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TAKEN TOGETHER, the four books under review here make me feel, not too comfortably, like a character in Middlemarch: in the aggregate, recent work on George Eliot is so slight that it evokes books unwritten, mighty tasks not only unfinished, but unbegun. The comparative modesty of even excellent work like Rosemarie Bodenheimer's, the sense that criticism is returning, in a smaller compass with more scrupulous vision, to ground already broken, is symptomatic of a void in our generation's imagination. An adequate appraisal of George Eliot needs an ambition as encompassing as George Eliot's own, but we seem to have directed our intensity to smaller, slyer writers.Frederick Karl's fat biography, the biggest and most widely available of these books (it is appearing in a fat paperback edition as I write), will probably become the most important Life written in my generation, even though its assumptions place it in the generation we rebelled against: its association of Eliot with lofty male sages like Carlyle, Arnold, and Mill is not at all the focus of our work. Whatever our differences, my contemporaries and I write about enlarged women, not honorary men. The visibility and authority of Karl's book makes me wonder who, if anyone, the authentic George Eliot of my generation is. After our strong start, do we have a George Eliot at all, or have we abandoned her along with all heroes and hero-worship?Those of us who began our careers in the early 1970s and went on to form the fractious, loosely-knit school that froze into "feminist criticism" have (collectively at least) more books behind us than ahead. Exposure to Middlemarch in college was probably the first inspiration for many of us; its despairing brilliance, the rage and fear beneath its consoling mask of wisdom, aligned me with Victorian women for life. I found my vocation in this novel about the impossibility of vocation, yet I, like so many of my contemporaries, have abandoned Middlemarch to write about monsters. After finding my Victorian England on the margins and in the interstices of its great tradition -in its vampires and demons, its plays and players -can I return to the vast book that embodies my nineteenth century?
TAKEN TOGETHER, the four books under review here make me feel, not too comfortably, like a character in Middlemarch: in the aggregate, recent work on George Eliot is so slight that it evokes books unwritten, mighty tasks not only unfinished, but unbegun. The comparative modesty of even excellent work like Rosemarie Bodenheimer's, the sense that criticism is returning, in a smaller compass with more scrupulous vision, to ground already broken, is symptomatic of a void in our generation's imagination. An adequate appraisal of George Eliot needs an ambition as encompassing as George Eliot's own, but we seem to have directed our intensity to smaller, slyer writers.Frederick Karl's fat biography, the biggest and most widely available of these books (it is appearing in a fat paperback edition as I write), will probably become the most important Life written in my generation, even though its assumptions place it in the generation we rebelled against: its association of Eliot with lofty male sages like Carlyle, Arnold, and Mill is not at all the focus of our work. Whatever our differences, my contemporaries and I write about enlarged women, not honorary men. The visibility and authority of Karl's book makes me wonder who, if anyone, the authentic George Eliot of my generation is. After our strong start, do we have a George Eliot at all, or have we abandoned her along with all heroes and hero-worship?Those of us who began our careers in the early 1970s and went on to form the fractious, loosely-knit school that froze into "feminist criticism" have (collectively at least) more books behind us than ahead. Exposure to Middlemarch in college was probably the first inspiration for many of us; its despairing brilliance, the rage and fear beneath its consoling mask of wisdom, aligned me with Victorian women for life. I found my vocation in this novel about the impossibility of vocation, yet I, like so many of my contemporaries, have abandoned Middlemarch to write about monsters. After finding my Victorian England on the margins and in the interstices of its great tradition -in its vampires and demons, its plays and players -can I return to the vast book that embodies my nineteenth century?
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