Review of George Eliot: Interviews and Recollections

In his introduction to this fascinating collection of accounts and comments by those who met George Eliot, K. K. Collins points out that modem biographies draw on about forty recollections that have come to form a canon of reminiscence. To this canon his volume adds a large number of unfamiliar sources, arranging more than two hundred items in sections which follow the chronology of her career, with subdivisions for the years of her fame under headings such as \u27Sunday Gatherings at the Priory\u27 and \u27Eton, Cambridge and Oxford\u27, and with full and helpful annotation of names and details. Of the canonical sources, he has omitted John Chapman\u27s diary and Edith Simcox\u27s \u27Autobiography of a Shirt-Maker\u27 as too extensive and self-contained to provide excerpts appropriate for this collection; but instead he presents, for instance, a hitherto unknown and surprisingly friendly account of the young Marian Evans by Chapman\u27s wife Susanna. Writing in 1881, she recalls the future novelist, \u27small in person, and always beautifully neat in her dress\u27 , engaging in cheerful conversation over the breakfast table and sharing her hostess\u27s joke that she, Marian, used too much soap because \u27she seemed to have washed all the colour out of her face\u27. According to Susanna, \u27she never took very kindly\u27 to the work of editing the Westminster Review, but \u27used often to say to me that it was the great ambition of her life to write a good novel, and when any book was under discussion she would remark I hope I may do better than that!\u27 (p. 28). If this may raise the suspicion of being a retrospective construction, other details have an authentic ring, such as Marian consoling Susanna, who was caring for a dying aunt, by maintaining that \u27you will never regret your labour of love\u27 , and claiming that her own greatest consolation was \u27in looking back at the time when I nursed my father in his last illness\u27 (p. 29). There is a liveliness to this reminiscence that comes from its incidental details, like the joke about the soap, or the expression of disgust on Marian\u27s face when she is detained by an American with a dreadful pun: \u27Why is Punch like a dealer in hardware? [ ... ] Because he deals in irony! Descriptions of George Eliot tend to highlight the same points - the heavy jaw, the face that lights up when she speaks, the low, sweet voice - but evaluate her features differently. Many find them plain, some even ugly, but Bret Harte, expecting plainness, \u27found them only strong, intellectual, and noble - indeed, I have seldom seen a grander face!\u27 (p. 210). Comparisons to Dante and Savonarola abound, the most memorable being perhaps Robert Browning\u27s when he was overheard at a reception stating that \u27She has the nose of Dante, the mouth of Savonarola, and the mind of Plato\u27 (p. 124). Most of those who met her at the Priory were powerfully impressed, many noting, like the future publisher Charles Kegan Paul, that her \u27every sentence was as complete, as fully formed, as though written in her published works\u27, although few could recall anything specific or remarkable that she actually said. The benefits of her conversation seem to have been tonic in a more general way. The publisher George Smith remarked on the stimulating effect of talking to her which left him feeling more intelligent than when he entered the Priory, a feeling shared by George du Maurier, the young mathematician Sophia V. Kovalevskaia and the Irish historian Justin McCarthy, who found that she made him talk with a fluency that surprised him