Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The “Evangelical”: starting out in a Christian culture
- 2 The Apostate: moving beyond the Christian mythos
- 3 The Journalist: editing, reviewing, shaping a worldview
- 4 The Germanist: balancing the counterweight of German thinkers
- 5 The Novelist: mixing realism, naturalism and mythmaking
- 6 The Historian: tracking ideals – utopian and national – in Romola and The Spanish Gypsy
- 7 The “Radical”: taking an anti-political stance in Felix Holt
- 8 The Encyclopedist: transcending the past in Middlemarch
- 9 The Visionary: transmitting ideals in Daniel Deronda
- 10 The Intellectual: cultural critique in Impressions of Theophrastus Such
- Notes
- Works cited
- Name index
6 - The Historian: tracking ideals – utopian and national – in Romola and The Spanish Gypsy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The “Evangelical”: starting out in a Christian culture
- 2 The Apostate: moving beyond the Christian mythos
- 3 The Journalist: editing, reviewing, shaping a worldview
- 4 The Germanist: balancing the counterweight of German thinkers
- 5 The Novelist: mixing realism, naturalism and mythmaking
- 6 The Historian: tracking ideals – utopian and national – in Romola and The Spanish Gypsy
- 7 The “Radical”: taking an anti-political stance in Felix Holt
- 8 The Encyclopedist: transcending the past in Middlemarch
- 9 The Visionary: transmitting ideals in Daniel Deronda
- 10 The Intellectual: cultural critique in Impressions of Theophrastus Such
- Notes
- Works cited
- Name index
Summary
George Eliot became an artist with a strong sense that this was her personal salvation: she discovered grounds for “hoping that my writing may succeed and so give value to my life …” (Letters II, 416). But her becoming a writer didn't make her any less formidable as a reader: “There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day …” (Letters II, 412). She was also inclined to indulge another cultural hunger, continental travel; even before Adam Bede was finished, she was off to Germany again, spending almost three months at Munich and a month and a half at Dresden. While working on the novel in these places, she went devotedly to the museums – of modern German art at Munich and of art history at Dresden. She didn't care much for the former – “It is for the most part elaborate lifelessness” (Letters II, 454) – although critics have made much of a scene in Middlemarch featuring an artist of the local school, the Nazarenes, which produced such art. But she greatly enjoyed the latter: “our society is strictly limited to Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Veronese, and the other ‘gents’ [giants?] of painting” (Letters II, 474).
A similar sequence followed with her next novel, but this time she waited for its completion. She finished The Mill on the Floss on March 21, 1860, and left three days later for Italy – a momentous choice.
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- Information
- George Eliot's Intellectual Life , pp. 112 - 139Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010