Novelist, journalist and translator Mary Ann Evans, better known, of course, by her pen name George Eliot, is remembered primarily for Middlemarch, praised by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. Yet the Victorian writer wrote seven novels in total, as well as short stories and poems that deserve a look-in too – Eliot’s biographer Clare Carlisle suggests some good places to start.
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The one to make you laugh out loud
The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot’s second and most autobiographical novel, features a passionate, intelligent young heroine stuck in small-town Middle England. While Maggie Tulliver longs for wider horizons, her dim-witted mother obsesses about her linen cupboard, her prized silver sugar tongs and her sister’s expensive new hat. As in Middlemarch, comedy ensues when high ideals and all-too-human pettiness collide. Be warned, this novel is a tragedy – it is also “The one that will make you cry” – but poor Maggie’s dreadful aunts are among Eliot’s funniest creations.
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The one if you’re in a rush
George Eliot’s first works of fiction were a series of three stories, all starring hapless provincial vicars. They were originally published in Blackwood’s Magazine, then collected in a book titled Scenes of Clerical Life. In the third story, Janet’s Repentance, Eliot really hits her stride. Like her mature novels, this is a dark marriage drama: its heroine, Janet Dempster, is abused by her violent husband and descends into an alcoholic spiral of shame and despair. One night she is thrown out of her house and shivers barefoot on the doorstep in a skimpy nightie, drunkenly wishing herself dead. It’s all a far cry from Jane Austen’s drawing rooms. This brilliant novella showcases Eliot’s dramatic flair, philosophical sensibility and deep emotional intelligence. It was based on real life, she told her publisher when he asked her to “soften” the story – and she refused to change it. The real Dempster, she said, “was far more disgusting than mine; the real Janet, alas!, had a far sadder end than mine.”
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The one to drop into dinner party conversation
Romola, set in Renaissance Florence, is Eliot’s challenging middle work. Written in the 1860s, its tall, dreamy, red-haired heroine would not be out of place in a pre-Raphaelite painting. In this ambitious novel Eliot flexed her creative powers, assembling a hybrid cast of fictional and historical characters – the philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, the artist Piero di Cosimo, the firebrand monk Savonarola. Impress your friends by explaining how this highbrow novel uses its 15th-century setting to explore grand Victorian themes: the loss of faith, the fragility of patriarchal power. Just make sure you pronounce “Romola” right – as Eliot told one of her fans, stress the first syllable, and the second “o” is short. (Think “gondola”, not “tombola”.)
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The one that will cheer you up
Most of Eliot’s novels are uplifting and melancholy, and Silas Marner is particularly tender-hearted. This small masterpiece probes human failure while allowing human goodness to shine through. Its fairytale quality is deceptively simple, though. Eliot wrote it while she was plotting Romola and preparing to become a stepmother to her partner’s teenage sons. Daunted by both tasks, she poured into Silas Marner her anxieties about combining love and work, motherhood and creativity. In the novel, love and motherhood triumph. In the author’s life, not surprisingly, things turned out to be more complicated.
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If you only read one, it should be
Middlemarch, of course. This is deservedly considered not just Eliot’s masterpiece, but one of the finest English novels ever written. It is funny, wise, grand, intimate and deeply philosophical. Eliot’s portraits of two disastrous marriages are exquisitely drawn, while the relationship between the Brooke sisters – proud, naive Dorothea and sweet, sharp Celia – is sheer delight. When Middlemarch was published in 1872, The Times declared it a “perfect” work of art. While a few reviewers grumbled that not a lot happens over its 800 pages, Edith Simcox, an astute young critic who was soon to become Eliot’s close friend and unrequited lover, realised that this novel opened a new “epoch” in literature by taking its drama “from the inner life.” For this reason, as so many devoted readers have found, nothing is lost on re-reading – and something new is gained every time. It is just breathtakingly good.
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The one that deserves more attention
What does an author write after Middlemarch? While a lesser artist would have rested on her laurels, George Eliot conceived a new novel even more daring and ambitious: Daniel Deronda. She defied the Victorian reading public by vesting the story’s moral weight in Jewish characters and experimented with a literary form inspired by Kabbalist philosophy. The result is flawed, yet dazzling. Spirited Gwendolen Harleth is Eliot’s most compelling heroine: shallow and complex, symbolic and believable, very far from perfect and totally irresistible. Gwendolen’s horrifying marriage to a ruthlessly controlling man mirrors Eliot’s vision of an upper-class English culture that conceals moral hypocrisy, sexual violence, and the cruelties of empire beneath its polite veneer. Unlike her other novels, set in a nostalgia-tinged past, Daniel Deronda is bracingly modern and looked towards a new century. It depicted hysteria, neurosis and childhood trauma before Freud made those concepts mainstream. For me, a child of the 80s, Harleth prefigures Diana Spencer: charismatic, unstable, at once ordinary and archetypal. She shines in the limelight, secretly desperate in her fabulous clothes, destined to be trapped in a pathologically English marriage.
• The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life by Clare Carlisle is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
