The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction

This is an important biographical and critical study which takes for its starting point George Eliot\u27s view in 1879 that \u27The best history of a writer is contained in his writings - these are his chief actions\u27 (The George Eliot Letters, VII, 230). Rosemarie Bodenheimer - who courageously ignores the current equalization stance of referring to Eliot and Evans - begins with an exemplary chapter, \u27On Reading Letters\u27. She observes \u27Letters and novels are both acts of self-representation in writing and, as such, may both be taken, to begin with, as fictions.\u27 This is a neat and persuasive way in, though there are a few sporting hiccups: W.J. Dawson, we are told, \u27emerges as a cheerleader for the familiar letter as the most intimate recording of the self\u27 (13), while we also note that \u27When letter collecting is powered by the desire to revel in personality, George Eliot\u27s productions do not make the cut\u27 (ibid). But of course each of her correspondents is an audience, and her letters indicate her ways of \u27directing and constructing her readership\u27 (22). Contrasts with Charlotte Bronte are drawn in \u27Constructing the Reader\u27, and while Marian Evans\u27s early letters are \u27manifestly adolescent\u27 they are also quite distinctly \u27the stuff of which George Eliot\u27s novels were to be made\u27 (38). Sexual frustrations and religious struggles are evident and interactive too. There is a particularly stimulating exploration (which includes re-dating) on \u27Letters from a Town Mouse to a Country Mouse\u27 which speculatively links the mode here to that \u27curious chapter\u27 which opens The Mill on the Floss. Narrative stances towards the reader are examined in the fiction. Superb phrases like \u27the piety of George Eliot\u27s realism\u27 (50) must be set against solecisms like \u27the next sentence, dropping a thousand watts of intensity\u27 (54) and \u27the many shadowy voices with whom George Eliot boxes in order to write\u27 (55)