Review of Modernizing George Eliot: The miter as Artist, Intellectual, Proto-Modernist, Cultural Critic

This distinguished work by a major Eliot scholar is the product of decades of reading, writing and reflection on her fiction and thought. It brings together in revised, homogenized form a series of essays from 1972 to the present day, including new material; and further, it engages with and amplifies two of Newton\u27s earlier monographs on Eliot, as well as his collection of essays by other critics on Eliot utilizing modem literary theory. Despite dealing with complex philosophical ideas, Newton\u27s writing is clear and lucid throughout, bringing to light new insights without the unnecessary jargon that occasionally taints modem criticism. Newton also considers nineteenth-century criticism, most usefully that of Lewes, making connections also with Austen and Scott and drawing fascinating parallels between the plots of Little Dorrit and Daniel Deronda: he places Eliot above these three writers as an artist, however. Despite some blemishes this comprehensive monograph demonstrates the radical nature of Eliot\u27s intelligence, her innovative experiments with literary form and her status as \u27both artist and ... intellectual. [T]he two are not separable\u27 (69; emphasis added). Newton firmly establishes Eliot\u27s relevance for the twenty-first century - her affinities with writers from Yeats and Joyce to Derrida and Levinas, and with modernist and post-modernist ideas. Use of post-structuralist criticism helps tease out subversive sub-texts, highlighting Eliot\u27s intense scepticism and the range of her thinking in ethics, politics and philosophy. Newton places Eliot in the literary canon alongside Dante, Milton and Goethe, high - and probably merited - praise indeed. This work can come across as a sustained defence of Eliot against her detractors, but it offers considerably more than this. Placing Eliot so high on her pedestal - an action to which the present writer must also plead guilty - may invite a repetition of early-twentieth-century attempts by envious writers to push her off that lofty perch: the \u27half malicious\u27 critics after her death, like George Meredith, referred to by Virginia Woolf in her centenary article, who \u27gave point and poison to the arrows of thousands incapable of aiming them so accurately, but delighted to let fly\u27. There has also been much disparagement of Eliot\u27s work on ideological grounds, of course. Raising an artist so high also creates a tendency to dwarf her peers. Newton thus, in reaction to assertions that Eliot is less \u27feminist\u27 than a writer like Charlotte Bronte, cites Pauline Nestor\u27s assessment of Jane Eyre as simply a \u27heroine of fulfilment\u27 - \u27a psychological fantasy of the extraordinary ... assurance of Jane\u27s ego, \u27 markedly at odds with the childhood circumstances that produced it. Such a fantasy is diametrically opposed to Eliot\u27s commitment to psychological veracity\u27 (n. 14, 197). Yet Bronte\u27s novels can also be seen as life \u27experiments\u27. Thus Lucy Snowe in Villette, subject to early trauma, is alienated, neurotic and prone to breakdowns