VICTORIAN NOVELIST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 503, 11 February 1949, Page 13

VICTORIAN NOVELIST

GEORGE ELIOT, by Joan Bennett. Carmbridge. HIS critical study sends us back to one of the most serious and well- | equipped, but perhaps not the most lively, of Victorian novelists. ("In all George Eliot’s novels .. . . it is possible to distinguish between an intellectual ahd an imaginative impulse.") I have sometimes imagined that George Eliot’s earnestness, her preoccupation with moral problems, was a compensation for her two breaches with Victorian convention: for Marian Evans had both lost her faith in Christianity and gone to live with a man to whom she could not be married. Her work seems to assert’ how ethical it was possible to be while committing from the highest of motives, the worst of sins. But these are not the ideas of Mrs. Bennett. The book begins with a study of George Eliot’s life and gives, with copious quotation, some interesting information about her friends and the origin of her ideas, It goes on to make a close study of the novels: Mrs. Bennett chews over each character, lifts out slabs from the novels to illustrate their essential characteristics, and pats down of upholds contemporary or later critics. From it George Eliot’s best quality appears to be a gift for homely dialogue which she often went out of her way to suppress. The book has a certain value as exegesis; as criticism it is less satisfactory, Mrs. Bennett. remains, like her sybject, rather a bore, and she cannot, like George Eliot, take refuge in melodrama. Once again a professional teacher of English literature "does" part of her "subject," oh so conscientiously. But is it quite the thing to write: "She has researched into " history’ of thought in fifteenth-century \

Florence?"

David

Hall