-house flowers grown to gargantuan proportions and in their final bloom—exhibit A: Salisbury himself. The Cecils had been a part of the ruling class since Richard II had taken a shine to their ancestral halls and swapped country estates with them in the late 1300s. Salisbury himself was tall at six four, both imposing and haughty. Even among his peers, he stood out—although he opted out of almost all social occasions. He refused to live in “shabby” Downing Street and had no truck with the accoutrements of his set. He despised riding, the true spot of a gentleman. He was otherwise bored and fidgety, prone to shaking his leg until members of his bench complained of seasickness.

Ensconced in his family’s amber, he was also dismissive, even verbally repellent. He called the Irish “Hottentots”; he referred to an Indian member of Parliament as “that black man.” Lord Morley once said that he loved to read the Prime Minister’s speeches because “they were sure to contain one blazing indiscretion which was a delight to remember.” Indeed, the Prime Minister’s own name became a by-word for his behavior: a “Salisbury” was an impolitic remark about someone just within hearing.

A sonorous but gifted speaker, prone to long speeches without a note at hand, he got his heart racing by riding a tricked-up, adult-sized tricycle at full blower through Saint James’s Park, his manservant on the contraption’s back step, ready to push the old gent up the hills, but otherwise erect and unswerving, his coat tails flapping in the breeze on the down slopes as Salisbury leaned over the handle bars, a gleam in his eyes.

It could be said that her Majesty and the Prime Minister were the last gasp of the nineteenth century, already in its dotage. And the forces were massing against them. Labor was only momentarily downed. Its matinee Idol, the legendary Gladstone, had backed home rule for the Irish. His party had been torn in two over his stance, half its members becoming Conservatives overnight. Still, the Irish question remained unsettled, despite Salisbury’s brutal crack-downs on the Emerald Isle.

What’s more, the factories of central England were starting to groan under the strain of unfair labor practices. And so the quays along the Thames were filling with the homeless, the impoverished, the outcasts, all the detritus of raw-energy capitalism, even more so than in Dickens’ day. Back then, the poor at least worked. Now, English products competed with cheap goods from abroad.

Oscar Wilde and Lord Douglas, about 1893And then there was a certain playwright, satirist, and gadfly, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. His trial in 1895, the year Salisbury formed his government, set London on its ears. It had always been supposed that artistocracy would close ranks around its favorites. And Wilde was certainly a favorite. But then came the facts: he’d taken up with the Marquess of Queensbury’s son, Lord Alfred Douglas, who eventually lured Wilde out of the posh gentleman’s clubs and into the seedy underworld of working-class male prostitutes. Queensbury, to shame Wilde and break up the relationship with his son, left a calling card one night at Wilde’s club: “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic].” Wilde brashly sued for libel. What came next was a circus: private detectives in the dankest alleys, revelations of gentlemen in each other’s bedrooms at the most respected houses, a London underground of cross-dressers and drag singers.

The court found Wilde guilty of “gross indecency among males.” Wilde’s wife and children were reduced to penniless poverty. Country houses were shuddered, disreputable for years. The fin had come for fin de siécle decadence. Sure, there had been men caught before. Just five years earlier, Lord Arthur Somerset, the son of the Duke of Beaufort, had been arrested in one of London’s homosexual brothels. But Somerset had been whisked off to the Continent where he lived out his life in relative quiet. Now, times had changed. The Church of England was railing against lewdness. The troubles in South Africa were simmering. The Boer War loomed. The Americans, too, were making threatening gestures in South America. Best then to close ranks—without the interlopers.

Wilde’s conviction severed the aristocracy from its erstwhile fling with the “Gay 90s.” A new regime stepped into power, Lord Salisbury’s, vehemently opposed to home rule for Ireland, antagonistic to voting reforms, hostile to any notion that the workers needed a safeguard against abuse, uptight, rigorously religious, thick-set with “family values,” and supremely convinced of their own centrality. As Salisbury himself once said to those pushing for increased suffrage: “You are pitting an overwhelming number of the employed against a hopeless minority of employers.” He felt that statement should settle the question.

But the sea was continuing to rise. The Kaiser was hankering to be noticed on the Continent, yearning to pick a fight with just about anyone. The answer from London? Hunker down all the more. Her Majesty became seemingly more resplendent, more maddeningly adored by her public.

Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, 1897So Britain pulled up short, looked in, and sat down. On the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, all the crowned heads of Europe had been in attendance. On her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, none was invited. She was instead surrounded by Salisbury and her government’s ministers, along with the premiers of the global empire, government heads from Canada, New Zealand, the Cape Colony, the six states of Australia, India, Cyprus, and more. It was a telling list: the world as owned by Great Britain. The rest could go hang.

Millions of her subjects turned out in London to see the Queen’s carriage as it rolled through the streets to her formal celebrations. “No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given me,” she journaled.

A young Rudyard KiplingYet the next morning, the music of some late-night balls still going strong, the streets barely swept clean, a young Anglo-Indian with writerly aspirations, one Rudyard Kipling, published a poem in The Times simply but audaciously called “Recessional.” It was an indictment of empire, of hubris, of smug self-complacency. It was a slap in the patrician face, framed in their own language, that of the Church of England:

God of our fathers, known of old—
Lord of our far-flung battle line—
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies—
The Captains and the Kings depart—
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard—
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard.
For frantic boast and foolish word,

Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Amen. 

           “All our pomp yesterday is one with Ninevah and Tyre”? The famed, worldly cities God despised in the Old Testament? The ones Jonah was sent to preach against? Waves, waves, waves. What else could one do but send up word that they shouldn’t exist? What else could one do?

Art and THE SONG OF THE LARK

THE SONG OF THE LARK is Cather's most self-consciously "arty" novel--not necessarily because of any inherent "literariness" in the book itself (although that may be the case), but rather because the novel makes reference to so many other works of art.

Of course, there's plenty of talk of Tolstoy throughout, including references to ANNA KARENINA. And Thea has some dramatic moments in the Chicago Art Institute.

Perhaps the most obvious art reference is to Jules Breton's painting, "The Song of the Lark," which hangs in the Art Institute. It's a lovely (or cloying, depending on your perspective) bit of French romanticism.

The major question of the painting is what exactly is the nature of the "song." Is it from the tiny lark flying in the sky in the upper-left corner of the painting? (You may not be able to see it too clearly in this reproduction.) Or is the song the one the girl seems on the verge of singing? Or is it the consonance between the two songs, the bird and the girl, together in harmony with the sunset (or dawn)?

Note also the presence of the rather dangeous-looking scythe in her hand in an otherwise pastoral and calm world--not to mention her grip on that scythe. If she is indeed a woman who works in the fields, where are her gleanings? And while we're at it, those fields look pretty trimmed already. So what's the scythe for?

Many, many questions, as always the case with French romanticism. But nonetheless, this is definitely the painting from which the book gets its title.

Of course, there are many more references to art in the text. Another big one is the Manet painting in the Nathanmeyer house in Chicago. The Nathanmeyers are considered true art patrons--and their taste is central to the thematics of the book (that is, that an artist should perform only for those with artistic spirits).

Here's the Manet painting in its full form. It presents a musician, probably a singer, stepping out of a rehearsal hall, holding a bag of grapes. You should note that the woman is eating in public, a bit scandalous for the time. (My grandmother, rather Old World in her thoughts, absolutely forbade eating in "public"--that is, while walking on the street or sitting in a car.) And Manet's singer is apparently heedless--or careless?--of the fact that her petticoat is showing under her rather heavy dress, a sign perhaps of her sexually carefree attitude. It, too, is a tad scandalous. But does she know? Or care? (And does Thea?)

By far, Manet was Cather's favorite artist. She felt closest to his art in her own: perhaps its careful delineation of strong characters, perhaps his frank depictions of sexually charged relationships (the most famous is here). It's a long-discussed question of how Cather was influenced by Manet.

Finally, and on another note, Thea runs out to "Panther Canyon" in Book Three to find respite from her life in Chicago. Actually, Cather has a very specific place in mind: Walnut Canyon in Arizona, east of Flagstaff. It's all now a National Monument, some fairly well-preserved cliff dwellings and Anasazi cliff paintings in the high, forested desert. Here are two pictures you might find interesting: one of the canyon itself and one of the remaining cliff dwellings where Thea spends the summer.

