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Wisely, Author Haight contents himself with chronicling his heroine's dazzling success in her own time. By the 1860s, the lady whom George Eliot unkindly referred to as "our little humbug of a Queen" was reading her books aloud to Prince Albert. Proper people were inviting her to dinners (she often declined). World rights to her books had brought in £41,000, in buying power the Victorian equivalent of a cool million dollars. After Dickens' death in 1870, she was revered, quite simply, as the greatest novelist alive.
Unhistoric Acts. George Eliot died in 1880. Critics still regard her as a monumental pioneer in literary technique—the unhappy ending, for example, and the creation of women characters who, if they are never shown in bed, are at least composed of flesh and blood. What stands between George Eliot and modern readers, however, is not merely her habit of intrusive and lengthy moralizing but the play of sentiment, which embarrasses perhaps for the very reason that it is so sincere. Richly mixed in, for those who wait to find it, are psychological insights that are penetrating and wittily precise, and an assortment of characters who rise above preposterous plots to lodge indelibly in the mind.
"The growing good of the world," George Eliot wrote in closing Middlemarch, her finest novel, "is partly dependent upon unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." It was not only the motto for her books but, as Haight convincingly shows, an accurate summary of her own hidden life.