Scenes of Clerical Life (1857)
Three long short stories based on characters and places with which George Eliot was familiar in her early years in Nuneaton.
The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton
Amos, Curate at Shepperton Church, has a wife and six children to support on a meagre stipend. He is hard-working but ineffectual and not very popular with his parishioners. He allows a countess to lodge with him and his family, causing more work for his over-burdened wife Milly whose health is affected. Milly dies in childbirth when her seventh child is born prematurely and the baby, too, dies. Amos loses the curacy but has the comfort of his children.
Mr Gilfil’s love Story
The Reverend Maynard Gilfil held the living at Shepperton before Amos Barton. He was chaplain to the family at Cheverel Manor (Arbury Hall) and fell in love with a protégée of Lady Cheverel, Caterina Sarti. Caterina, however, was in love with Sir Christopher Cheverel’s heir, Captain Wybrow. Wybrow flirts with her until he has to tell her he is to be married. He dies of a heart attack and Caterina thinks she has caused it. Gilfil looks after her and when she has recovered he persuades her to marry him. They settle at Shepperton but she dies in childbirth less than a year later.
Janet’s Repentance
Janet Dempster is married to a violent and drunken lawyer, Robert Dempster. He takes a strong dislike to the young clergyman, Edgar Tryan, who does good works. Dempster succeeds in suppressing Tryan’s intended course of lectures. Janet, embittered by her bullying husband, takes to drink. She meets Tryan and is attracted to him. Dempster, in a drunken rage, turns her out of doors clad only in her nightdress. In her distress she sends for Tryan who comforts her. She decides to return to her husband but he has had an accident and Janet nurses him until his death. When Tryan is dying of consumption Janet and her mother nurse him until his death. Later Janet adopts a little girl and lives quietly, grateful to Tryan who saved her from despair.
Adam Bede (1859)
Adam, a young carpenter, supports his work-worn mother and drunken father, and falls in love with Hetty Sorrel. Respected by everyone, he is a great friend of Arthur Donnithorne, heir to the local landowner. He discovers that Arthur and Hetty are lovers. He fights Arthur and insists that Hetty and Arthur do not meet again. In despair, Hetty agrees to marry Adam whose father has just died. Before the wedding she runs away, discovering that she is pregnant, and tries to find Arthur, the baby’s father. On the way to his regiment she gives birth and abandons the baby. Going back to the copse where she left the baby she is arrested and imprisoned. She will only speak to her cousin, the preacher Dinah Morris, and to her she confesses. She is tried and condemned to be hanged. Arthur Donnithorne tries to get her a reprieve but only gets the sentence
changed to transportation. In time Adam falls in love with Dinah and they marry.
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Maggie Tulliver is the daughter of mill owner Tulliver who admires her quick thinking and spoils her, although he will only educate her older brother Tom, to whom Maggie is devoted. She runs wild to the despair of her mother and aunts until she falls in love with Philip Wakem, the crippled son of her father’s bitter enemy, Lawyer Wakem. Mr Tulliver becomes bankrupt and has a stroke. Tom insists Maggie does not see Philip again. However, she meets Philip at the home of her pretty cousin Lucy Deane who is to become engaged to the handsome Stephen Guest. Maggie and Stephen are attracted to each other. Stephen takes Maggie out on the river but rows so far that they cannot get home that night. He begs Maggie to go away with him but, realizing her situation, returns home to find every one appalled at what she has done. Tom refuses to take her in and with her mother she takes lodgings with Bob Jakins, an old friend of herself and Tom. Despite her ostracism, Lucy forgives her. The river rises in flood and seeps into the house. She takes a boat and goes to the mill to rescue Tom. But the boat overturns and both are drowned.
Silas Marner: the Weaver of Raveloe (1861)
Silas is falsely accused of stealing and moves to Raveloe to start a new life. In Raveloe he is tolerated by the villagers because he is a good weaver. Embittered by his earlier experience he becomes over-fond of the money he has earned and buries the gold pieces under the floor. Dunsey Cass steals the coins, leaving Silas in despair. One New Year’s Eve Silas leaves his door open and has a cataleptic fit. When he recovers he finds a small girl by his fireside and then finds her dead mother under a bush. Not knowing that the child whom he calls Eppie is the daughter of Godfrey Cass, the squire’s eldest son, he adopts her. When Eppie is older Godfrey tries to adopt her as he is childless, but Silas and Eppie are so happy together that Silas refuses. Eppie marries Aaron Winthrop whose mother Dolly has helped Silas with her upbringing.
