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Epilogue
    W ITHIN TEN YEARS of her death no one was reading George Eliot. Or no one who mattered. Sales of her work continued steadily in the cheaper editions, but the intellectual élite, the opinion formers, had already moved on. As the nineteenth century spun to a close, new and more apt chroniclers stepped forward to capture the particular combination of despair, ennui and hectic pleasure which marked the 1890s. Hardy and Wilde between them – there was no one whose vision could arc the whole – charted a society that was already dancing on the grave of Victorianism.
    The 1919 centenary of Eliot’s birth failed to reverse the decline in her reputation. Now that all her oldest and staunchest friends had died – Cara in 1905, Sara in 1899, Edith in 1901, Elma in 1903 – there was no one to agitate for a proper memorial. An attempt to raise money for a commemorative corner in Coventry library failed, despite the Newdigates stepping in with the gift – appropriate for the daughter of their one-time forester – of some oak panels. But the truth was that by now Joseph Conrad and Henry James had used their un-English eyes and ears to produce a new kind of novel, which expressed doubts about the ability of language to represent the social world that had stood at the heart of Eliot’s work. Before long, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would take the novel even further away from the certain world of Middlemarch .
    John Cross could have done something about the centenary. He did not die until 1924 and there was no new marriage to distract him from his job as Chief Worshipper. Ironically, though,it had been his attempt in 1885 to honour his wife in the three-volume Life which had led to her falling so spectacularly out of favour. The version of George Eliot that Cross presents in his well-meaning work is heavy with Victorian righteousness. His Eliot is the Sibyl, the Sage, the earnest talking head who urges the world to try harder. Cross’s method of presentation was to quote extensively from his late wife’s letters, linking them with small contextualising comments from himself. The rationale, he boasted, was to let Eliot tell her story in her own words. But these are not her words. Or rather they are only some of them. Cross pruned everything from Eliot’s letters that might sit badly with his authorised version. Anything catty, sexy or funny has disappeared completely. ‘It is not a Life at all,’ exclaimed Gladstone when he read it. ‘It is a Reticence in three volumes.’ 1 People who had known Eliot felt cheated. William Hale White, the novelist who had worked with her during the early Strand days, felt obliged to write to the Athenaeum and say: ‘I do hope that in some future edition, or in some future work, the salt and spice will be restored to the records of George Eliot’s entirely unconventional life. As the matter now stands she has not had full justice done to her, and she has been removed from the class – the great and noble church, if I may so call it – of the Insurgents, to one more genteel, but certainly not so interesting.’ 2
    It was an extraordinary paradox. The woman whose private life had been too scandalous – and too sexually scandalous at that – for the High Victorian age now seemed too staid and dreary for the naughty nineties. George Eliot had become like an old aunt at a youngsters’ party whose current reputation for a rebellious youth was confined to the occasional daring cigarette.
    And so Eliot languished until the 1940s. It was then that F. R. Leavis picked her off the back shelf, dusted her down and gave her a place in his Canon, that oddly authorised version of literary history. Now she sat alongside Dickens and Shakespeare as a maker of the English essence. But just as had been the case with Cross, Leavis’s attempt to rehabilitate Eliot led to her being buried even deeper. By the 1970s a new generation of critics had arrived to do battle with Leavis’s