 

Willa Cather and Isabelle McClung

Isabelle McClung, about 1914It's important to note that THE SONG OF THE LARK is dedicated to Isabelle McClung, one of the great loves of Cather's life. I thought I'd take a moment to explain the complicated relationship between the two. (For a fuller chronology of Cather's life, click here.)

In July 1896, after graduating from the University of Nebraska and wandering aimlessly a bit, Cather landed an editorial job in Pittsburgh with a nationally circulated "women's" magazine, Home Monthly, part of the vanguard of home-ec publishing that would soon sweep the nation with larger titles like Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens. (Here's a hot, on-going debate: were these magazines an incipient form of proto-modern feminism, a "room of one's own" where women could develop an aesthetic and even an ethic away from the eyes of their husbands, or were they a niche for a grasping patriarchy, desperate to keep wives nailed in the coffin of domesticity in the face of increasing modernism and industrialism?)

While editing and writing various articles on domestic matters, Cather also worked as a music and theater critic for newspapers in both Pittsburgh and back home in Lincoln, Nebraska. These were high times for a woman from the prairie: Cather interviewed touring musicians, went to recitals at the new Carnegie Music Hall in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, and heard some of the best performers of the day. She also traveled to New York to hear various operas, including a complete Ring cycle. One can speculate endlessly how much this life influenced her portrayal of Thea, her musician from the plains.

Within a few years and still quite hesitant about her own attempts at creative writing, Cather resigned from the magazine full-time and accepted jobs teaching English in various Pittsburgh high schools. Her first book, a volume of poetry, "April Twilights," was published in 1903, and followed quickly by her first volume of short fiction, "The Troll Garden" (1905). One of the best-known stories from this collection, "Paul's Case," is a true-to-life portrayal of a swishy gay man from the plains, encountering the art-filled life of the big city for the first time. The story ends tragically--but it's also important to see in the title the prevailing notions of homosexuality: a "case," a problem, an illness, a condition, mostly mental.

Willa Cather, around 1920Needless to say, Cather's relationship with her own sexuality was complicated. Until she left for Pittsburgh, Cather most often went by the name of "William," not Willa. She dressed in men's cloths--particularly doctor's clothes. Most of her friends at college called her "Dr. Will."

In Pittsburgh, Cather seemed to embrace (somewhat hesitantly) her own sexuality. She reverted to using "Willa" as her name--and was comfortable enough to make lasting friendships with prominent Pittsburgh families. By far the most important friendship was with Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a wealthy and well-connected Pittsburgh family. Isabelle's father, Judge Samuel McClung, had presided over the 1892 trial of anarchist Alexander Berkman, the would-be assassin of tycoon Henry Clay Frick. From their meeting in 1899 until Isabelle's death in Sorrento, Italy, in 1938, Cather and Isabelle were sometimes lovers, always devoted friends. Indeed, although Cather had other relationships with women throughout her life, Isabelle was perhaps her true love. Late in her life, Cather said that "all my books were written for Isabelle."

That said, it's hard--always--with Cather to fathom the true nature of her attractions. For one thing, she was intensely private, a common modus operandi of homosexuals living in oppressive cultures. To that end, she destroyed much of her private correspondence before her death. For another thing, her will expressly forbids the publication of any remaining letters or journals.

An undated picture of Willa Cather and Isabelle McClungHowever, we can say this: around 1901, Isabelle invited Cather to move in with her. Problem was, Isabelle was quite young, in her late teens, and still living at home. Nonetheless, Cather lived in the McClung home until she moved to New York in 1906. Many of the stories in "The Troll Garden," including "Paul's Case," were written while Cather lived in the McClung home.

Cather shared Isabelle's bedroom. The two women were inseparable at dinner parties. They traveled to Europe and out West together. And apparently, the old Judge was okay with the arrangements--so long as they stayed (mostly) under his own roof. When Cather moved to New York, he forbade his daughter from going along.

Cather was not one to let the grass grow under her feet. She was soon involved with other women. Yet on her frequent cross-country train trips back to Nebraska to tend to her ailing parents and the settlement of their estate, Cather often stopped off in Pittsburgh to spend time with Isabelle and the McClung family.