Romola (1862-63)
The beautiful Romola de Bardi lives with her blind father and helps him with his scholarly work. When Tito Melema becomes her father’s secretary she falls in love with him. She meets Savonarola and is much affected by his personality. To him she turns when Tito becomes a difficult husband. She leaves Tito when he sells her father’s treasured library but Savonarola urges her to go back to her husband. Famine and fever break out in Florence and Romola works with the sick, including Tito’s adoptive father whom Tito has refused to look after. Finding out how Tito has betrayed the Medici conspirators and also has a wife, Tessa, and two children, she leaves him again. Reaching the coast she drifts away in a small boat, and finds herself near a small village badly affected by plague. She helps the survivors and returns to Florence. When she discovers that Tito is dead she collects Tessa and the children and goes to live with them in the house of a cousin. She watches Savonarola’s trial and execution but has been grateful for his help when she was in trouble.
Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)
Felix Holt learns the watchmaking trade and to help support himself and his mother, teaches a few ragged boys. He is a staunch Radical and Dissenter and attends the Reverend Rufus Lyon’s chapel where he meets Lyon’s adopted daughter, Esther whom he derides for her fashionable ways, but nevertheless falls in love with. Felix is caught up in election day riots which he is trying to prevent but he is arrested and is held responsible for a constable’s death. He is sentenced to four years in prison. Local gentry, believing there has been a miscarriage of justice, secure his release. When he comes home he finds that Esther has been proved to be the heiress to the Transome estates but she is disillusioned with high society. She prefers poverty and marriage to Felix to the misery of marrying Harold Transome of Transome Court, the illegitimate son of the wife of the owner of the estate. Mrs Transome has worked hard to run the estate in place of her weak husband but is drained by her first son’s debts and the betrayal of her lawyer, Jermyn, who has furthered his own interests out of the estate and is also Harold’s father. Harold inherits the estate but discovers his true parentage. Esther, now heir to the estate, returns home to her adoptive father and marries Felix.
Middlemarch (1871-72)
‘Middlemarch’ is set in a Midlands town and is subtitled ‘A Study in Provincial Life’. It weaves together various lives and relationships within the town – Dorothea Brooke with her high ideals who marries the dry Mr Casaubon and then finds that her hopes of helping him with his great work is not wanted and that her marriage is as dead as her husband’s academic aspirations. Another thread is woven into the life of the town by the arrival of a new and ambitious young doctor, Tertius Lydgate, who marries the self-centred Rosamond Vincy. Her extravagance ruins him and denies him the chance to do some good in the world. Another story is the relationship between Rosamond’s feckless brother Fred Vincy, who has high expectations of an inheritance, and Mary Garth. His love for Mary saves him and he settles down to a life in estate management with Mary’s father, and to a happy marriage with Mary. The fourth strand relates to the sanctimonious Mr Bulstrode who is brought down by his past. He kills the blackmailer Raffles but his wife remains loyal to him and, ashamed of what he has done, he leaves Middlemarch.
Daniel Deronda (1876)
This novel is made up of two separate stories which are bound together by the relationship between the spoilt and self-centred Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda’s search for his identity. Gwendolen’s family lose their money and Gwendolen accepts the proposal of marriage from the wealthy Grandcourt rather than become a governess. Gwendolen finds he has a mistress and children but goes ahead with the wedding. It is a disastrous marriage. Grandcourt is cold and cruel to his beautiful wife and is determined to break her spirit. In her unhappiness she turns to Deronda who is sympathetic, but Grandcourt is suspicious of the relationship. He takes Gwendolen on a boat trip and at Genoa sees Deronda who has come to see his mother. Grandcourt suspects that this meeting has been arranged by Deronda and his wife. When they are sailing, Grandcourt falls overboard and Gwendolen holds back from saving him. He is drowned and in her guilt she turns to Deronda for help.
In the meantime Daniel, who has been sent by his guardian Sir Hugo Mallinger, to Genoa to meet his mother has discovered that he is a Jew and this knowledge is great news to him as he has already met and fallen in love with a Jewish girl, Mirah Lapidoth. Now he is free to marry her. He returns to England with the widowed Gwendolen who is still leaning on him for comfort and reassurance. The reader feels she is almost in love with Deronda but when he tells her he is to marry Mirah, although she cannot understand his joy at being Jewish and his plans for his Jewish people, she wishes him well and assures him “it will be better for me for having known you”.
Other work
Apart from the eight novels outlined here, George Eliot also published two novellas, ‘The Lifted Veil’ in 1859 and ‘Brother Jacob’ in 1864.
In 1869 she published ‘The Spanish Gypsy’, a story in verse and in 1874 ‘The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems’, which includes the two poems for which she is best known – ‘The Brother and Sister Sonnets’ in which she looks back on her happy childhood as Isaac Evans’s little sister, and ‘O May I Join the Choir Invisible’, in which her views on immortality are clearly aired.
In 1879, after Lewes’s death, she published a series of essays, ‘Impressions of Theophrastus Such’. Her essays in the Coventry Herald newspaper have been identified as well as those she wrote for ‘The Westminster Review’, none of which bear the author’s name.
In the mid-1840s she took over the massive task of the translation of ‘Das Leben Jesu’ from the German by David Friedrich Strauss. It took her two years to do – and she was paid twenty pounds.
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