Death and Recollection: The Elegiac Dimension of Scenes of Clerical Life

Perversely, though perhaps appropriately for a paper on death, I want to begin at the end. George Eliot\u27s last novel, Daniel Deronda, ends with a good death: that of Ezra Mordecai, dying with the arms of Mirah and Deronda around him, and feeling \u27an ocean of peace beneath him\u27. The deaths that immediately precede it in her fiction, Grandcourt\u27s drowning in the same novel, or the deaths of Featherstone, Casaubon and Raffles in Middlemarch are of a different order: those figures go more or less unlamented to their graves, and their passing may even be a form of liberation for those who outlive them. Death can, of course, work in different ways in the novel, but it is striking how in George Eliot\u27s case, to adapt the words of the other Eliot, in her end is her beginning, for the central event of her first story, \u27Amos Barton\u27, is another \u27good\u27 death, that of the much loved, angelic Milly Barton in the company of her grieving family. Death frames George Eliot\u27s life\u27s work as a novelist and it marks her first book with particular intensity, with the deaths of Wybrow and Caterina, and of Dempster and Tryan playing a central part in the other two stories. What I want to reflect upon here are the implications of this prominent concern and what I see to be the resulting elegiac strain in Scenes of Clerical Life