In 1914, Cather got a severe case of blood-poisoning from a stick by a hat pin. She was hospitalized for a long time and took almost the entire year off to recuperate--which she did, not in New York, but back in the McClung's home in Pittsburgh with Isabelle in constant attendance. It was during this year, laid up in bed and being served hand and foot by her favorite woman, that Cather wrote THE SONG OF THE LARK.

But it did not go well from here. Two years later, Isabelle decided to cash in her chips and marry violinist Jan Hambourg. Cather was devastated--and yet quickly recovered, partly with the help of Edith Lewis, the women with whom she was living in New York City (and with whom she would live for the rest of her life).

The Shattuck Inn in Jaffrey, New HampshireNonetheless, Isabelle and Cather remained close. Isabelle and Jan asked Cather and Edith Lewis to join them for a summer holiday at the Shattuck Inn in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, the next year, in 1917. It proved a healing and idyllic time. Eventually, Cather saw Jaffrey as the site of some of her happiest moments; she would use Jaffrey as the place she wrote most intensely in the years to come, often pitched in a tent in the woods, often wandering on the slopes of Mount Monadnock. There is some evidence to suggest she associated Jaffrey with Isabelle, long after the married couple stopped summering there. Indeed, Cather chose to be buried, not in Nebraska, and not near her Greenwich Village home, and not near her beloved retreat on Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy, but in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in sight of Mount Monadnock.

The Two Faulkners

In some ways, there are two Faulkners. You can see the shift between the two in the 1930s when you compare modernist, almost cubist masterpieces like "Absalom, Absalom" (1936) with the more straightforward, rambling, story-telling in "Light in August" (1932). Eventually, the latter style will win out and become the way Faulkner writes throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, before his untimely death.

Think of it this way. There's the first Faulkner, mostly in his twenties and thirties, a high modernist, heady and intellectual, into literary gamesmanship and obfuscation, enamored by ridiculously complicated references to art and history. The first Faulkner's writing is dense; it takes great pleasure in defying and disorienting its reader. It's packed with allusions, not just quotations from other books and historical incidents, but instead complex rewritings of those allusions in a rather warped but playful intertextuality--like Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. If you've ever read "The Sound and the Fury" or "As I Lay Dying," you'll know what I mean.

Then there's the second Faulkner, in his forties, fifties, and sixties, more like some half-drunk uncle who just wants to sit on the porch and tell you a long story, complete with rambling asides which abruptly veer into the tragic. The second Faulkner's writing is thick, not dense, a thicket of words (but not allusions), more like (dare I say it?) Marcel Proust and Henry James, but decidedly Southern, less about the mental games and more about the story itself, into local color, but always also headed for the joke, except when he can't make it there. (Of course, I don't presume to say you actually have a drunk uncle, but I'm sure you can imagine what I mean.)

"The Hamlet," of course, is of the second Faulkner, the mostly unknown Faulkner. It's actually a bit of a privilege to read this second Faulkner--so few even know the work. 

As we'll discuss, these two Faulkners are indicative of the great divide in twentieth-century literature, the stark difference between modernism and postmodernism--and here it is, happening right before your eyes. In fact, I will contend that the second Faulkner is actually far more radical--artistically, at least--than the first.

With George Eliot, you had to get in there with her and make the text happen. The two of you had to wrestle through "Middlemarch" together--she, on your shoulder, telling you what it all means; you, sometimes brushing her away because you don't think that's what it all means--or don't care because you just want to get on with the story. Her sentences defy you, her logic is even more intense, and at all times she forces you to grapple with the novel, to make it make meaning.

With "The Hamlet," you just have to ease into a chair and let the novel happen to you. Faulkner's not asking for anything from you except that you listen. Still, a shot of bourbon helps.

What They Said About MIDDLEMARCH

Since its publication, MIDDLEMARCH has provoked debate among readers, writers, and literary critics. Early reviewers were befuddled by its scale and subject; Jazz Age sophisticates sneered at its priggish moralizing; Julian Barnes has called it "probably the greatest English novel." Blackwood's Magazine in 1883 declared that the novel made Eliot the heir of Shakespeare; modern feminist scholars like Lee R. Edwards have found the novel nothing more than a long-winded "cop-out"; and F. R. Leavis, the Cambridge intellectual who helped define the modern notion of the "great books," wrote in 1948 that MIDDLEMARCH showed Eliot was the long-sought English Tolstoy.

