Barbara Hardy, George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. xxvi, 170; ISBN: 0826485154 (hbk), 0826485162 (pbk).

A self-declared, ‘rever[sal] of conventional critical biography’ (Preface, viii), this book is an incisive and deeply absorbing meditation on the life and work of a woman with a preternatural sensitivity to the shaping effect of form. Excitingly, Barbara Hardy matches this with her own specialised sensitivity to formal effect, replacing the biographer’s commitment to sequential linearity with the critic’s impulse toward thematic spatiality, so producing a work of committed organicism: ‘a kind of anti-biography’ (Preface, xi).

Rather than allowing life events to lead, this book is interested in how Eliot’s experiences and emotional ties were absorbed into the metaphors, images and principles of her writing. It uses Eliot’s various names to illuminating effect – Hardy uses Mary Ann, Marian, Evans, Lewes, and George Eliot according to circumstances both emotional and legal. Yet, although such multiplicity suggests an affinity with the ‘many Dorotheas’ of Eliot’s creation, in Hardy’s confident, informing hands, here emerges a writer who may have traversed a complex emotional landscape (with an impressive imaginative, if not always physically realised, geographic scope) yet nevertheless retained certain principles of affection, care, communication, and insight that confer a compelling continuity not only across the various episodes of her life, but also in the warp and weft of her work. In her systematic (although always without predictability) comparison between Eliot’s life and her works, Hardy’s models of recurrence, echo, accruement, and ‘shifts from abstract to the particular’ (118) transform the fragmentariness of memory, image, and verbal habit into a strengthened, synthesised coherence that illuminates not only the hard fact and event of either life or work but also the method by which affective experience is transmuted into metaphor or trope.

The book, then, is not structured around Eliot’s birth, childhood, adulthood, and end (although all of these stages are judiciously evoked and Hardy provides a useful outline of Eliot’s life at the start), but rather around ‘Scenes of Family Life’; ‘Home, Travel and Need for Foreignness’; ‘Three or Four Love Stories’; ‘Acquaintances and Friends’; ‘Illness and Death’; ‘Objects, Words and Metaphors’. None of these chapters is restricted either by time-scale or by attachment to any one figure (even Eliot herself): the illnesses and deaths of her family, protagonists, minor characters, beloved friends, temporary acquaintances, lovers, and, of course, herself all inform, for example, chapter five’s illumination of Eliot’s sense of the simultaneously symbolic and acutely real experience of mortality.

Although claiming to draw on a range of biographical materials, it is Eliot’s correspondence that most arrestingly – and often movingly – capture Hardy’s prodigious imagination. This is admitted by page 118 where Hardy, with typical economy (this biography is brief, but densely rich), compares the letters favourably with journal entries that ‘do not involve personal address and are oddly reader-less’. Hardy thus hints at the intense communicative capacity of Eliot’s letters, which act as enabling bridges between souls even where convention and sometimes-wilful heterodoxy frequently alienated Eliot from both family and friends. Their warmth is revealed by Hardy’s readings, which helpfully draw out the enriching development that exists between a casually intimate detail of correspondence (the cut of a dress, an affectionate name, a watery expanse, a movement of dance) and its later reappearance in the fabric of Eliot’s fictional texts: such illuminating readings are, of course, realised through Hardy’s dazzlingly intimate knowledge seemingly of every last phrase and sentence of Eliot’s writing. It is a pleasure, indeed, to be carried along by such a guide.

Although displaying a clear admiration for her subject, Hardy does not baulk at pointing out deficiencies (albeit briefly, although space is limited): her discomfort with Eliot’s repeated denigration of her own looks is not disguised; chapter two’s discussion of Eliot’s foreign perspective (grounded in travels abroad and mental voyage through mainly European thought) at least gestures at some of Eliot’s troubling conservatism and ‘tentative sympathy with the beginning of Zionist ideas’ (66) whilst maintaining a cautious guard against anachronism. Eliot’s life with Lewes, whilst clearly creatively invigorating and personally satisfying, nevertheless is seen from the perspective of a biographer with a commendable desire to respect the influence of those who loved and were loved by Mary Ann and Marian and are too frequently overshadowed by the great George Eliot: the understandable hermeticism of a couple forced into a social marginalisation did not preclude them from becoming instrumental in exclusion themselves, as Hardy’s sympathetic discussion of Sara Hennell’s relationship with the two attests (113-6).

This biography – or ‘anti-biography’ – then is valuable not only for its provision of a concise account of a writer of immense reputation, but also for its implied demand that we find new ways of telling lives, ways that are sympathetic to the overlapping, recurrent, intuitive shapes of lived experience. The author’s commitment to the ongoing resonances of small details also produces a biography in which ‘minor’ characters are brought out as pervasive influences, usefully reconceptualising the social currents that swirled around this prominent Victorian and re-populating the familiar territory of British literary life with new protagonists (Herbert Spencer, Jane Senior, Charles Bray, John Chapman, amongst others). I have only two reservations, both issuing from its impressive scope: first, it is part of Continuum’s ‘Writer’s Lives’ series, designed to be ‘accessible introductions’. Whist accessible, the book works at the level of deep intimacy with Eliot’s texts: this is a rich experience for those already familiar with Eliot’s major novels at least, but I am not sure how disorientating it may be for one entirely new to her writing. Secondly, although the letters are frequently cited, other sources of biographical detail are not always referenced, and the volume does not include a bibliography: given its scope and variety, more direction to sources would be welcome.

In all, however, this biography is a critical treat. We learn of its subject that ‘people were struck by her sympathetic listening, and Lewes said she missed nothing that came within “the curl of her eyelash”’: the same may easily be said of her biographer.

Rhian Williams (University of Warwick)

For more details, see the Continuum website.