Taken together, the four books under review here make me feel, not too comfortably, like a character in Middlemarch: in the aggregate, recent work on George Eliot is so slight that it evokes books unwritten, mighty tasks not only unfinished, but unbegun. The comparative modesty of even excellent work like Rosemarie Bodenheimer's, the sense that criticism is returning, in a smaller compass with more scrupulous vision, to ground already broken, is symptomatic of a void in our generation's imagination. An adequate appraisal of George Eliot needs an ambition as encompassing as George Eliot's own, but we seem to have directed our intensity to smaller, slyer writers.

In his project for the tale “The Death of The Lion” (1894), Henry James envisaged the mythical, and distinctively modern, fate of the artist as celebrity. Besieged by journalists, lionizers, and autograph-hunters, the celebrated writer is subjected to a voracious desire for knowledge concerning his life, whilst, conversely, the work, upon which his literary fame supposedly rests, is neglected. The work of the author is displaced from its position as the privileged object of literary interpretation by a proliferation of new cultural practices which construe the “life” as a more vital source of meaning. Through such media as advertising, journalism and photography, authors, like the texts which they produce, are marketed as commodities, as products to be circulated and consumed.

George Eliot lamented the decoration of her and George Henry Lewes's house, for which Owen Jones, the man behind the color scheme for the Crystal Palace, designed wallpaper and chose draperies. At the beginning of his chapter on Middlemarch in Novels Behind Glass, a detailed historicist study of Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot and the Great Exhibition, Andrew Miller quotes Eliot's lament: “Such fringing [sic] away of precious life in thinking of carpets and tables is an affliction to me and seems like a nightmare from which I shall find it bliss to awake into my old world of care for things quite apart from upholstery” (189). In the Afterword, Miller quotes the deathbed words of Oscar Wilde, whose earnestness about his own wallpapered predicament are quite in contrast with Eliot: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death…. One or the other of us has to go” (221).

She'd had no end of myths about immortals coming down and taking human bodies, dying human deaths. Helen knew how to interpret that scripture: if gods could do this human thing, then we could as well. That plot as the mind's brainchild, awareness explaining itself to itself.…She'd had the bit about the soul fastened to a dying animal. What she needed, in order to forgive our race and live here in peace, was faith's flip side … how body stumbled onto the stricken celestial, how it taught itself to twig time and what lay beyond time. (Powers, 319–320)

A sudden scholarly interest in Robert Louis Stevenson has resulted in a good many publications — his collected letters, a brief life by Ian Bell, a more authoritative life by Frank McLynn, and a very full biography of Fanny Stevenson, the American woman who lived with the writer for the last twenty years of his life. Besides informing us about the Stevensons, this outpouring says a good deal about where biography is now, in the mid-1990s.

Since carol christ's pioneering research in 1975 on the “finer optic” of Victorian poetry, the optic has become even finer in all senses of the word: refined, particular, precise, scientific, and, most importantly, thoroughly historical and material. The optical is no longer a metaphor, but a reality: a device, apparatus, or gadget whose lens-crafted appearance on the scene of vision enhances and alters “visuality,” a recently coined term for “how we moderns see seeing.” Terms which once stood solely upon metaphorical ground, as in W. D. Shaw's “The Optical Metaphor: Victorian Poetics and the Theory of Knowledge” (Victorian Studies, 1980), now refer to concrete practices, scientific optically monitored experiments, and lens and mirror evidentiary and entertainment venues that shaped internal and external life as “modern” during Queen Victoria's reign. In fact, her reign from 1837 until 1901 exactly corresponds with the era that saw the invention and gradual institutionalization of photo- and cinematographic techniques of imaging.