It's all a muddle. But I thought we might look at a few of the reviews and reactions to this sprawling masterpiece.

An early, anonymous assessment in "The Saturday Review" (1872) starts us out with a common comment about the novel having the unhappiest of happy endings:

If Middlemarch is melancholy, it is due perhaps to its religion being all duty, without sufficient admixture of hope.

You might want to think more about that in relation to Dorothea's and Lydgate's fates--and the way the novel seems to swerve for both just at its ending, particularly in the "Finale."

A year later, Arthur George Sedgwick, writing in "The Atlantic" was caught in a dilemma familiar to many who have read the novel: how to get a grip on so much material.

It would be a mere waste of time to go into a minute criticism of "Middlemarch." The plots are too numerous, the characters too multitudinous, and the whole too complicated. Out of the history of Dorothea's marriage and domestic life, Lydgate's marriage and domestic life, Bulstrode's crimes and hypocrisy, the love-affair of Mary and Fred, and the adventures of Ladislaw, a library of novels might be made; while on the humor, the observation, reflection, and suggestion contained in the book a regiment of writers of social articles might support themselves for a lifetime. It is an interesting question, whether this Study of Provincial Life is a success or a failure; whether it is a work which, judged by its own standard, reaches or falls short of that standard.

Sedgwick never answers that last bit. Instead, he bogs down in the question of whether Dorothea or Lydgate is the center of the novel--and laments that the novel may not have a true center. (I would disagree and claim the novel does have a moral but not a narrative center.) He ends his review with this curious obfuscation: "One cannot help feeling that to properly analyze and explain George Eliot, another George Eliot is needed." (If you'd like to read Sedgwick's review in full, click here.)

Henry James reviewed the novel in "The Galaxy" that same year (1873). He was far less befuddled. He begins by claiming that "Middlemarch" is "one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels," a "treasure-house of details" but "an indifferent whole." James, too, seems to find too much muchness in the novel; he yearns for it to be, not about everything, but just about Dorothea:

George Eliot's men are generally so much better than the usual trousered offspring of the female fancy, that their merits have perhaps overshadowed those of her women. Yet her heroines have always been of an exquisite beauty, and Dorothea is only that perfect flower of conception of which her predecessors were the less unfolded blossoms. An indefinable moral elevation is the sign of these admirable creatures; and of the representation of this quality in its superior degrees the author seems to have in English fiction a monopoly. To render the expression of a soul requires a cunning hand; but we seem to look straight into the unfathomable eyes of the beautiful spirit of Dorothea Brooke. She exhales a sort of aroma of spiritual sweetness, and we believe in her as in a woman we might providentially meet some fine day when we should find ourselves doubting of the immortality of the soul.

Quite a lot to claim for one character! Still, James's ire seems to be saved for Will Ladislaw:

The figure of Will Ladislaw is a beautiful attempt, with many finely-completed points; but on the whole it seems to us a failure. It is the only eminent failure in the book, and its defects are therefore the more striking. It lacks sharpness of outline and depth of color; we have not found ourselves believing in Ladislaw as we believe in Dorothea, in Mary Garth, in Rosamond, in Lydgate, in Mr. Brooke and Mr. Cauaubon. He is meant, indeed, to be a light creature (with a large capacity for gravity, for he finally gets into Parliament), and a light creature certainly should not be heavily drawn. The author, who is evidently very fond of him, has found for him here and there some charming and eloquent touches; but in spite of these he remains vague and impalpable to the end. He is, we may say, the one figure which a masculine intellect of the same power as George Eliot's would not have conceived with the same complacency; he is, in short, roughly speaking, a woman's man. It strikes us as an oddity in the author's scheme that she would have chosen just this figure of Ladislaw as the creature in whom Dorothea was to find her spiritual compensations. He is really, after all, not the ideal foil to Mr. Casaubon, which her soul must have imperiously demanded, and if the author of the "Key to all Mythologies" sinned by lack of order, Ladislaw too has not the concentrated fervor essential in the man chosen by so nobly strenuous a heroine. The impression once given that he is a dilettante is never properly removed, and there is slender poetic justice in Dorothea's marrying a dilettante.

