GEORGE ELIOT, A BIOGRAPHY by Gordon S. Haight. 616 pages. Oxford University Press. $12.50.
"Magnificently ugly," the young Henry James summed her up in 1869, "deliciously hideous." But in the ugliness of "this great, horse-faced bluestocking," James admitted with some awe, "resides a most powerful beauty . . . and sweetness—a broad hint of a great underlying world of reserve, knowledge, pride and power."
Such resounding but paradoxical praise for novelist George Eliot was characteristic in her time. Today, young students and many adults who are obliged to read her worst book, Silas Marner, look on the great woman author as a kind of nanny-goat novelist. But the Victorian public, teetering between reason and sentiment, and tormented by the discrepancy between public virtue and private vice, was shocked and then charmed both by the author's daring life and her works. It began by accepting her early writing as the creation of a country parson, and it ended by making her one of the richest and most honored women writers in his tory. For much of the period in between, however, no proper Victorian family would have her to dinner.
Loving and Flying. As with many another famous Victorian, her trouble—as well as her eventual triumph—lay in a longing for love and an excess of earnestness. Born plain Mary Anne Evans, the bright but ungainly daughter of a non-U Derbyshire estate agent, she lost her faith at 22 (in 1842) after a characteristically exhaustive study of new scientific attacks on the Scriptures. (She had attended several schools, but was largely self-educated.) When she declined to accompany her father to church, he refused to have her under the same roof and sent her away. It was the start of a long struggle between conscience and convention.
Working as the unpaid—and largely unknown—editor of a prestigious liberal quarterly, the Westminster Review, she fell in love with Herbert Spencer, who rejected her. The notorious apostle of ethical Darwinism was a man "as capable of loving as of flying." But when she developed a plain woman's devotion to "the ugliest man in London," a chatty, witty, sensible litterateur named George Lewes, she found herself deep in one of those parallelograms of passion that so often defined Victorian domestic life.