James ends his essay with a curious, half-hearted praise: Middlemarch "sets a limit . . . to the development of the old-fashioned English novel." You can hear in that a young writer's goosing one of the literary lions of the previous generation. But you can also hear a certain ring of melancholy: an ideal passing away, a realist fiction project that is simply not possible in the ever-modernizing world. (To read the full text of James's review, click here.)

As to that modernizing world, it, too, has been obsessed with Eliot's masterpiece. You've heard me say that Virginia Woolf called MIDDLEMARCH one of the few novels written in English for adults. Fair enough, but the quote is often stated a bit out of context. It's not quite the full-on endorsement you might think. Here's the complete thought from Woolf's assessment of George Eliot's achievement in "The Times Literary Supplement" in November, 1919:

Her humour has shown itself broad enough to cover a wide range of fools and failures, mothers and children, dogs and flourishing midland fields, farmers, sagacious or fuddled over their ale, horse-dealers, inn-keepers, curates, and carpenters. Over them all broods a certain romance, the only romance that George Eliot allowed herself--the romance of the past. The books are astonishingly readable and have no trace of pomposity or pretence. But to the reader who holds a large stretch of her early work in view, it will become obvious that the mist of recollection gradually withdraws. It is not that her power diminishes, for, to our thinking, it is at its highest in the mature "Middlemarch," the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. But the world of fields and farms no longer contents her. In real life she had sought her fortunes elsewhere; and though to look back into the past was calming and consoling, there are, even in the early works, traces of that troubled spirit, that exacting and questioning and baffled presence who was George Eliot herself. In "Adam Bede" there is a hint of her in Dinah. She shows herself far more openly and completely in Maggie in "The Mill on the Floss." She is Janet in "Janet's Repentance" [one of the three novellas in "Scenes of Clerical Life"], and Romola, and Dorothea seeking wisdom and finding one scarcely knows what in marriage with Ladislaw. Those who fall foul of George Eliot do so, we incline to think, on account of her heroines; and with good reason, for there is no doubt that they bring out the worst of her, lead her into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic, and occasionally vulgar. Yet if you could delete the whole sisterhood, you would leave a much smaller and a much inferior world, albeit a world of greater artistic perfection and far superior jollity and comfort.

If you'd like to read the whole assessment by Woolf--and it is itself quite a piece of writing--click here.

More recently, A. S. Byatt has followed in a path well worn by contemporary English novelists. In "The Guardian" (2007), she argued that "Middlemarch" is simply the greatest English novel. Byatt's assessment is largely about the strength of the characters--not the strength of their actions, but rather their strength as characterizations, as portraits of individuals caught in a web.

[The novel is] held together by one of the most complicated and brilliantly worked metaphors anywhere in fiction. It is a metaphor of a web. . . . It is both a field of force, a trap like a spiderweb, and a pattern of invisible connecting links between humans meeting each other's eye. We meet it in Mrs Cadwallader, the vicar's wife, who sees Middlemarch itself as a spiderweb of gossip, which connects to the idea that Lydgate is doomed by the common consciousness of the society he is in: "Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing Lydgate and assimilating him very comfortably."

Byatt does get her facts wrong--she claims Eliot started writing about Dorothea and then switched to a plot about Lydgate (in fact, the opposite is the truth)--but she also points out something that was very true at the time of the book's serialization and that we may have lost today: most Victorian readers expected Lydgate and Dorothea to end up together. That these two didn't may account for some of the discomfort among nineteenth-century reviewers. (To read Byatt's entire essay from "The Guardian," click here.)

As I said, it's a muddle. In fact, when I was a graduate student, I used to refer to the novel as "Muddlemarch." Perhaps we're best to leave the assessment to one of the most original voices in all Anglo-American literature, to Emily Dickinson. She called MIDDLEMARCH "a little book of granite for you to lean on." And she wrote this about it to one of her confidants:

What do I think of ‘Middlemarch’? What do I think of glory--except that in a few instances this "mortal has already put on immortality." George Eliot was one. The mysteries of human nature surpass the mysteries of redemption, for the infinite we only suppose, while we see the finite.